MT killed the weblog star

"Wish I had a way to stay curious instead of working hard getting all serious" - Aquanote, One Wish

It's time to explain how negroplease.com (which I really should go ahead and domain map over here instead of doing the code redirect) ended up as a typepad site.

It's a sad tale of a glitch in a tool that I once loved and now consider more nuisance than a functioning program.

I started negroplease.com on blogger before eventually moving to movable type. I explain all that here (I think). I've always had a love/hate relationship with the tool. I'm a content guy and don't really care for getting under the hood of a product to make it tick the way I want it to and my early frustrations with MT had to do with that aspect. I couldn't just take it out the box, so to speak, and go to work.

However, once it was working (and I believe I started with 1.6 or something), it was brilliant. Archives, organization, comment management, and the most important, the input and posting of content, worked very well.

Over the past 2 years, I've been less enamored. The slow rebuilds (until recently), the comment spam (which required plug-ins to battle) and then, the new beast trackback spam, reared it's ugly head.  It was my downfall.

On November 1st, I was hit with well over 1000 trackback spams with no end in sight. The load was such a burden on my site host that they shut down my site.  I could've done a re-install of MT but, you know what, I didn't install and use the tool just to spend the majority of my time managing it's flaws.

A majority of what MT had become was less about content and more about dealing with spam. These are flaws. Flaws that folks have been aware of for awhile and that should be addressed but, for whatever reason, they aren't.

Typekey is a solution but it's not the right one. It doesn't leave you signed in across all MT enabled blogs. Despite requests to remember you at sites, it doesn't and blogs aren't messageboards. It shouldn't be a requirement to register in order to comment. In fact, many people who only read blogs and don't post on them are simply opposed to having to register for anything.

And so, I switched to typepad. Now, I think typepad is a cool tool. I don't have to think about it. I can just log in and go but I've lost the ability to host it on my own server. What if typepad goes down? What if it needs maintenance?  What if I want to do something cool that typepad hasn't thought of yet. I'm limited.

That said, I like it here. It's a tool that does it's job.

MT, on the other hand, has stopped being a useful tool. Users of a tool can't be expected to spend all their time managing the tool because then it's no longer a tool, it's a problem.

It's the reason people seek out Firefox over IE right now. It's the reason mac lovers have such disdain for microsoft OS. We just want our shit to work and work the way it's intended.

So, basically, MT killed negroplease.com and now I'm here.

If you want the super geek version of how things like this are happening around blogs, check out Daily Whim's piece.

Also, if you only read the rss feed of negroplease.typepad.com, you're missing out.

I use del.icio.us for my remaindered links and you can subscribe to that. I link to good stuff. I promise you this.

For example, other blogger tech nerd goodness I've bookmarked in del.icio.us recently have been the following:

A great piece on copyright law and bloggers.

The Media Drop's look at Jason Kottke vs. Sony.

Also, you're missing out on the random flickr pics that show up there. You can subscibe to that., too.

Meet the new place, not really same as the old place.

Comments

[ej]

Ironically enough, exponent on Typepad still gets comments, doesn't get spam, and in general is a good thing. It's for this reason I may be switching back.

I'm a serious Blogliner, however, and may end up placing another xml feed in, who knows...

[Tom]

I've been shut down twice in the last couple weeks - without notice - because of comment spam on my MT blog. I'm in the middle of changing hosts, partially because of that issue - which they blame on me alone, unfortunately - and upping to the new MT install. We'll see how this progresses, but you're right - it's kind of stupid to be spending so much time literally managing a flaw in the system. Whether or not people figure out ways to get around the comment spammers and their bots is a whole nother story, though.

[Anil]

We're definitely busting ass to get MT up to shape on the comment spam issue (expect a bug fix shortly) but it's been hard because people are on a dozen different versions, a handful of different web servers, a number of differnet databases, etc.

We've learned a lot from fighting comment spam on TypePad (we block anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of comment spams on the system daily) and we'll be putting it to use on MT. Check back on sixapart.com and mt.org and we'll explain more about that.

I'm sorry it sucks right now, and I'm very glad you stayed with us on TypePad. We'll get this right eventually.

[Jason]

Thanks for commenting Anil. I saw your post on the 6A blog soon after I wrote this. I intentionally didn't mention sixapart because I wasn't trying to rail against you guys.

I respect you guys as a company and think that 90% of MT is pretty perfect. It's just this needling 10% that lost me as a user of that particular program. I'm pretty happy with typepad (although I am frustrated that I can't have two different typepad accounts with the same email address).

[Peter Cooper]

The answer? CAPTCHAs. Why every blog system isn't using these yet is beyond me.

One of my clients also got bombarded by comment spam yesterday, which smacked load up to 80(!!), and I am probably going to ban MT on my servers within the next few months (helping everyone over to an alternative).

I know there are plugins for MT, or that they could all go up to Movable Type 3.1 or whatever, but they don't want to, the licensing on MT 3.1 is not favorable. Luckily, there are lots of alternatives these days :-)

Anyway, it seems like SA got what they wanted. They *want* people to use TypePad rather than MT because they make far more money (per customer) off of that ;-)

[Anil]

Peter, we'll be talking more about this, but there are a number of problems with CAPTCHAs, foremost among them that they don't work for a significant percentage of users and are scriptable for people to get unsuspecting web visitors to decode on behalf of spammers.

We're working very hard on the load issues with MT. Check out movabletype.org and sixapart.com for more updates on that.

There's still a free version of MT3.1, same as there ever was. We've never advocated one of our platforms over the other, we'd just like to be giving people the tools they need and having them work the way they want.

[karsh]

Then again, there are other CMS's out there besides MT that are more about content and less about hard-coding. Me, I loved to get under the hood of a fresh MT-install and tweak that bad boy six ways from Sunday, but the comment spam was un-freaking-believable. I mean sometimes up to 200 spam comments an hour. It was crazy.

Then I switched to Wordpress and all that spam stopped. Ironically, so did most of my commenters and readers. C'est la vie. Be easy.

[j. brotherlove]

It has been a challenging 3rd and 4th quarter for the seasoned blogger. I love MT, I really do and can understand the frustratations people are having. I'm attempting to wait it out (luckily, I don't have huge spam or rebuilding issues). Nevertheless, I'm rethinking the privilege of just anybody having the ability to post a comment on my site.

karsh is right about the existence of alternatives. But I've tested them and they come with their own sets of drawbacks - I haven't been wowed, frankly; especially from a design standpoint.

I admit to being a bit dim and losing track of where you are Jason. But I'm bookmarking and listing everything here so that doesn't happen.

Keep bouncing.

[Hashim]

Jason,
what do you want Typepad to do that you feel it can't? over on my site (http://www.hiphop-blogs.com) my designer taught me a few tricks that got the system to do very cool things without a plugin.

Hollerate.