been a busy day

At least for my weblog…  I went ahead and uninstalled the TechnoratiTags plugin, only to turn around and install two more.  These, however, were provided by AlogBlog, a person who evidently has far too much time on his or her hands, juding from the number of MovableType plugins he or she has developed.  Regardless, the two plugins are the full-featured FCKeditor, and the CCode/TCode Spam Blocker. 

The first is a rather powerful interface-changing plugin that gives all manner of new functionality to your run-of-the-mill MovableType post-editing window.  All of the basic features you have in your standard word-processing program are available, in addition to such web-related things as image-uploading and -linking, Technorati/Flickr/del.ico.us/Wikipedia-tagging, smiley-inserting, and all manner of other things.  Basically, more buttons than you could shake a stick at.  A very large stick.  It also changes around the basic format of the MovableType interface, which takes a moment to get used to, but I think it will make things easier to deal with in the long run. 

In short, if you ever got tired of how basic and constricting the MovableType post-editing features are, get this plugin.  It should give you all the options you could ever need.  I promise. 

The second plugin I understand even less of…  Basically, it adds randomized strings to a javascript-obscured version of the links to your comments and trackbacks…  I do not know about you, but I have been getting a positively obscene number of … well … obscene trackbacks to just about every one of my posts.  And, considering how small of a blog I am, and how miniscule my readership is, the number is remarkably surprising.  Well, the creators of MovableType were not the brightest when they devised the system that generates trackback links – they are all numbered in sequence.  So as soon as a spam-spyder or -bot finds one of your posts, it immediately knows that not only that post exists, but so does every other number lower than it.  Whoops.  This plugin just makes the links harder for the bots to understand, and hopefully will stop them in their tracks.  We will see, and I will keep you appraised. 

Do not get me wrong…  MovableType 3.2 does a positively outstanding job junking appropriately bad comments and trackbacks.  However, that only happens after the comments/trackbacks arrive at the server, taking server time to process them as junk, and then taking my time to delete them.  This little plugin should prevent both of those from happening.  I hope. 

Of course, all of this was a remarkably educational experience for me, considering the fact that I had to play with command-line scrips (like "tar" and "perl" and all that nonsense).  Being the hardcore Windows user I am, I go out of my way to avoid command-line interfaces – I like my GUIs.  But, as the webpage instructions indicate, using the command-line scripts turns out to be a little easier than extracting the files on my computer and then uploading them to the server…  It still made me slightly uncomfortable to hit [enter] after typing in a single line and have a couple hundred lines of what was going on stream up… 

At any rate, none of these changes will be readily obvious to you, the reader, but they certainly make my life a little easier.  At the moment, I would recommend the plugins to any other MovableType users, but that recommendation should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt – I would have done the same with the last plugin, until I found out that it does not do what I thought it did.  Or what I thought it thought I thought it did.  Or something. 

Spare time or no, thanks to Joon Lee for the plugins!