Eagle's Path: Meta: Journal comments (2005-09-01)

I purged all the comment blacklist entries except for the stuff to catch URLs and re-enabled HTML in comments. Hopefully just the URL block will be sufficient to keep the spammers out. I'm currently rejecting over 100 spam comments a day, which is just way more than I can deal with even on a semi-automated basis without blocking up front, so something like this is necessary until I can get a chance to upgrade to something with captcha support.

I often wish that Movable Type were better at hosting discussions, but it just isn't, and I just don't have much time to try to struggle with it right now. I'm sorry. I feel bad about it, particularly when it catches something from a friend and causes a huge hassle.

I'm hoping to get a chance to switch to WordPress in the near future, but it requires figuring out how I'm going to back up MySQL, getting the software installed and configured with reasonable templates, and making sure that I can keep up with security updates. So basically four or five hours of work, doable but hard to come by at a stretch at the moment.

I just started up a new journal on WordPress (chosen primarily on your recommendation), and it looks like the process of backing up the MySQL database for it is remarkably straightforward, thanks to the WP_DB_Backup plugin that comes with a default install of WordPress. It installs a three-clicks-and-done interface into the admin page that produces a dumpfile of the database, which you can either download, store on the server, or email. Also, the same author's produced a sort of "poor man's cron" plugin, which he notes can be combined with this to email yourself a backup file on a regular basis.

(Admittedly, I do need to figure out how to verify that the dumpfile actually has the right stuff in it, before I trust it too much, and that might take a bit more work.)

Dunno about the templates (I'm using one of the defaults for now), but the basic installation itself was startlingly simple and straightforward. Importing an existing journal like this one might be a bit more interesting, though.

Posted by Brooks Moses at 2006-03-01 01:49