Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

weblog changes

I’ve been pondering whether to upgrade to Movable Type v3 for a while now, but the fact that they’re now charging for a full license (although I still can get a limited personal license for free) has put me off a bit.

However, yesterday’s explosion of comment spam has made me decide to take the plunge and upgrade, probably sometime this evening. What that means for this blog:

• MT has a known vulnerability in the way it handles comments that makes it ripe pickings for comment spam. The new version allows for some controls on commenting, from blocking comments altogether to allowing all comments to putting all new comments in a queue for a moderator to approve before they appear on the site. There also is an option to require people to be registered on the site before they can post a comment. I plan to turn on comment moderation, and we’ll see how that goes.
   
• The new version of MT allows for more pages to be generated dynamically. This probably won’t be a particularly obvious change on the user end, although it may mean that the URLs to archived entries may change.