Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Besides this, and a couple of othe hiccups, which I will talk about in a minute, the migration was quite peaceful. The comment filtering capabilities of MT-3.33 appear quite impressive and hopefully would allow me to accept legitimate comments without too much of a bother. For the time being I plan to just stay with built-in filter SpamLookup but am open to try out others such as Akismet or Comment Challenge, a text-based CAPTCHA plugin for MovableType.

Besides comments and trackback filtering, this version has many other nice features that I have already started appreciating:

• Faster builds of static pages. Though this may be due to use of MySQL. The earlier installation used BerkleyDB.
• Nicer editor to post entries. Allows resizing of height.
• Many more administrative options with intuitive navigation. This combination is actually quite rare!
• A style gallery and a plugin to try out and choose a new style with just a few clicks! I tried out this feature but am sticking with the default for the time being!

Comming back to the hiccups I referred to earlier:

• I got an error message on pointing browser first time to mt.cgi after setting the configuration values in mt-config.cgi, saying that connection to MySQL failed via /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock. I knew that my server had this at /var/lib/mysql/4.1/mysql.sock, but didn't know where to specify that. Found the answer at MovableType Knowledge Base -- set the option DBSocket to the right socket path.
• I was first getting a blank page and then the ATOM feed at the main blog URL after doing a site rebuild. Apparently, the newly installed Movabletype is creating both the main page index.html and ATOM feed file index.xml in the same directory and my sever's Apache settings give preference to index.xml over index.html. This was fixed easily by creating a .htaccess file with single entry

  DirectoryIndex index.html

  Note: this is not good for performance, but I rely on shared hosting and cannot edit the main configuration file.