Nabokov never had this in mind.

Over the past week or so, many people with Movable Type blogs got hit by comment spam ostensibly posted by “Lolita,” linking to some nasty porno website. This has created a tizzy in the blogosphere, and happily, Jay Allen is doing something about it. Once he gets his plugin up and running, I plan on installing it. If only we could deal with e-mail spam as effectively.

Until he finishes, however, there’s something you can do right now. This comment spam is posted by an automated bot that looks for Movable Type’s comment cgi. You can change the name of this and cut the bot off at the knees. So here’s what you should do:

First, find the file “mt-comments.cgi” in your MT install and rename it something obscure (though I’d keep the .cgi ending).

The next steps you take are dependent on what version of MT you are running, and what version you were running when you created your blog templates, as MT has added some new tags for dealing with comments. If you have old blog templates, they will not use these tags; if you are running an old version of MT, you won’t have access to them anyhow. I’m not sure when these were instituted–I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure this out.

1. If your initial install of MT was relatively recent

This is the simplest situation: Open your mt.cfg file. Find the line that reads “# CommentScript mt-comments.cgi”. Remove the # and change “mt-comments.cgi” to whatever new name you have picked. Then rebuild all files in your blog or blogs.

2. If you are running a new install of MT with old templates

Your templates probably aren’t using MT’s special placeholder for the comments CGI. You can either change the hard-coded reference to mt-comments.cgi in each template to a hard-coded reference to the new file, or change it to “<MTCommentScript>”. In either case, once you’ve done this, go through and follow the instructions for 1 above.

3. If you are running an old version of MT

You will not be able to take advantage of the <MTCommentScript> tag at all. You will need to change the hard-coded reference to mt-comments.cgi in each template to a hard-coded reference to the new file, and then rebuild.

This sounds more complicated than it really is. It took me about 10 minutes to fix all my blogs.

I really like Movable Type, and have been a fairly active proponent of it. It certainly has its drawbacks, though, not the least of which is that it is very intimidating to set up. But hey, you can’t beat the price–it’s free.

Enter TypePad. This is a hosted Movable Type service, sort of (technically the back-end is a little different from MT). It looks very nice, and it seems clear that the Six Apart people have done a lot of polishing and tweaking to make the user interface and the default blog templates just that much better than what comes with the current version of MT (which are already good). So that solves the difficult set-up problem, but the trade-off is that you pay for it. They’re offering three tiers of service, and it is interesting that they are tying price to user sophistication. That is, the more control you want, the more you must pay.

This strikes me as a misstep, though a minor one. I don’t understand how the ability to manually edit a template (for instance) would actually raise costs, except perhaps for support (and I have no idea how that’ll work)–what should really matter would be storage space, bandwidth usage, things that really impose costs at the back end. I can imagine a non-technical user who wants to use TypePad as a photo album–which would require one of the more expensive accounts–but who would have no desire for the more extensive tweakability that came with it. By the same token, a more sophisticated user with modest server needs would pay for resources that would go unused.

Nevertheless, for people who are sick of Blogger.com (or don’t want to get started there) but don’t want to get their hands dirty with MT, TypePad looks very nice indeed. Some of the handsomest blogs (with the best markup) on the web right now were built using default TypePad templates.

Jeff Jarvis writes about the frustration of having a print article on blogging edited badly. Go ahead and read it–it’s interesting. I’ll wait.

I’ve never worked in journalism, so I can only wonder if there’s any truth behind my point here. Big-media journalism caters to several different audiences: the legal department, the advertisers, and a diverse readership/viewership that can vote with its wallets/eyeballs.

All of these create pressure to avoid saying anything that might offend anyone. So where a blogger, who mostly writes to please himself, will write “The president lied,” traditional media will wind up saying “there are some doubts as to the reliability of the president’s statement.” I can easily imagine an editor who has worked in that environment internalizing these rules an applying them widely.

Journalists also try to create the initial impression of objectivity, which manifests sometimes as an aversion to the categorical. The result is the same: what otherwise would be a strong statement is watered down to “some people say this.”

There’s also the obvious problem here of the traditional media’s relationship with blogging, which is wary at best and hostile at worst–so it only makes sense that someone with both feet planted in the former camp would edit with an eye towards softening the strongest pro-blog points.

via Anil Dash

Blizg is another one of these blog-affinity finders. It looks for “ICBM” location data (as popularized by GeoURL) and Keywords in your headers, and finds proximate and topically-related blogs for you. Nice. Although it would be more powerful if it could extract keywords from the stuff you actually post about, rather than the stuff you mention in your meta-data.

I’ve written before about why I blog, but you probably knew that was a load of hooey. The real reason I keep a blog is because I hope to achieve wealth and fame through it.

So far, my success on the fame part has been limited, and the wealth part hasn’t been working out at all. Until now: I’ve received an offer for a “complimentary review copy” of what I am promised is an “entrancing novel.”

I’ve got a few reviews on epinions, and All Consuming but my guess is that I got this because of my blog–the book has a Japanese angle, and it would be too difficult to find reviewers on those sites with an interest in Japan (my profiles mention nothing about Japan). But contacting would-be reviewers on the basis of their blogs wouldn’t be a first.

Will I take them up on it? I haven’t decided, but I’m not inclined to. I prefer to choose my own reading.

For those who are interested, I’ve updated my full-text RSS 2.0 feed to include comments. To use this in Movable Type, open your template-editing screen. Click on “RSS 0.91 index”. Rename that to “RSS 2.0 index”. Replace the contents with this file. The output filename should still be “index.xml” unless you have a good reason to change it to something else. You may want to change lastn="10" to some other number–this shows the last 10 posts. The comments section is set off by blank lines, and can be tweaked.

This is based on the template provided by Mark Pilgrim at feeds.archive.org, but removes your e-mail address (which spambots might find) and adds the comments. It still validates.

[Later] Made a slight change to make the RSS feed friendly to foreign scripts: my template now uses the tag, which I believe is new to MT 2.6. For this to make a difference, you need to be using MT 2.6, and edit your mt.cfg file: de-comment the line containing PublishCharset and
set the appropriate charset (I’ve set mine to “utf-8”–unicode); also I think you need to de-comment the line NoHTMLEntities 1. This only matters if you use non-Roman script (Japanese, Cyrillic, etc).

[Later still] Fixed a few more minor things, including a link to extended entries (tip o’ the cap to David Nunez).