The Artful Writer - Technical Update

I’ll be back (probably on Monday) with yet another provocative post about writing. Start collecting blood pressure meds for Olson. In the meantime, I thought I’d keep you all posted on some changes I’ve been implementing here behind the scenes. Let me know if you experience any strange behavior when visiting the site.

Like anyone who runs a blog, I get inundated with comment spam. Loads of it. The weird part about comment spam is that while some of it makes sense (pitches for online gambling, viagra, incest with dogs, the usual), some of it doesn’t even seem to contain advertising at all. That’s the stuff that worries me, of course. No URL, no text pitch…just some weird profusion of comments saying something like “Hi to all is good for same!” published to twelve posts at a time. Wonder what those guys are up to…

Anyway, this site is powered by Movable Type, which has been doing a fairly decent job in the war against spam. Unfortunately, plenty gets through. Lots of sites (like John’s) have tried to deal with the problem using captchas (those annoying codes you have to manually enter in order to post a comment) or challenges (like John’s erstwhile “oxlip and nodding violet” test). I find those things intrusive and disruptive to my browsing experience (and lo and behold, John’s chucked the oxlips too), so I made a choice very early on to prioritize ease of commenting over ease of webmastering.

But over the last month, as more and more spam fought its way past Movable Type’s built-in filter plugins, it started to get very irksome.

Enter MT-Keystrokes, a brilliant little plugin for Movable Type. The author’s theory is that the vast majority of spam comments aren’t actually typed into the text field; that would be a terribly inefficient way of going about the task of bombing thousands of blogs a day. Instead, bots crawl the web, find blogs and then autopost comments to them. The answer? A plugin and some quick template hacking that requires my commenters to actually type something into the text field…or even just click the “submit” button. That’s it. If you do that, you make it to the next level (where you get filtered behind the scenes again by another plugin). If you don’t…I never even hear about it. You’re toast.

So far, the impact has been startling. The plugin author is aware that sooner or later the spammers will get around this, but for now it’s working like a charm. Still, if you attempt to post a comment and it doesn’t show up, let me know. It may be that something’s gone wrong.

On the hosting side, we haven’t yet moved to our new server, but it’s a-comin’. Also, I’ve implemented some coding changes recommended at Elise Bauer’s absolutely brilliant site, Learning Movable Type. These changes should reduce the load that this site puts on our server, and maybe even cut down on the slowages and outages. As an aside, one of the cool things about the internet is that there’s a person named Elise Bauer whom I’ve never met and probably never will, but she still means a lot to me (and God knows how many others). Like her counterparts in the scribosphere like John August, Elise decided one day that she would spend her own time and money to help people learn some of the things she’s learned. There’s no charge, there’s no advertising…just really useful information. Thank you, Elise!

Over at The Forum, I’ve updated the software (it’s a separate application called SMF). Every time I do that, something gets broken. This time, it was the link to our Chat Room, but our Forum Valkyrie (aka Denise) fixed that just today.

Finally, a quick note about the links to other sites. I never wanted a massive blogroll, because it’s my belief that a list of 500 hundred blogs means no one’s gonna click on any of them. My intention has always been to feature links to blogs that meet at least a majority of the following criteria:

1. About screenwriting.
2. Good.
3. Attractive.
4. Frequently updated…as in at LEAST once a week.

Personally, I hate hate HATE generic Blogger sites, and I really don’t know why anyone has a blog that they don’t update more than once a month (and don’t give me “I’m busy” because trust me, you’re not). On the other hand, Josh Friedman definitely scores big on criteria 1 and 2, so he’s not getting bumped. Similarly, you may have a beautiful, well-written site that you update daily, but if it’s not screenwritingish enough, I’ll eventually bump you.

Nothing personal.

The truth is that some sites are just plain excellent, and I don’t want them lost in a big list. Everyone knows about Josh Friedman and John August and I’m sure most of you have enjoyed Complications Ensue and Word Player and The Thinking Writer and John Rogers…

…but save some love for Warren Hsu Leonard’s The Screenwriting Life. It’s a really attractive blog. He deserves extra attention.

That’s the update for now. Thanks for continuing to read and make use of the site. We continue to grow, clocking about 18,000 unique visits a month now. I don’t know how long we can continue to grow at this pace, but I suppose we’ll find out.

Up next, my dream of the perfect studio. I call it…Scriptopia…