Well, TypeKey isn’t very different, at least not to me. It’s a service that stores user information and authenticates via a central server. Apparently, it’s mostly valuable when in blog comments, it’s supposed to get rid of (or reduce) comment spam, and verify that when you’re commenting you are who you claim you are, so blog owners can make sure that nobody comments unless logged in via TypeKey.

So far so good, but TypeKey isn’t exactly my favorite solution for this kind of problems. Centralization, in most cases, proved to be a failure, it’s prone to errors, it’s maintained by a single entity, and everything’s in one location, that’s just too risky.

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Here’s the story: Before I redesigned my site, I had a daily meal of 10-15 comment spams. Yes, I did feel recognized, but I didn’t like the “Enlarge Your Penis” kind of crap, I’m in pretty good terms with my penis and the rest of my body.

But after my recent (dare I call it a) redesign, I didn’t get a single comment spam. Not a single one, can you imagine? I didn’t install any of that bayesian spam filters, they’re just too heavy for my site, I didn’t have any extra plugins or tweaks for MoveableType, so how come?

Deeper log reviewing uncovered the mystery. /cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi had the largest 404 hits among all others. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say, spammers look for obvious things, so they take down the 95% percent of the sites who install MT in such obvious locations. I don’t even have MT in CGI-bin, my installation resides in /mt, a location most spammers don’t think of for some wierd reason.

So here’s a piece of advice for anyone who has MT installed. Move your mt from cgi-bin, or at least rename mt to something else, maybe your pet’s name, or your favorite color, or x78H, your StarWars nickname. Yes, that reduces comment spam if it doesn’t eliminate it.

As for you, spammers, please don’t insult my intelligence. I don’t even care where MT resides as long as it works, so if you start looking for mt-comment.cgi in my new installation location, I’ll move it (or sue somebody), I don’t care where it’s placed, even if it’s deep down somebody’s throat, capiche?!

The new pricing scheme of MoveableType isn’t really what’s upsetting most of us, it isn’t really the issue, every user is willing to pay for software he or she uses and likes. It isn’t that SixApart got greedy, or did all MT users think that SixApart are simply donating for the best of the community? They have their bills, they need to pay them, a make-a-donation button simply isn’t enough.

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To me, this is sheer disappointment, I liked MT, I’m not a very loyal user, but still I like it, I can recognize good software when I see it. It isn’t just some things that make MT so special, it’s the whole package, it’s well documented, perl modules are structured, it’s extensible enough, it’s almost everything I could need to manage a single blog with a single author.

I’m not disappointed because I’ll have to pay, I mean I still fall into the free category, so the pricing wouldn’t affect me very much, except I hate to see a company I respect destroy it’s reputation like that, they need to understand, the casual bloggers are not where the money is, it’s the corporate ones, it’s the support, it’s everything that’s not a blogger who wants to do a favor for his friends.

SixApart should revise the pricing, this is not how you do business, go learn some marketing, but don’t kick away loyal MoveableTypers, they’re the key to making business, it’s not the money that matters, it’s the reputation.

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First, because I just can’t stand having a /cgi-bin at the end of every program’s URL, one thing I like about PHP is the ability to have friendly links in a URL, now with mod_perl that’s possible with Perl scripts. Second, because mod_perl is much faster than CGI, it takes way too much time to fork a script into memory.

Luckily, MoveableType can run under mod_perl without problems (apparently), so now I can have a /search, /trackback, /etc. URLS, much cleaner than /cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/entry-id.

Can’t wait to be done with the site redesign, hopefully then I can move permanently to mod_perl