1. Although there's supposed to be a migration path for users of the Custom Fields plug-in, I can't find it and the existing custom field data wasn't imported. That might be because I'd already tried the MT4.1 beta and updated my database schema, preventing any upgrade script from running. Either way, the built-in pro pack plug-in works and it also offers the additional asset container tags that never made it into Arvind's original plug-in but which is available from the Athena codebase still. Which is nice.


2. FastSearch currently hiccups with it. I get through two results from either a straight search or a tag search before getting a "divide by zero" error. I've let Mark know, so hopefully a fix won't be long in coming. Unless there's something screwy with my set-up, of course.

To say MT4's buggy is an understatement. I've reported at least 14 bugs so far and I'm experiencing intermittent bugs of no great concern all the time. They're bugs I can live with or work round, but they're still irritating. Here's a few:

• New tags not working properly (eg MTCommentFooter within MTCommentReplies or the URL tag for the commenter authentication type not working for TypeKey authenticaion)
• Templates that are set to rebuild with main indexes not rebuilding
• MTIfStatic and MTIfDynamic not recognising MTElse and getting confused within MTIncludes
• Tag glue not displaying properly, so that quotes appear around the glue
• Certain settings for blogs getting propagated to other blogs
• MT4's default templates not containing all the necessary variables to activate the correct text in the About widget

And so on. As I said, mostly things I can live with for now. All in all, though, I'm glad I made the move to MT4 since there are some nifty things in it I'm starting to enjoy having.

Simply Threaded was giving me some problems and not showing up in Smarty, but it turned out there had been a stealthy upgrade to the plug-in that I hadn't noticed that overcame the problem. I had to amend the archive templates to switch from the old MT3.35-compatible <MTRepliedComment> tag to the MT 4.0-native <MTIfCommentParent><MTCommentParent> tags, but that's a couple of seconds' work so not too big a problem.

More of a problem is MT Media Manager, which is choking quite a bit and giving me odd errors preventing me from rebuilding my index pages. Judging the Major Domo forums, other people have been having similar problems, so I'm hoping it'll get fixed in a future beta.

That just leaves MT Notifier as the last major stumbling block for the full MT4 upgrade (I can probably do without MT-Blogroll). Hopefully, that'll be happening soon. But we're nearly there.

Movable Type has no built-in support for avatars. But there are third-party avatars services out there, including Gravatar. Gravatar - short for 'globally recognised avatar' - looked like the natural choice. There are plug-ins for both dynamically and statically published MT pages, for one thing. However, the service is just too slow - page load time for anyone who hadn't cached the avatars already was on the order of 10 seconds or more which is just hopeless. It's also very hard to convince people to go to the trouble of getting a Gravatar when all they get for their effort is a little picture of themselves on a comment.

So I decided to switch to MyBlogLog. This is owned by Yahoo! so is practically instantaneous. It also offers users things for their own blogs, such as widgets that show who's been visiting the blog as well as web analytics functions.

Trouble is, although the service does claim to support adding avatars to comments on MT blogs, it requires the inclusion of the MyBlogLog widget on your blog and I don't particularly want to do that. So I wrote my own MT plug-in: MT-MyBlogLog. Here's how I went about it.

Finding out how MyBlogLog generates avatars was another issue, since I couldn't find any documentation for developers. However, there is a WordPress plug-in, MyAvatars, from which I was able to find out what options there are for avatar generation and how the avatar URL is formed.

Turns out there are far fewer options. Importantly, unlike Gravatar which uses an MD5 hash of the email address as part of the URL, MyBlogLog uses a regular encoded URL, either for a specific web site or email address. Since I didn't especially want to create a plug-in that throws out people's email address to the spambots, and because people are more inclined to give out their blog URL than their email address, I decided only to use the URL encoding for creating avatars.

Since my PHP coding isn't that bad, it was relatively easy to put together the dynamic plug-in. Perl, I know nothing about, so that was far harder and I had to look at some other Perl MT plug-ins to find out certain parts of the Perl syntax.

Still it all works now. There are bound to be issues with it, but fingers crossed, others will get some use out of it, too.

I'm not exactly sure what the problem was, other than a problem with my individual archive template that caused Smarty to have issues (it seemed to think there was a problem with the MTInclude function). After removing references to the Simply Threaded plug-in, the template worked fine, even though Simply Threaded appears to be compatible enough to work with MT4 on its home page - maybe it's only on dynamically published pages that there's an issue. However, TypeKey authentication seemed to have a problem with the 3.35 JavaScript, so before I embark on a wholesale upgrade of the templates and JavaScript I want to run a few more tests, since TypeKey authentication issues appears to be a common problem with MT4.

Besides, there's no rush. According to the Movable Type developer email list, MT4-compatible versions of Media Manager and Simply Threaded are due out soon - this week in Simply Threaded's case - and since there should finally be instructions on how to do properly hierarchical commenting using MT4's new threaded commenting features released at the same time, which will require more template changes, I might as well wait until everything's ready before I make the plunge. Besides, I'm still waiting for MT Blogroll to get upgraded as well.

