Category: Analysis

I love Movable Type. Movable Type changed my life. Movable Type is a better piece of software for me than anything I could have designed for myself. I would pay money for Movable Type. I’d like to see Ben and Mena Trott get rich from Movable Type. And I’ve been looking forward to the release of version 3.0, while they’ve been focused on other projects.

But their new licensing scheme is confusing. I think Inluminent hit the nail on the head: they need an unlimited personal license for a reasonable flat fee for personal use (say, $100 for unlimited users and weblogs) and either a flat fee or user/weblog licensing scheme for commercial users. Personal users shouldn’t be subjected to tiered licenses.

I don’t think anyone who is a serious enough blogger to need a lot of users or weblogs from Movable Type would object to paying $100 for such a wonderful tool.

But right now, I’m not sure what I’m going to do next.

I’m tempted to move to Expression Engine for its simpler license, dynamic php publishing, and the free “switcher” license they just offered me. I’m using their pMachine software for Coastsider and am considering migrating that site to Expression Engine.

But MT is making me consider whether I want to use commercial software at all.

I have been so happy with the GPL software I’ve been using lately that I’m tempted to move all my personal publishing to GPL as a gesture of support. WordPress seems to be the GPL solution of choice, with a large community and lots of momentum. It also uses php, which is quickly becoming my platform of choice. But it doesn’t have the author and weblog management flexibility of either commercial option.

MT 2.x does what I need right now. Until I need the features MT 3.x or Expression Engine, or WordPress matures, I think I’ll sit tight.

Gerry McGovern says we should treat content management as a process, not a project. One example of this kind of thinking is making sure that the things we build are maintainable once they are built and that a procedure for maintaining them is in place.

Gerry’s talking mostly about content management on intranets, but this is clearly applicable to online publishing.

I remember a meeting in the early days of the Web when our project manager told the team, “When the server upgrade is finished, things are going to be a lot better.” To this our webmaster replied, “Don’t you see? We’re never going to be ‘finished'”. I’ve told this story over and over because it points out the difference between two schools of thought in IT generally and the Web in particular. I wouldn’t call our webmaster a pessimist, although the project manager probably perceived him that way.

I’ve always readily admitted that it’s a lot more fun to build Web sites than it is to maintain them. If you’re not careful, this kind of thinking can lead to the creation of lots of cool features that don’t work all that well and eventually break. Gerry says that this point of view also leads to the idea that everything will be fixed in the next redesign. But, if you don’t change your way of thinking, you’ll find yourself in the same fix when you’re done.

Gerry says we should be building a small number of important features (e.g. search, directories) that exceed our users expectations and can be maintained in that state over the long run.

I really like Rafat Ali’s new Digital Media Jobs Blog. It’s an incredibly simple idea with a real revenue potential.

He’s simply blogging digital media jobs, from the usual online classified sources. Finding these jobs in the usual haystacks is nontrivial and the number and quality of his listings is high. This site demonstrates how versatile the blog format can be and that we have only begun to explore its possibilities.

After spending too much time an energy dealing with posting spam, I finally installed MT-Blacklist. I’ve been concerned that it wasn’t going to be effective, but it was becoming clear that the vast majority of the spam in my comments was coming from just a couple of scumbags and that a blacklist was probably the right approach.

Comment spam has become such a nuisance that every time I open my mailbox I could feel the tension and anger rising.

While I don’t have enough experience to say how well it works, it did manage the few test messages I threw at it. It is really well-designed and easy to install and set up. It also allows me to avoid inconveniencing my users by requiring registrations for comments or closing comments after a certain period of time. Finally, it avoids the more radical and time-consuming solution of switching my site from Movable Type.

Yesterday, I wrote that I received an obvious spam comment, apparently from Edmunds.com. Today, I was able to analyze my log files, and the results are explosive.

At the date and time that message 364 was spammed, that message was accessed by a Java program from IP address 66.161.49.254. According to the following IP Address lookup, this address belongs to Automotive.com, a competitor to Edmunds.

