New trackback spam: I have been hit with about a dozen TB's that all look similar to this one http://7949.u2mme6.info/ the http followed by four numbers then a dot

Can the filters be modified to include this type of spam?

Posted by: GM Roper at 01:16 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Argh. I've read the MuNu posts about building a 3-column blog. I've gone here, here, here, here, and here, among others. And I'm still at a loss. Visitors to my site(both of you- thanks) have probably noticed some bizzare structures as I attempt to work my way through this, which provides some entertainment in its own right. Still, I'd like to actually figure this out. Anyone think that they've got an answer? For the record, I'm trying to avoid the table driven concept to prevent me from having to redo this effort in the future. A pure CSS solution would be helpful. I do not care if it's center-floating, or 3- column floating. Fixed width would probably be a poor choice, though.

THanks in advance. I'm gonna fix my blog back to a functional 2-column setup for the nonce.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 05:09 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Poke poke...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:04 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Pixy...
Just got some e-mail from Steven DenBeste. He's been trying to comment over at The Pond, and the filter has been killing his comments toot sweet.

He's tried many things, as this e-mail mentions:
"It objected to "Wou", "Woo", and "Doe" when I tried to use the words
"would", "wood", and "does" as the first words of comments I tried to post.
I think it probably would object to everything in those positions."

He also tried such things as "gronk", "A", "Aaa", "Testing", and the pernicious word "Hello."

Help?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 07:56 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Has someone blacklisted the English language again

Posted by: Stephen Macklin @ at May 21, 2006 08:20 PM

2 Not sure what the problem was, but it seems to have been resolved.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 21, 2006 08:29 PM

3 Yup, sure seems like it. Boy, you're good!

Posted by: Wonderduck @ at May 21, 2006 08:40 PM

4 I checked my emails. Howie (who posts at the Jawa Report) had an accident with the blacklist, but was able to find the entry and fix it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 21, 2006 11:09 PM

5 Boy, do I hate those Tragic Blacklist Accidents!

Posted by: Susie @ at May 26, 2006 05:17 PM

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What would you have to set up in order for it to work on your weblog?

Posted by: Matthew at 07:17 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 There's a pinger built in to MT; not sure if Jim turned it on for you or not.

Only problem is, it only accepts one ping from the whole of munu every half hour, so most of the time your ping will get rejected.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 21, 2006 08:30 PM

2 Damn.

Well, what way do you suggest to get a blog out there?

Posted by: Matthew @ at May 21, 2006 08:32 PM

3 Try the Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger:
http://www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp

Posted by: Jim @ at May 23, 2006 01:35 AM

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Darling Pixy,

I would email you, but you know I can never remember whether you are a dot-com or a dot-net.

Anyway... despite the fact that I have my Time Zone correctly set to Eastern (UTC-5) time, my posts are publishing with the Central Time Zone times. This is really only a minor annoyance, unless I some day need an alibi.

If you can find a minute between slaying spammers and trying to have a real life, could you look into this? There's no hurry.

Love,

Susie

Posted by: Susie at 01:06 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I think this is a daylight saving issue. The server doesn't adjust for it, and Movable Type doesn't either. Which means you need to do it manually by changing your time zone.

P.S. Posting here is fine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 21, 2006 07:10 PM

2 The wonky gets wonkier - now the time stamp is off by 7 hours.

I've adapted.

Posted by: Debbye @ at May 29, 2006 07:24 PM

3 The servers got rebooted, and came back with the wrong time - even though I had already fixed this in the startup scripts so that it couldn't happen.

Aargh!

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 30, 2006 02:28 AM

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Everytime go to my url it sends me back to the main mu.nu site.

Posted by: Matthew at 08:31 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

My blog is finally up and running.

The instructions were rather scary at first, but importing turned into a cinch after calming down a bit.

I will say it does look neater in the template already provided than it does on blogger -- the font is even bigger right now.

