Nicole,

In case you can’t get to e-mail, your clue is next to the most recent “combination” we created:

331 n / s

543 c * y

231 n / 5

127 n + 6

457 n = 2

982 c + f

153 n – d

Movable Type version 4 is coming soon. For years I have wished uploading and managing photos was easier. The steps to upload / thumbnail / copy html code / paste were just too complicated for the average Joe. And then if you upload something wrong or to the wrong place, how do you change that without FTP? (You don’t.) MT4 will introduce a media manager (Manage Assets), something I’m used to using with Joomla on the www.sjnlilburn.com website. Here are a couple of related links:

Manage Assets Overview

Test Site for Movable Type 4 (login = demo and password = demo)

I noticed that posting comments was taking 15 to 20 seconds. I typed “movabletype comment posting delay” in Google and found this article with these instructions about an anti-spam service, blitzed.org, that has gone out of business. The comment posting routine was trying to contact the defunct service and check to see if the poster was coming from a “blacklisted” spam source. It would give up after 15 to 20 seconds.

Fix instructions:

1. Login to Movable Type. (Your account will need to have System Administrator privileges.)

2. Click on the “Plugins” link in the main navigation on the left hand side.

3. Look for the “SpamLookup – Lookups” plugin set listed among your other plugins.

4. Click “Show Settings.”

5. Under “IP Blacklist Services” highlight and replace the text “opm.blitzed.org” with “zen.spamhaus.org”.

6. Click “Save Settings.”

Comment posting much quicker now! I think this formal kind of support is an advantage of using MovableType

There was a power outage at the home of Mac5 on Sunday. The caretakers did not realize the Mac had not restarted. None of the Mac5 family let me know, but a friend at work did. He’s been reading up on old (funny) entries about raising kids because he is expecting his first child in a few weeks.

His wife now wants a family blog, too.

Mom writes:

Jeb,

Mom

This is temporary. I was experimenting with making a time-based background that would automatically change through the seasons and day. As many things… this is an unfinished project… daylight coming.

Note to self: Added several patches to MT 3.2 and now running 3.21. This is out of the 3.33 security release.

Over two years ago in May of 2004, I added Google ads to my blog and reported my first $4.08 in earnings. It has been a slow climb to get to the $100 mark that will trigger my first check from Google. Since I took this snapshot, it rolled over that mark, so the check should be in the mail at the end of this month.

Ted got his first check much faster and has gotten other checks from other ad sources. Helps to be an engineer-consumer-writer guy.

The on-line Journal Nature uses MovableType as do 30 of the top 50 scientists they’ve identified who write blogs.

http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2006/07/scientific_proo.html

Ted is Mac5’s closest thing to a scientist.

MovableType helped sponsor a styles contest. There are 146 entries. You can browse through them at thestylecontest.com/browser. You scroll across to see the thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail to zoom in. There are about 20 “pages” of thumbnails, so use the page links at the top right to go through those.

If you see one you would like to use on your site, look for the name (on the left) and let me know. I’ll help you get it loaded. If you like having a random photo banner, or just random photo, think about picking a style that will work with a photo.

For example, I picked out “Rudimentary” and set it up on Stonegate.

Lowdown is a MovableType plugin that simplifies text, converting “high characters” like curly quotes to low characters and also strips out html. I’ve been trying to get the html to not show in the recent comments section on the main page. The MTGlobalComments plugin I use does not properly process the remove_html=”0″ setting. But now I can use a lowdown=”0″ setting and all html is stripped out.

Not only does it strip out the html, but now the right side of mac5 will not get broken in IE when a truncated link tag is displayed… because now it doesn’t display.