Automotive.com also spammed my site on 3/10. Finally, I was spammed via email, apparently by one of their affiliates using a forged return address, eight times in November and December of 2003.

Edmunds general counsel posted a prompt reply to my posting yesterday evening, denying they had anything to do with it. Now that we know who is responsible, I encourage him to take it up with Automotive.com.

Update: Edmunds didn’t spam me. Automotive.com spammed me, using Edmunds name, and I have the log files to prove it. Also see the comment on this message from Edmunds general counsel.

My web site has recently been plagued recently by spammers trying to scam links to sites offering viagra and baldness cures.

Today, I find that someone calling himself Mark Riley has posted a completely irrelevant and gratuitous comment on my site with a link back to edmunds.com. Here is the comment. You decide if it’s anything other than comment spam.

Edmunds.com is a legitimate site and one that I use and like. Are they now using spam to promote themselves? I can see no other explanation for this message. No one other than Edmunds could possibly benefit from it. I’m awaiting Edmunds’ reply.

I’m spending time every day deleting spam from MediaSavvy. The worst part is having to rebuild the entire site every time I delete a single spam. Perhaps I need to switch to a dynamic CMS like Expression Engine, so that I don’t have to do this.

Meanwhile, my email spam filter managed to move a couple of important messages into my spam folder. I don’t blame SpamSieve, which I love. I blame the spammers for making this whole process necessary.

Finally, I get a dozen spam faxes for every fax I want. This has been going on ever since I used my fax to send a message to efax.com. You can’t tell me they didn’t sell my number to the spammers.

Detecting spam has become an entire industry.

Technology is insufficient and the law is insufficient. You need both to solve this mess. What really galls me is that the direct marketing industry has fought every step to help solve the problem and given us a law that is completely inadequate to the task. Apparently, they can’t tell the difference between what they do and what the spammers are doing. If they can’t, how are we supposed to?

[This note was rewritten. The original post was eaten by a Safari bug exacerbated by the way Movable Type posts messages.]

Steve Outing asks why so many Web sites put their (fixed-width) content flush-left in the browser window, and not in the center.

I’m not a designer, but I know why I do it. When you have centered pages and go from one site to another, the location of the top left of the page in the browser window is going to move every time you go from one site to another.

I find news.com’s centered presentation very disorienting when I move there from pretty much any other site.

Eliminating fixed-width layouts is also better because they give designers the illusion of more control of presentation than they really have. Fixed width for navigation and advertising columns is more justifiable, but content should be set free and more control over presentation should be ceded to the user.

I never thought I’d program a Web page.

I’ve done a little programming, but on the Web I have been happy to either create static pages or to use a content management system. My Web programming has been limited to using includes to modularize my pages and tossing CMS macros onto my pages.

But since I’ve started building Coastsider [password required for the next week or so], I’ve started using PHP. I started using it against my will, just to get some of the “templates” that came with my classified software to look like the rest of the site. Then, I started using it to create forms for my users.

Yesterday, I created a page that interfaced to the Terraserver’s satellite photo database, including panning and zooming. It’s empowering to be able to build software into your web pages. It’s barrier-shattering to be able to mix code with HTML to do simple tasks and to interface to your content management system. The architecture of PHP encourages experimentation.

No more than a small number of individual Web site publishers will ever do much coding. On the other hand, I now think that increasingly powerful content management systems will encourage programming, rather than make it unnecessary.

I spent some time today cleaning up my stylesheets on a big site I’m working on. I was stunned by how messy they were. I was able to reduce the size of my main stylesheet by 20%. Not only that, but this top-down review showed me a lot of structural problems that had accumulated over the months: styles that didn’t cascade properly, orphaned styles, redundant specifications, and even a couple of missing styles.

The result is that I’ve managed to resolve a few formating quirks that were due to stylesheet problems, improve the consistency of my site, and improve its performance.