Management Summary of this longer entry: 1) Comments are back, 2) I’m using Serendipity instead of Movable Type and 3) This layout – though premade – is going to stay.
But now my reasoning:
As I’ve stated earlier today, I had enough comment spam arriving on gnegg.ch. Not only the blog was filled up with junk, but also my mailbox was hit (MT was sending mails for every comment).
To underline how BAD it was, notice this: During last weekend I was off the internet most of the time. In the two nights (friday to saturday and saturday to sunday), gnegg.ch was hit by 683 SPAM comments, of which MT only classified 4 as spam.
For each of these 683 comments, I got an email message. Which was especially bad as I was checking mail from my mobile phone (that was the most expensive mail checking process in my life I guess – imagine the sheer size of only the headers)
Even worse was the interface for comment removal: The biggest page size I could select was 50 comments, so I had to delete the comments in groups of 50, each time waiting for the affected pages to be rebuilt over and over again.
There is a mutliselect option in MT, but it always affects all comments per page, so chosing to display all comments and then using the “Select All” feature would not have helped as it would have deleted the legit comments too.
This just so you understand why I had to do something. I did not want to have another “fun” comment removal session next sunday evening (most of the comments get posted on the weekends – probably in the hope they will remain unnoticed for a while longer – which they did).
At first, I just wanted to turn off the comments and keep it at that.
But what is a blog without comments? Yeah. right… not much.
So I went ahead and installed Serendipity because I knew that it had some really nice SPAM-countermeasures included.
As I currently don’t have the time needed to port the old MT template over, I selected a template that comes with s9y and I have to say: It looks great, IMHO. I think I’ll keep it at this.
I’m no web designer and even if I could convince Richard to create a new layout for me (thinking that the old one just is a bit too dark and grey for my current mood), it would take AGES for me to create a Smarty version out of it, so I decided to go with premade templates.
And this one (Perun Blue) is really nice – IMHO even better than the old, custom made, one. So, I hope, you can live with this.
While the import process worked flawlessly, many links inside the site are broken and I’m currently in the process of fixing them.
gnegg 