We consider communication with our customers to be one of the most important aspects of our business. Because of this we keep a public weblog of our very own. Here you will find news and information not only about our company but the blogging world in general.
Posted by Jace Herring on March 22, 2004
Lots of people use the free site statistics provided by Reinvigorate to track hits and referrers. While Reinvigorate is a fantastic service, occasionally they will perform maintenance or their site will be overloaded and the service will appear down. This can cause problems on your own site if you don’t have the bit of Javascript they have given you in the right place.
If you have it too high up on your page and their site is down or slow, the rest of your page will fail to load or take an unusually long amount of time to render. You can easily remedy this and keep the Reinvigorate stats you love by placing the Javascript link at the very bottom of your page(s) right before the </body> tag. This will ensure your site is rendered the quickest regardless of how well Reinvigorate’s service is operating.
Posted by Jace Herring on March 18, 2004
We are looking for a few people that would be interested in writing articles on blogging and the blogging world a few times a month. Be it from the technical side, creative side, or anything that you find interesting in the community. If you are interested please contact us with a few lines about yourself and also a link to where we can read some of your writing. Anyone who loves blogging is encouraged to drop us a note.
Posted by Jace Herring on March 15, 2004
Most servers these days are running CGI applications, for which MovableType is one, in suexec mode. This means the application is run as your unique username enabling you to write files (i.e “rebuild”) via the interface without having to set your directory permissions too loosely. Why then, is MovableType configured to create folders and write files with global writability? Usually this isn’t a problem if the server is configured correctly but shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to ensure our directories are secure? I vote yes. Luckily MovableType can easily be configured to write files with stricter permissions.
Within the MovableType configuration (mt.cfg - make a backup of this file just in case you make a mistake) file there are two sections. The first is commented with a strict warning about changing the settings. Since we know what we’re doing (i.e asking MT to write with stricter permissions, see conclusion below for full result or read about file permissions), we’re going to change them. This first section looks like this:
# DBUmask 0022
# HTMLUmask 0022
# UploadUmask 0022
# DirUmask 0022
The “#” before the entries has commented these lines so they are ignored by MT. We want to remove the comment and make the four lines appear like:
DBUmask 0022
HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022
The next section is usually just below and is preceded by yet another warning. It looks like this:
# HTMLPerms 0777
# UploadPerms 0777
Let’s once again remove the comments and also change the default configuration:
HTMLPerms 0644
UploadPerms 0644
(Optional) While we’re here, lets also find this line and speed up our rebuild times somewhat. Near the top we see this:
# NoTempFiles 1
Let’s once again remove that comment:
NoTempFiles 1
Now save the file. In order to get the new permissions to take effect up you will have to delete all of your archives and indexes and then do a full rebuild. Of course, you could just change their permissions manually but it’s up to you. All new entries posted, files uploaded, and archives created will use the new settings by default.
Conclusion: The above changes will ensure that your files are writable by you and you alone. These changes are recommend but, as I already stated, normally not required. I’d only recommend making them if you are comfortable poking in your mt.cfg file and are interested in getting the most out of your MovableType configuration.
Posted by Jace Herring on March 06, 2004
Below are our picks for our March 2004 Spotlight Sites. Each month we will choose two or more of our favourite blogs from our client list, link ‘em, write a small blurb about them, and post them here. While we don’t officially support the views of the sites we link we do commend their ability to put themselves out there.
bestyearofmylife.com
This month we are thrilled to feature a photoblog. A quick glance at the archives will show what a unique collection of photos Mark Prints has assembled. From children, to flowers, to numerous people-photos, bestyearofmylife.com is a wonderfully creative site to visit.
Zionide
A fairly new member of our community, Zionide is a well-written journal that comes to us from Nick in Salt Lake City. Deeply personal and honest, Zionide adds something a bit different to the mix.
That’s it for this month. Check back in a few weeks for more!
Posted by Jace Herring on March 06, 2004
The issues with Fantastico on Phoenix have been fixed and it has, once again, been made available to customers on that server. Several new modules have also been added and the Wordpress installer now supports 1.0.1. Enjoy!
Posted by Jace Herring on February 27, 2004
“You may have already read that Tucows Inc. has acquired Blogrolling.com. As a Blogrolling.com subscriber, I thought it was appropriate to drop you a quick note introducing myself and Tucows. I also want to provide you with a brief overview of our future plans for Blogrolling.com.
Important things first - Tucows is planning to run Blogrolling.com *as is* for the foreseeable future. We will continue to evolve the service and ensure that it gets the care and feeding our subscribers deserve. We will *not* limit or disable the service in any way or prevent users of specific weblog/website management tools from continuing to use or access the service.”
Excerpt from the email sent to BlogRolling members. Read the statement on blogrolling.com or the official press release.
