salguod

FYI - My server is fine now. Never did hear back from Earthlink, not did the help desk. Emails just started going through again week or so ago.

Me too.

Yep, it's the second thing I did after emailing EarthLink. I did get a message from TCH that the issue was getting forwarded to the appropriate department, but otherwise no response yet from either (I don't expect much from Earthlink). My point was that if it's known that these kind of email forwards can get a server blacklisted with many ISP's, it seems reasonable to prohibit their use on shared servers where one person's actions can effect many. On the other hand, I can appreciate TCH trying to give us all the features and flexibility possible.

I too can no longer email to EarthLink from my domain. I'm on server123 and have less than 10 email accounts and no forwards outside my domain. If it's true that "If yet to find an ISP with the ability to differentiate from actual SPAM and forwarded SPAM, nor want that likes it when their customers forward spam to them." I'd like to suggest that TCH no longer allow forwarding on shared servers to outside ISP's. I now have to deal with not being able to contact folks on EarthLink for weeks I guess, likely due to someone else's forwarding.

That SixApart article makes a big deal about support of FastCGI in 3.34. There are claims of up to a 15x (!) increase in speed. Does TCH have FastCGI installed on their shared servers?

I've heard that Spam Karma is great. One of these days I'll have to give WP a try. Dayton? That's funny, I was in Dayton most of the day to day for work.

I started on MT at 2.661, now on 3.33. There are lots of new stuff in the 3.x releases (3.34 is due out next week) including themes and much better anti-spam. In fact, I just commented on the pinned MT spam thread on a bundle of 2 great antispam plugins that have dropped my comment and TB spam and my spam maintenance to zero. It was very low before with the techniques availble, but this has eliminated the problem. Just like with WP (if I understand right), if you don't set up your blog with good anti spam plugins adn don't pay attention to it, you'll get flooded with spam. BTW - I just noticed you're frm Ohio. I'm in Columbus, what part of Ohio are you in?

A recent addition to my anti-spam arsenal is Ccode and Tcode and they are awesome. 100% effective in my experience, not a single spam has gotten through since I installed them. In fact, I have no junk comments in my database either since it blocks them prior to getting in the system. I don't entirely understand their operation, but I understand they add a hidden form field generated from the content of the post itself that operates like the CAPTCHA that Blogger uses. Comments cannot be submitted by hitting the comment script directly, they have to go through the comment button on the actual page. The nice thing is that, unlike Blogger's maddening CAPTCHA image, the user doesn't need to do anything special.

As a MT user, I'd love to second that, but I can't as I've never used WP. I'd have to agree with Bruce (who, I think, has used both), it's a matter of opinion. I suspect they both have their advantages. I do know that I'm a little envious of the user community behind WP and, as a personal blogger, wish MT had that. I get the impression it once did, but as it's moved into the professional arena that's faded some. There are still some great users behind MT, but from the outside looking in the WP community looks deeper. I'm on the Silver hosting plan running 3 personal blogs on MT 3.33 with a MySQL database and all static files haven't had any issues. One of the nice things about MT is that you can run a mix of static and dynamic pages which might help you optimize your site for server loading. My site doesn't see enough traffic to need that so I'm not entirely sure. Good luck, I'm sure the folks at the help desk will help you get back into your site.

That's what I was afraid of. Oh well, thanks.

I looked but didn't see where this fit so here I am. I need to set up an FTP account for someone to trouble shoot a plugin on my Moveable Type installation. I'd prefer to give him access to the MT install directories only, but because I installed MT in the cgi-bin, the installation is in two separate folders. I couldn't see in cpanel how to provide him with access to both the 'public_html/cgi-bin/mt_3-32/' and the 'public_html/mt-static/mt_3-32' folders but nothing else. How do I do that?

Well, after letting my galleries languish with what I thought was a broken plug in, I discovered the problem was me. I had inadvertently disabled part of the plugin and failed to notice. That would tend to mess things up. After correcting that, it works great once again. So I once again recommend Photogallery 1.7 (better docs here) with MT 3.33. The best looking galleries I've found with MT.

If you're using MT 3.1 you can use the Typemover plugin for MT backups, but it hasn't been updated for use with MT 3.2 or newer. But, neither that, or I assume the WP plugin, would backup the rest of your site, only your blog. I have some images up there and some static pages too. The bulk of it is MT, but there are other things. There are older but still valid MT specific backup instructions here and PHPMyAdmin instructions on the MT website here. I do backups via FTP using Filezilla, I'll have to look into the cpanel thing too. Does cpanel just make a big zip file of the contents of the site that I can download via FTP?

