More Meddling

Remind me to never again make fun of my wife for randomly rearranging the furniture or spontaneously re-wallpapering a room. As often as I change the design of this site, I have no room to talk. The worst part is that I change the site more often that I post on it.

If you're looking at this site outside of a feedreader, you'll notice I've changed the design yet again. I've moved away from my homemade version and have gone with a standard template. It may seem like a step backward, but there's a good reason for the change.

When I implemented my previous design, it was before Movable Type upgraded to version 4.0. When the upgrade came, I resisted, keeping hand-coded versions of most of my site elements, rather than moving up to the new MT templates/widgets that were available. My site went from being a fairly clean piece of code to a muddled mix of the old assets and the new apps. I started to have a bunch of random glitches due to the mess I'd created.

The biggest glitch I encountered involved comment spam. Although I had spamblock and akismet installed, I suddenly started getting about 600 spam comments each day. And since MT only lets you view about 100 at once, it took me way too long to delete them all. It was even worse when I'd forget to do it for a day or two. This comment spam was taking up too much of my time and energy, but I couldn't seem to find the problem. I eventually decided it had to be related to my clunky code.

I made up my mind to start over. I exported my blog contents, then deleted the blog and wiped my server clean. I built a new blog from the ground up once everything was cleaned out, and imported the content back in. I chose one of the standard templates because I was too lazy/tired to mess around with it. Yes, the template has a picture of Portland on it, and I live in Atlanta. There was no Atlanta version of this theme, and I've always wanted to live in Portland, so I went with it. If someone someday does the Atlanta skyline, I'll switch it out.

The new blog isn't so different from the old one. The big changes are that I've temporarily lost my blogroll and that I've removed the Google ads I once had up. I will definitely put the blogroll back when I can figure out how I want it to look. As for the ads, I'll probably retire them permanently. I wasn't making any money off of them, so they were just clutter, anyway.

It should also be noted that I accidentally deleted all comments received since early 2007. So if you left me a comment in the last week or two, I may've deleted it before it could be read. I apologize for this--I sometimes screw things up when messing with code, and this is an example.

Any other changes to the site are mainly behind-the-scenes tweaks. Now that I'm using MT's widgets as intended, I can quickly move things around or swap out themes without any fuss. And with the reinstall, my comments work correctly and my comment spam is at a minimum. I may need to approve a comment you leave--my spam filter is a little strict at the moment--but at least I can receive comments without all the noise. Oh, and you may also notice the cool little "find me elsewhere" box to the right. That and the list of recent activities below it are products of the new Action Streams plugin for MT. I'm just starting to play around with it, but it looks like it will be a cool way to pull in some of my other web activities and make my digital world just a little bit smaller. Let me know if you want more info on how it works or how to get it on your own blog.

That's it for now. Let me know how things are working...or not. Oh, and if you are a graphic designer interested in reproducing the Atlanta skyline--or even the skyline of my hometown, Mishawaka, IN--let me know. Until then, stay classy, Portland.