Finally found a few dollars to purchase Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon. I tested a number of other feed readers out during the past couple of months, and while there are a few things some of them had that I would like to see integrated into FeedDemon—mainly Atom, which Nick has now available in the FeedDemon 1.10beta, and secure feeds which I have discussed before—FeedDemon remains the fastest, least resource intensive and most polished feed reader available for Windows. No small bonus is the excellent support and constant improvements that Nick is well known for in all his products.
In unrelated news, Jacques Distler recently observed that the search function in MT is fairly resource intensive and could be a target of abuse by launching multiple concurrent searches. To mitigate that potential, he has released a patch—also available as a drop in replacement—for the search module that limits the number of concurrent searches allowed. I have followed his example. I doubt it will affect anyone as at most I have ever seen two possibly concurrent searches happen in the past months log files (grep is your friend).
It’s almost funny, in a wierd twisted sort of way…
Recently the comment spam problem for MovableType users escelated when some script kiddies released an automated comment spammer. The site hails it as:
“the first integrated solution for testing Movable Type blogs for working anti-spamming features”
Six-Apart, the team behind MT(MovableType) released a modification to enable comment throttling–limit the number of comments allowed to be posted in any given period of time–which Jacques Distler improved upon with a further patch which enabled even tighter controls on commenting including IP banning based on comment frequency — they have all been installed here as well.
It seems now however that the poor loser is mad at Jacques for linking to the FloodMT web site. In the comments to Jacques post, One Down a “DV” complained that Jacques was linking to the site and threatened to redirect all visitors refered from Musings to “Goatse” or “Tubgirl” — the two most popular of a slew of disgusting/shocking images out there on the net.
So to spread the fun a little bit once again here is the crapflooders website, or at least the “tool” that he uses: FloodMT
If you are running MT and allow commenting or trackback pings I suggest very highly upgrading to MT 2.661, then applying the patches provided by Jacques to further tighten comment throttling and — to combat the latest annoyance, trackback spamming — trackback throttling.
If you’re a programmer also, you might want to keep an eye on the latest developments at FloodMT to keep abreast of their latest developments to stay, if not a step ahead, then at least only a half step behind their developments.
Edit: 23:55
More of the background from this spate of crapflooding and the history of Dv along with FloodMT and FloodMT.perl (along with a server that seems to be having uptime issues) is available on Phil Ringalda’s site in the post and comments for Throttling Down and Confidential to my crapflooder. Phil is how I found the music of Kris Delmhorst, which I have really been enjoying, so a big thanks for that one Phil.
Damn, now I’m 36.
Also filed in
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Tagged MT
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Laurent Mihalkovic (big thanks!) has come out with a great plug-in that has taken care of a nagging annoyance in MovableType for me—no way to preview an entry with the template and style sheets that will be used when it is actually viewed by visitors. MT-Preview now adds another button to the “new entry” / “edit entry” page for a WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) preview of the entry—using the individual archive template. Works like a charm. Of course…
He also added a great tag,
Currently viewing in preview mode
to your Individual archive Template in MT. When previewing an entry you get the warning message (in bolder red etc) but when it is published those tags are ignored in the build process and the page appears without the warning. Great!
Unfortunately it appears—from my feeble attempts at least—that
< $MTEntryBody apply_macros="1" check_spelling="1"$>
< $MTEntryMore apply_macros="1" check_spelling="1"$>
< $MTEntryBody apply_macros="1"$>
< $MTEntryMore apply_macros="1"$>
The preview page looks exactly as I wanted it to, it has the MT-Speling marked entry and extended entry followed a check-box and suggested spelling corrections, with the check-box to turn on or off the MT-Speling visuals. Unfortunately the published site version, well… it’s sort of missing a body and extended entry. It seem to hit the
Right now this entry will be a bit of a mystery to anyone who looks at it on the individual archive page, but I’m going to leave it this way for a day or two…
To make the plug-in work with the
Also filed in
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Tagged MT
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Thursday, January 22, 2004
It’s almost funny, in a wierd twisted sort of way…
Recently the comment spam problem for MovableType users escelated when some script kiddies released an automated comment spammer. The site hails it as:
“the first integrated solution for testing Movable Type blogs for working anti-spamming features”
Six-Apart, the team behind MT(MovableType) released a modification to enable comment throttling—limit the number of comments allowed to be posted in any given period of time—which Jacques Distler improved upon with a further patch which enabled even tighter controls on commenting including IP banning based on comment frequency—they have all been installed here as well.
It seems now however that the poor loser is mad at Jacques for linking to the FloodMT web site. In the comments to Jacques post, One Down a “DV” complained that Jacques was linking to the site and threatened to redirect all visitors refered from Musings to “Goatse” or “Tubgirl”—the two most popular of a slew of disgusting/shocking images out there on the net.
So to spread the fun a little bit once again here is the crapflooders website, or at least the “tool” that he uses: FloodMT
If you are running MT and allow commenting or trackback pings I suggest very highly upgrading to MT 2.661, then applying the patches provided by Jacques to further tighten comment throttling and — to combat the latest annoyance, trackback spamming—trackback throttling.
If you’re a programmer also, you might want to keep an eye on the latest developments at FloodMT to keep abreast of their latest developments to stay, if not a step ahead, then at least only a half step behind their developments.
Edit: 23:55
More of the background from this spate of crapflooding and the history of Dv along with FloodMT and FloodMT.perl (along with a server that seems to be having uptime issues) is available on Phil Ringalda’s site in the post and comments for Throttling Down and Confidential to my crapflooder. Phil is how I found the music of Kris Delmhorst, which I have really been enjoying, so a big thanks for that one Phil.
Damn, now I’m 36.
Also filed in
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Tagged MT
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