I've heard a lot about WP. I'd say it's prbably the best choice for personal bloggers now. If I was starting now I'd probably use WP. That said, I use MT and find it very good. The improvements since 2.661 are profound, expecially in anti-spam. Spam Lookup, once configured, is quite powerful. It's the 'once configured' part that's a bit dissapointing. Fortunately, you can go get and install the Weblog Defense Grid and have Spam Lookup nailing nearly all your spam. I get no TB spam and only occasional comments spam. I'd try the upgrade to 3.33 before swapping to WP. You'll get Spam Lookup, tag support, a better CSS structure with access to a lot of themes at The Style Archive and more.

If you're planning on upgrading to MT 3.3x, check out these instructions at Learning Movable Type. I used them and found them quite helpful. She put up similar instructions last year for upgrading to MT 3.2 when it came out and I used them too. Hope that helps someone.

I've been using his methods for several months now and they're very effective.

Well, I wanted to come back here and say that I'd have to withdraw my recomendation fo r PhotoGallery. Wiht the MT 3.3 upgrade, at least for me, it's quite broken. I don't know what to do and I haven't gotten much from the plug in developer on it. It's a side project for him, I don't really blame him, but it's dissapointing. It produces very nice galleries, but in 3.3 it simply doesn't work for me. Hopefully it'll get fixed at some point.

Try Byrne Reese's Photo Gallery plugin. It's the best looking MT based gallery I've found. Based on the templates from Stop Design. I use it for my gallery here. I've run accross a couple of bugs, but mostly it's a good plug in. You can download it here, more complete documentation is here. Be careful which version you download. You need at least MT 3.2. PhotoGallery 1.4 is for MT 3.2, 1.7 for the new MT 3.3x. If you are planning to upgrade to MT 3.3x and haven't yet, do that first. I've had some issues with PhotoGallery from the upgrade and they aren't quite resolved yet.

Thanks folks, I've got some homework to do. :-) Ideally for my application the image would be re-size upon upload. I've got no need for the full size image on the server. I'm using a Moveable Type plug in that uploads the file and ties it to an entry, so I don't think Coppermine will work. I'm trying to make this as easy as possible for non-techie users.

Boy, I think both of those are over my head. I've only skimmed them, though, perhaps they'll be clearer after a more thorough reading. Do I understand the first one correctly that it doesn't actually change the file but resizes it on-the-fly?

I'm looking for a way to set a 'max width' for images on my site. I want images that are over say 400px wide to be displayed at 400px, while images under 400px to be displayed actual size. If I add a 'width' attribute to the img tag, it forces the image to that size. The result is that smaller images get blown up and pixelated. I'd also want them to keep the aspect ratio. Is this possible? Any other way to handle this? (The background is that this is for a site where many people will be uploading images (family blog) and I suspect that they won't all get resized before uploading. Periodically I'll go back and re-size them to save server space and browser load times, but I want them display properly regardless.) Thanks,

I've heard good things about MT-Keystrokes as well. I've had very good results with the Weblog Defense Grid from Solid Wall of Code. It's a comination of a SpamLookup extension with enhanced functionality, a comprehensive list of junk filters and a plugin that automaticly bans IP addresses based on junked items.

Heh. I hadn't thought of that. Maxthon, because it has more features out of the box, is less reliant on plugins than FF so it shouldn't be as big of a deal. I browsed the Maxthon Forums a bit and found that it is already compatible with the IE7 betas, but you'll have to wait until Maxthon 2.0 (It's at 1.5.3 now) to be able to take advantage of all the new IE7 security features, whatever they are. It's all somewhat speculative now, but evidently some of those folks on the forum are Maxthon 2.0 alpha testers. Maxthon 2.0 (supposedly a complete re-write) won't be final until IE7 is in a stable release and I guess should be compatible with both IE6 and IE7. Supposedly the plugins should work just fine too, but given my experience with FF plugins I'll believe it when I see it. To be fair to FF, my experience with broken plugins was with the FF 1.0 to 1.5 upgrade. I've heard (don't remember where) that future upgrades of FF should not be so hard on the plugins. I don't know why, but that's what I heard. The few plug ins that I had used with FF are still not 1.5 compatible.

THe thing I like about Maxthon is that it worked very well with a lot of extra features out of the box. I got burned by FF when I started using it on version 1.0, added in several plugins and got it close to where I wanted it. Then I upgraded to 1.5 and many of the plugins quit working. I found the plugins to vary a lot in how they were maintained and documented, a function of the multiple people building them. It was so painful, I gave up. I've gone back to it every now and then and still found some of the plugins, and particularly the skins, were still not updated. I've also found that Maxthon loads and runs faster and uses less memory than FF. To each his own, I love Maxthon and can't see using FF, but others feel the oposite.

With MT, I can give different users differnt rights out of the box. I can restrict their rights on posting, editing, managing categories, system config, weblog config, what weblogs they can access and more. Does it take a plugin in WP to do that? I plan on doing the rights by placing the weblog files in a password protected folder and creating a robots.txt file to tell search engines to not index the folder. I'm pretty sure that there is a plugin that will password protect through MT, but the folder level seems easier.