Archives

Another Fresh Start

The behind-the-scenes blog updates are finally done, for now. What I thought would take a few hours over the weekend ended up turning into dozens of hours throughout the week. I think I've finally got everything working correctly now, but not without a few changes.

Firstly, I've decided to remove the archive link to my old blog. It took long enough to get my main site working with the new version of MovableType, and I don't think it is worth the effort to do the same for my old site. I'll be keeping those 4 years of blog archives for whenever I feel the need to look back on my musings and laugh, but I don't think they were accessed much on this new site. So that change shouldn't make a big difference.

One of the main areas that needed attention during the upgrade was the comments. That system changed a fair bit between the versions of MoveableType that I've skipped, so a lot of my comment code and templates needed to be redone. During these changes, I decided to remove the popup comment window and make the comment form reside on the individual blog entry's archive page. This should make the flow of posting a comment much easier.

Additionally, the CAPTCHA question I had installed with the old comment system to help prevent bots from spamming my site didn't work with the new comments. This was the old "enter the text below" question that randomly supplied some text for you to enter. The new CAPTCHA system that comes with MoveableType doesn't work on my webserver because I'm missing some necessary software, so I needed to install a less powerful plugin to replace it. Now when you enter a comment, you'll need to answer a simple static question which should be enough to prevent common bots from spamming my site into oblivion. At least I hope so.

Those should be the only changes you notice for now. The whole reason I wanted to upgrade was so I could add some more detailed categories and tags for my blog entries, but I'm too exhausted from debugging the problems to add those changes right now. You'll probably see those additions over the next week or so. In the meantime, I'll be mighty appreciative if you notify me of any bugs or errors you see on the website. I've made so many little changes that there's bound to be something that slipped through. Please feel free to post a comment to let me know of any problems you encounter.