Part of my motivation for finally upgrading this site to the latest version of Movable Type was to allow comments to once again be possible. Among other problems, the comment spam handling was limited, so real comments were getting lost in the noise. With the upgrade complete, I think I’ve got it set correctly to take anonymous comments that don’t require registration or even an email address. With that I have a favor to ask: if you’ve got a minute to spare, could you come visit this entry on my blog and leave a comment? Thanks!
As part of my Movable Type 4.1 upgrade project, I noticed that depending on my template settings, republishing the whole site would get extremely slow. Movable Type sometimes catches flak for this because it’s designed to serve static pages, so the "build" time tends to be a bit slower. (A good tradeoff in my opinion.) There is much room for improvement on the rebuild times. It looks like the next release of Movable Type will focus on performance and scalability, so here’s my first contribution to that effort. After some trial and error, I discovered that the Archives sidebar widget…
The code and design for this site have pretty stagnant for the last two years. Everything was functional, but the design was old and needed some serious improvement. With the recent release of MovableType 4.1, I decided to put some time into this and get it upgraded. Many hours later, it’s done! I spent lots of time on this — probably too much — but wanted to come up with a clean upgrade process. To back up a step and look at what I was trying to achieve, these were my goals for the upgrade: Create a more useful template…
Today the two top open-wheel racing series in the US — the Indy Racing League and the Champ Car World Series — agreed to merge, effective with this coming season. Actually, it’s not so much a merger as it is Champ Car shutting down: After 12 years of bitter rivalry that confused fans, promoted apathy and nearly buried the sport, Champ Car agreed to cease operations, giving the surviving IRL the opportunity to rebuild open-wheel’s lost prestige. Champ Car clearly came out the loser in this deal, but considering they went bankrupt a few years back, they’re probably lucky to…
This past week we finally made a trip to the premier Nascar event — the Daytona 500 — and “experience” is the best way to describe it. Not many sports hold their “super bowl” event on opening weekend, but Nascar sure makes a show out of it. This year was also the 50th running of the race, so the celebrities and celebrations were above and beyond the norm. For the racing itself and the wow factor for being there, I’d give Daytona top marks. Anyone who considers themselves a Nascar fan should attend this race at least once. It’s easily…