An explanation
Mar 7th, 2005 by bornfamous
To my surprise, someone has actually noticed the mess that has been this blog for some time now. Here’s what happened:
1. Two or three months ago, comment spammers bombed my site.
2. At the same time, I tried to update MovableType, which somehow disabled MT-Blacklist and things just went downhill from there.
3. As a result of the botched MT installation attempt, I was unable to stop the comment spam. Decided to delete MT and the archives completely.
4. Discovered several comments in the midst of the removal process, but lost them before I could reply. Became too discouraged to explain.
5. Felt guilty for being a bad blog-friend.
6. Briefly contemplated committing blogicide and posted a rather bitter 404 error page.
7. Missed blogging.
8. Decided to install WordPress, which is less targeted by spammers than MT and has the added advantage of generating pages dynamically, thus saving server space. I know the latest version of MT also offers this option, but trying to switch was when my troubles began. MT has simply become too complicated for this geek-wannabe to use.
9. Blogged new entries with WP for a few weeks and liked it very much. Also liked the fresh start aspect of no archives.
10. Screwed up again somehow. Not sure what went wrong, but couldn’t access the WP interface any more.
11. Had to reinstall and start over, losing the “new” entries. Figured what the hell and imported the old MT archives into WP.
12. Too tired to blog. Thus, the old “I got fired for padding my hours” entry was up on the front page again for an uncomfortably long time. Thank you, dear heart, for nudging me.
13. Will try to do better from now on, since I apparently haven’t lost ALL of my readers, just most.
5 Responses to “An explanation”
comments weren’t working recently either which made it harder to know that anyone was reading! I was glad to see that you’d started posting again and figured the return to a past date was a server/backup copy problem of some sort. Ah, what time-sucking ephemera all this web stuff is, eh?
Oh — and I see a couple sites I frequent are using a “must preview comments entry before posting” set up to rule out a lot of the spam comment posts. That seems like a reasonable approach for as long as it works.
BFG is a smart dude. Glad to have you back.
Mary Beth: Time-Sucking Ephemera! Great name for a blog–I love it!
Ju: Glad to be back. And glad you’re back too. :o]
Some readers are harder to lose than others.