TypePad AntiSpam count so far: 31700

That’s over the past year. I’ve modified some settings to get more aggressive, and have a few other countermeasures going, but I still get too much spam to manage for a personal site. 25 messages in the past 15 minutes in fact, plus 4 that AntiSpam didn’t catch. Cleaning this stuff off of a personal site takes a lot of effort.

I think it needs to be said that not only have the advents of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter moved a lot of the energy from blogging, this has as well.

I’ve been planning to migrate back to WordPress for a while now, but along with that, I’m considering Disqus for this site. I’ve been holding off because paradox1x.org is a personal site, but leveraging a shared resource like that, to solve a bunch of known problems, makes sense.

Easiest Movable Type Upgrade Yet

Over the years I’ve used Userland Frontier, Userland Manila, Userland Radio, GreyMatter, WordPress, PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Drupal, and have ran this blog using Movable Type for years.

This upgrade was the smoothest yet, probably due to the lack of custom plugins or templates I am relying on these days. But the urge is still there to tinker. So is the urge to ‘minimal’ with something like PyBlosxom, Jekyll, Hyde, or to again write my own (in my work I’ve built full-on CMS’s, thin website frameworks, and have experimented with Django and web.py).

It always comes down to how I choose to use my time. Time is everything.

Kudos to the Movable Type team. Nice work.

Migrating to Movable Type’s Standard Templates

I’ve been behind the curve in adding new features and functionality to this blog for a while, so I’m migrating paradox1x.org to a set of SixApart provided templates and rebuilding my look and feel. You can see it taking place here. This will include a change in link structure. To handle that, a query into Movable Type’s mt_entry table will provide me with the URL patterns to add to .htaccess for redirection.

Top 3 resources for migrating to the latest Movable Type templates

I’m going to be migrating to the latest and greatest Movable Type templates soon and wanted to collect the best resources I could find. Here are three:

How to upgrade to Movable Type 4 full templates (MT4) – Robert Green’s DIY

Upgrading Your MT3 Templates to Movable Type 4.0 | Movable Type Docs

Movable Tweak: Movable Type 3 vs. Movable Type 4: A Modular Site Approach

(ah, I used ‘top n-number’ in a post!)