Ghost of a Flea

Over the past few days, I've been installing upgrades over at Nicholas Packwood's Ghost of a flea, which is one of the leading lights of the Canadian blogosphere. (And with traffic to match: last month about 40x what I received over here. Not that I'm jealous. No, not at all…)

Conclusions? Movable Type 3.14 is a marked improvement over release 3.0D, which is what powers Andúnië. Especially in the matter of rebuild times: the Flea cranks through that task several times faster than possible in older blogware versions. That alone would be worth the upgrade tedium, except that at this site I have to worry about all the customized hacks as well.

TypeKey — Six Apart's centralized commenting system for MT blogs — is on the other hand rather a bitch to appease. The Movable Type people recently deigned to provide a TypeKey tutorial, which includes this pearl of wisdom:

You should review the new default templates and use them as guidelines for upgrading your existing templates.

Oh, thanks. And what exactly does the template upgrade process look like? This. Were it not for Donald's most detailed instructions I'd have been in the wilderness for the next month. (Which, of course, says some unflattering things about my web design skills, or rather complete lack thereof.)

The whole purpose of TypeKey is to combat the twin evils of trolls and comment spam. Six Apart just released a comprehensive guide on the subject. If your site is infested, it's a must-read, even if they frown upon my preferred solution.

I'll be back tomorrow—uh, later today. In the meantime do go check out Nick's most excellent blog.

UPDATE. Winds of Change has another useful anti-comment-spam roundup.