I think I'll enjoy being here.

Posted by: Matthew at 07:32 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I'll be terminating the http://gmroper.com site with the current provider this weekend, I would like to have anyone that clicks on someone elses link to the dot com site point to the mu.nu site. What do I use for NS1 and NS2 (did I even get that part right?)

I own the registration... should I contact another registrar and just have them take over the registration of http://gmroper.com and point it to mu.nu?

Anxiously awaiting an answer... I am

Yr most obediant servant....

GM

Posted by: GM Roper at 03:37 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Does anyone know of an HTML 'trick' that I can use to get my blog to look normal when using Internet Explorer 6? When my blog is viewed in IE6, everything is centered.

It looks great using Firefox, but not everyone uses it.

Posted by: Mad Mikey at 02:57 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

To Munuvian Demosophist, who lost his brother-in-law.

Posted by: Vinnie at 01:16 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Yuri fell over yet again.

This time I do have a record of what was happening at the time, and the answer is, a hell of a lot. The server was out of swap space, and processing several hundred simultaneous requests.

That could be an attack, or a hardware problem, or a software failure. I can, however, eliminate certain kinds of attacks, hardware problems, and software failures, so it's a step forward.

I can move everyone over to Kei, and I might do so this weekend if I don't make any progress on fixing the problem. Kei by herself is more powerful than the previous munuserver, so it should cope okay.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:10 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Some ijit on SBC DSL downloaded 187,971 copies of Ace's home page in ten days.

That's 30 gigabytes of bandwidth.

Not sure why. He (I'm sure it's a he) may have been trying to find an open mail relay he could spam people with. Well, we don't got one of those. Sorry.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:44 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Pixy, I tried to email you a coupla days ago, but I've lost your addy. I sent it to bloglets AT pixymisa DOT com --- was that correct?

Posted by: kyer @ at May 11, 2006 03:58 PM

2 That was correct, but it got eaten by my spam filter. I've convinced the beast to regurgitate it now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 12, 2006 08:10 AM

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Sorry about the recent outages. Yuri (one of the two main munu servers, and the one that runs most of the blogs) has locked up twice for no obvious reason.

As to unobvious reasons, I'm looking into several possibilities, but the two main suspects are an intermittent hardware fault and and some sort of DoS attack. Or, possibly, there's something misconfigured in the software that I need to find and fix.

The problem I have right now is that the system log files aren't showing me anything definite. I've added new logging routines that are taking snapshots of the server state at ten-second intervals. That chews up some CPU and disk space, but it's a lot better than scratching my head and rebooting the server twice a week.

I'll post more as soon as I know something.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:01 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I'm attempting to set up my blog, but can't even get it to display the name or the theme. I captured the html of Munuviana to see if I could apply that to my "Main Index," but nothing I do to it seems to make a difference. I was going to post the actual code that I've modified from some generic setup but don't know how to preserve the text from being interpreted. I imagine that I can specify anything that's in the form <$somethingorother$>, but it's not clear to me exactly what I ought to do. What, for instance, do I place in <$MTBlogDescription$>? Just some description of my blog? I tried replacing the text inside and rebuilding, but it didn't actually do anything. No change on the blog. Is there a tutorial somewhere about exactly how to configure things? What's with all this generic <$YouCanPutAnythingYouLikeInHere$> nonsense? Can I just replace all of that with anything that's relevant to my blog? Oh yeah, my blog is Demosophia. No header yet, because I haven't a clue how to configure it.

I'd post the html, but don't know how to do it while preserving the text.

Posted by: Demosophist at 04:02 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Good design!
My homepage | Please visit

Posted by: Wendy @ at May 09, 2006 01:13 AM

2 Great. One reply, and it's spam.

The Movable Type manual is available here. Have a little look around and see if that answers the question. It does list all the options.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 09, 2006 03:58 AM

3 Just to get you started in your reading of the Movable Type manual, it'll help to know that code that looks like this is what's called a tag.

