Recently in Blogging Category
Martin has always been fairly positive about the ScribeFire plugin for Mozilla Firefox. True, it has its quirks, but the plugin seems to work fairly well. I decided to also take a look at it, but was unable to get it to work at my first attempt. I just could not get my blog added to the interface, yet I am running a supported engine (Movable Type). ScribeFire insisted that I provided an invalid username/password.
Here is what I did to get it to work.
Like many others, I have been a member of the Security Catalysts Community for a while. When I first joined, I did not really take advantage of my membership as much as I should have, but I have made up for it in the last few months.
When Micheal Santarcangelo started the weekly Carnivals, I was more than happy to participate. If you are not yet a member of the Security Catalysts Community, or SCC as it is lovingly known, please do pay us a visit.
Some of the topics that caught my attention in the last week were:
One of the things that makes blogging interesting is the ability to leave feedback, such as comments or trackbacks. Microsoft's Security Response Center (MSRC) also has a "blog".
Please note the use of double quotes around the word blog. While I have been subscribed to the "blog" for a long time, it did not strike me until recently that it does not allow any feedback to be submitted, even after signing up for an account.
One might wonder why.
As far as content goes: the "blog" seems to house nothing more that carefully screened posts that offer little or no insight into the workings of the center, nor does it provide much original thought.
With a few exceptions, the blog posts a summary on patch Tuesday and an announcement the Thursday before. Very rarely does it go much further than that.
Of all the vendor blogs that I subscribed to, this must be the least useful one.
I upgraded the engine that powers this blog to Movable Type 4 beta.
Note: Six Apart points out this software is beta software. It is not recommended for production use.
Having said that: it seems to work fine for me. I looked for upgrade documentation, but I was unable to find that. Just pretend like you are doing a fresh install, and it will all work out just fine. Do not forget to make a backup copy of your existing software, your existing site, and of your database before you start. I didn't need it, but having a good back-out scenario is always a good thing :)
I encountered a few glitches, but those were easily fixable.
- I had to update file permissions in the filesystem. MT4 wants to write a configuration file in your mt-scripts directory, so that needs to be writable for the user that runs the web server. Do not forget to remove these permissions once the file is written!
- My Apache server was configured fairly tightly and because of that, I got Internal Server Errors in detailed entry views. Configuring the directory that contains the website to AllowOverride +Indexes fixed that.
Once this was all done, my site was up and running without problems. While I didn't run into anything that was unfixable, others did, so please make sure that you have your rollback scenario ready before you start the upgrade.
The management interface looks very different than the previous version's did, and I haven't decided yet if I like it. My initial feeling tells me that Six Apart went a little overboard in the CSS realm, but that might be a matter of getting used to.
My biggest issue so far is that the spam filter does not seem to be as good as the old one. Significantly more spam trackbacks are getting through; something that didn't bother me before.
Another bug: If you assign categories to your post and then hit 'Preview' without hitting 'Save' first, you loose those categories.
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