Also, the case for an MT4 upgrade isn't quite so compelling. By creating a separate blog that publishes to the same path as another blog, you can create Pages; I've no idea why Folders would be useful; MT4 seems a lot slower than MT3; Google authentication doesn't work yet; I don't podcast or vodcast; I use Ecto for publishing so don't need an asset manager plus the asset manager doesn't catalogue files I've already uploaded to my blogs. The only thing that I'm really compelled by are the new themes in StyleCatcher.

Still, once everything's ready, I'll no doubt make the plunge. I just wish there were more documentation so I could find out how to use MT4's latest features!

Now, since I've been using CCode, I've only had two pieces of blog spam and that was created by humans, not robots. But I did like I was asked.

Big mistake. I've had about seven pieces of legitimate feedback trashed by Spamhaus, and since I've not been in the habit of checking my junk comments folder of late, they've languished there for weeks at a time.

Since I've disabled zen.spamhaus.org, I've not been inundated by spam and I've had no legit comments trashed, so I'd advise you all to remove it from your spam settings ASAP.

Keyvalues doesn't work; Media Manager stops the whole blog from working; MT-Blogroll is broken; Smart Rebuild stops any rebuilding ('republishing' as it now is in MT4); and Fast Search, which I eulogised about earlier, is going to need an update too.

SimplyThreaded and MT Compare are classed as unnecessary in MT4 because there's equivalent functionality. Well that's all right then, isn't it? All I have to do is check all my templates are rewrite them accordingly...

As it is, it looks like with Keyvalues down, I'm going to have to split the blogs up into two separate installations so that some can use the new MT4 features and others can keep working.

The trouble with the MT4 beta, apart from the bugs, is there's so little documentation. It's fairly easy to report bugs and say “these features have stopped working on my blog”, but it's a lot harder to talk about the shiny new features when there's no clear idea on how to implement them.

Some of the new features are also at 0.1 status - so while I love the new ability to authenticate via LiveJournal, OpenID, etc, the Google account plug-in is optional and gives anyone using it a generic name if they sign in.

How do I implement the threaded comments properly? How do I implement the recommendations framework? So many things, so little to work with.

I'm just going to keep adapting my templates to the new modular approach taken with MT4 and feed in the extra capabilities as they become clear. It should, I hope, be worth it.

I've done several things over the years to reduce resource loads: I've converted various templates to dynamic publishing to reduce loads at page rebuild time; I've switched to using Fast CGI instead of CGI. My latest trick, since the file locked down was mt-search.fcgi, was to use FastSearch 2.0.

I have to say I'm extremely pleased with the results.

This all changes with FastSearch. Not only does FastSearch reduce resource use when searching, it includes built-in pagination functions. It also permits Google-style highlighting of search results:

I've had to lose case-sensitive and regular expression searches, but I'm not too bothered by that. I also had to pony up a $10 donation to get the relevant modifications to permit URL-cleaning for tags (ie so that a URL of the form ../tag/xxx gets mapped to the search page with tag=xxx as a variable parameter. On the plus side again, FastSearch also modifies the <MTTagSearchLink> tag to include a directory attribute that lets you specify the directory of such cleaned up tags. Nice.

All in all, well worth the investment and pretty simple to work with, once you've got the hang of it.

1) Change the JavaScript to the following:

// Dynamic Comment Preview - Kudos to Mike Industries for the inspiration!
// D.C.P. - Comment Text
function ReloadTextDiv() {
document.getElementById('TextDisplay').innerHTML = '<p>'+document.getElementById('comment-text').value.replace(/(\r\n|\n)/g,'<br />').replace(/(<br \/>){2,}/gi,'<'+'/p><p>')+'<'+'/p>';
}
// D.C.P. - Comment Author
function ReloadNameDiv() {
document.getElementById('NameDisplay').innerHTML= document.getElementById('comment-author').value;
}
// End Dynamic Comment Preview

You'll notice I changed

document.getElementById('NameDisplay').innerHTML = document.comments_form.comment-author.value;

to

document.getElementById('NameDisplay').innerHTML= document.getElementById('comment-author').value;

2) I added “margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 0px;” to the div containing the POST button.

3) In step 2, I changed

var authname = getCookie(“mtcmtauth”);
document.write(authname);

to

document.write(commenter_name)

4) I also changed

<p class=“comment-footer”>Posted by:
<span class=“author”><a href=“#” id=“NameDisplay”>

to

<p class=“comment-footer” style=“padding-left: 0px; margin-left: 0px”>Posted by:
<span class=“author”><a href=“#” id=“NameDisplay”>

Now it looks right and works properly.

So out-sourcing those capabilities is always something CIOs think twice about. It's one of the reasons ASPs floundered - the services provided weren't reliable enough. But SaaS promises far greater reliability - technology has moved on, as has the Internet, and reliability and speed are far easier to accomplish at an acceptable price.

That promise is for nothing if providers can't actually provide that reliability, of course. So it has to be a blow to the whole idea of SaaS that one of the icons of the movement, Salesforce, managed to crash for four hours yesterday. Four hours without a CRM: any CIO who suffered that outage internally would probably be for the chop. With the current backlash against outsourcing in full swing, SaaS might just have suffered a killer blow.