What that format means, is that the code is going to pull a value from a setting or data within your weblog to fill in that space. So for example, the tag I just mentioned is going to pull the information that you entered in the box called Blog Description in the setup section of your Movable Type administration page.

Movable Type uses tags to insert all kinds of information into the page that will be displayed to the viewer. It's how your posts, your author name, the time, the date, all of that sort of data gets entered automatically.

Paul

Posted by: Light & Dark @ at May 09, 2006 04:09 AM

4 Pixy and Paul:

Thanks. I noticed that w.bloggar has a neat new facility that allows one to edit and review templates (main and archive), but for some reason the facility doesn't work with my munuvia account. Do I need to set it up, or is it a matter of not having the correct permissions? Or perhaps it just doesn't work with this version of MT?

Posted by: Demosophist @ at May 09, 2006 01:38 PM

5 I haven't used w.bloggar recently - I'll have to take a look.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 09, 2006 03:56 PM

6 Yea, sorry, me neither, and I won't likely have time to check it out this week.

For the time being, you'd probably be better off working directly in Movable Type's admin interface so you can be certain you're not seeing legacy problems from the alternative access through w.bloggar.

P.

Posted by: Light & Dark @ at May 09, 2006 07:22 PM

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...makes my blog stretch to the sides, and this cat's blog to be contained in a box?

It's like, weird science even.

Posted by: Kyer at 03:49 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Autostretch—I've been too lazy to configure it (kind of a pain with my banner). I might do it this summer, though. Did you do it in CSS, kyer?

Posted by: patrickafir @ at May 05, 2006 04:23 AM

2 It's your CSS (stylesheet).

That cat has his blog hard-coded to be 954 pixels wide:

#container {
line-height: 120%;
margin-right: auto;
margin-left: auto;
text-align: left;
padding: 0px;
width: 954px;
background-color: #a0968c;
border: 0px solid #000000;
}

Where yours is left to fend for itself:

#content {
z-index:2;
position:absolute;
right:208px;
left:212px;
background:#FFFFFF;
margin-bottom:20px;
border:2px solid #555;
overflow: hidden;
}

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 05, 2006 06:17 AM

3 I noticed you referred to Patrick's container section, but my content section. I originally thought the container was what uh... contained the whole blog content.

I don't want seem as if I am ripping off his stylesheet, but I've always wanted to see what my blog would look like if it was floating like his. Is it merely a matter of tweaking the content/container sections, or is there more to it? Whenever I simply paste one or the other, it all goes to pot.

My container/content code is below:

#container {
margin-right:150px;
margin-left:150px;
background: #E1ECF8;
}

#content {
z-index:2;
position:absolute;
right:208px;
left:212px;
background:#FFFFFF;
margin-bottom:20px;
border:2px solid #555;
overflow: hidden;
}

P.S. Off topic while I'm here, can somebody please direct me to a link/tutorial for implementing the live preview and comments that simply expand, rather than open in a new window? I was having some trouble with the "Thingys and Doodads" instructions --- I also didn't know whether to use PHP or HTML.

That's it! No more questions! ::shakes Question Jar empty::

Posted by: kyer @ at May 05, 2006 06:03 PM

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I have a web design/resolution question.

I am working on a personal project and I want to be sure that everyone gets to see everything as nicely as I do. Basically I want to make sure the banner on what is basically a weblog doesn't get cut off.

It looks really good on my 17" PowerBook at 1440x900. On my G4 Cube it's fine on the 15" display at 1024x768. If I set the resolution to 800x600 part of the banner is cut off.

Do I need to worry about that low a resolution? I expect that most of the people viewing the site will be on Macs and most Mac monitors are probably at 1024x768.

Is 800x600 common to the PC world? I could check it on my wife's Compaq laptop but I have to wait until my son gets tired of Cartoon Network games. I figured it would be faster asking here!

