Yeah. More changes. I am trying to clean up the site, make it more functional, make the browsing experience more pleasurable, and learn Wordpress all at the same time. Mostly I’m leaning on Jason for help with plugins and scripts and stuff like that. I think he likes it, well he’s not as burned out on this crap as I am. I dealt with MT for a few years and this is my first blog endeavor outside the MT world since I mucked with LiveJournal and some other server-side scripts. I’m impressed with Wordpress, but the documentation is pathetic for a lot of the plugins. I don’t think that the developers take as much pride in their work as the developers did in the MT community when I was still actively using it. There was more of an effort for documentation and communication. My biggest wish for the Wordpress community is that they install a real threaded bulletin board system for their users. Finding answers to my questions and posting things in the right place would be a lot easier if a real forum was installed.

I also think the Wordpress community could stand to start a plugin/hack site like the MT Plugins site, where things are posted when they’re updated and users can help each other with problems. Most of what I miss about MT relates to the community, but WP is young yet so things will hopefully change for the better.

So I finally jumped ship. After all those years of using Movable Type I have finally jumped ship. Yes I did it because of the licensing, but not because I wasn’t willing to pay. I just wasn’t willing to pay what they were asking for the four blogs and three authors that were running on my install. Furthermore, as far as I can tell the changes in MT3 were minimal and did nothing to quell the problems with the comment spam. By employing a centralized login system, the only
thing that Typekey did was drive visitors and comments away. Not all of the people who refuse to log in are comment spammers. Some people just don’t like creating accounts on every damned website and they’re entitled to that, as I should be entitled to quell comment spam with a reasonable level of ease without requiring logins. MT3 did not provide that solution for me, so why would I pay for something that didn’t fix the problems I had with the previous version? Furthermore, there is no guarantee that I won’t have to pay through the nose for the next version when its released. I just didn’t feel secure paying that amount of money to not solve my blog problems so thus I am here. Wordpress is a learning experience, and I’m excited because it’s PHP based and I’m all about learning some PHP. Maybe I will be compelled to produce some plugins. We’ll see. Anyway, tell me what you think of the WP setup here, and I’ll try to accommodate any issues you guys find with my site.

You might’ve been.. yet things look different. That’s because I added more stuff of course. I also fixed some busted stuff and reclaimed some unused space in my main pages. I’ve also tried to keep my navigation more consistent (and how do I hope it worked). I said I wasn’t gonna do it and I did it. I put the buttons back on the page (actually I made new ones that matched the current theme). I took them off originally because I thought they’d be a navigation horror, boggle screenreaders, and piss people off. Well it turns out I found out exactly why I put them on the page in the first place. When they’re aligned like I have them, they save a lot of space. Trying to write out explanations to all those links or just having a ridiculously long scrolling list of links didn’t work either (and most of that stuff shouldn’t be in a blogroll). At any rate, they work. I’m still looking for a couple of good ones.

I didn’t realize how many forms spam could take until recently. I’ve had every type of spam e-mail you could think of from marketing crap to get rich quick schemes. Though you might not personally consider it spam, but pop up ads, pop under ads, and those websites you accidentally surf to when you mistype a url.. those all get lumped together with spam in my head. It’s not informational spam so much as it’s a visually invasive type of spam issue. I don’t know if that makes sense to you but that’s how I feel when I am subjected to it.

Anyway, a healthy discussion of how Elise feels about spam is not the point of this post. My blog has been subjected to comment spam, my boyfriend’s site has been subjected to comment spam, and most major blogs that I visit have been subjected to comment spam provided that they leave their comments open. This is an unfortunate situation. It’s not bad enough that I get over 100 spam e-mails a day to all of my personal accounts, but I also manage to pull in my fair share of comment spam lately. I actually banned IPs and domains because of it. The only good thing that’s come out of all of this spammy horsecrap is that the next version of Movable Type is going to have an option for registration to leave comments. Goodie gumdrops.

I also wanted to apologize for not being too commentish lately. I’ve been busy with work and school, and might have the flu right now, and Jason’s visiting in a couple of weeks… busy busy! I am also holding off on doing too much with my blog until I know more about MT 3.0. Anyway I’ll post again relatively soon.