P.S. Any feedback on the site (particularly typos and other stupid errors) would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: Aside from a few missing images, the site is basically complete.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 08:24 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 It used to be very common in the PC world but only the really old machines still use it. What'sit... 1280xsomething is most common nowadays in PC land.

Posted by: Ted @ at May 04, 2006 01:15 AM

2 The only people using 800x600 are those stuck with 10 year old machines. They're probably also on Windows 3.1 and dial-up internet.

There are still a fair number of people on 1024x768, particularly on notebooks, so we can't drop that just yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 04, 2006 02:30 AM

3 Good.

Given the nature of the site, if they are looking at it on 800x600 I probably don't want to be hearing from them anyway!

Posted by: Stephen Macklin @ at May 04, 2006 02:44 AM

4 Page http://onedesigner.mu.nu/archives/030396.php

"mechanical pnmcils" "model selction" "directing photograqphy" "photo selction" again

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 04, 2006 03:23 AM

5 Damn it.

Thanks Pixy.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin @ at May 04, 2006 03:33 AM

6 Just to add my 2 cents...

Something too many web designers seem to forget is that the vast majority of readers emphatically do NOT want to HAVE to maximise their browser window just to read your site.

Just because a viewer has 1024x768 pixels doesn't mean he's willing to let you have all of them. More than likely, he has other windows open as well and wants to be able to see/use them at the same time as the browser without constantly having to do the minimise/maximise dance. This is especially true for laptop users.

Screen size/resolution is irrelevant. It's the portion of the screen your going to be allowed to use that determines the minimum size for which you should design.

Damn soapbox.

Paul


PS In your first indented job responsibilities section on the front page, you switch from past tense to present and back again. Go with "Designed and oversaw..." for the 2 middle sentences, for consistency.

On Market Growth Resources portfolio page - last sentence: "focusing on true anecdotes form [from] the brands [brand's] long and storied history."

On Ryan Partnership portfolio page: "The Standee for for Heiniken USA's promotion..." Heineken spelled incorrectly twice in this blurb. It's correct elsewhere on the page.

Next blurb on same page: "Rather than force the two brand [brands] together, a three sided [three-sided] display..."

Same page: "...for the re-release of the original Star Wars movies[comma required here] two end-aisle stacks..."

An overall style thing... it's generally considered standard to italicise titles of magazines, movies etc. You do it in one spot on the Ryan Partnerships portfolio page (Heinekin standee - Tomorrow Never Dies) but should probably do it for all instances. Either that or remove it from that one instance for consistency.

Well, you did ask!

P.

Posted by: Light & Dark @ at May 04, 2006 05:54 AM

7 I maximise everything, except when I need to do a lot of cutting and pasting. Of course, if I had a 30" monitor I probably wouldn't do that, but I don't, so I do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at May 04, 2006 06:24 AM

8 Thanks for the good eyes, Paul.

I'm not terribly concerned about someone having to maximize the window in order to read it. If they don't they type will re-flow and they'll lose part of the banner.

I'll have to put some thought into re-working that first indented section. Some of those items are specific past events some are ongoing present realities.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin @ at May 04, 2006 10:21 AM

9 Here's what I noticed:

BIC Portfolio examples page: In the description of the first sample, the last "t" in Twist isn't italicized. It currently reads Twist.

Ryan Partnership, main body: The movie titles should be italicized.

Ryan Portfolio page: First item repeats the word for. "The Standee for for Heineken USA's promotion tie in..."
Forth item description says "Pepsico" rather than "PepsiCo", as you wrote it on the main page.

Yarmouth Printing: Second paragraph is missing a period at the end.
Sheesh, I started in the bindery department and ended up running a press. You started in the bindery department and ended up running the shop.


University of Maine: Having graduated in 1985, all of the following dates are obviously a decade off! "Editorial Page Editor (1994) and Managing Editor (1995)..." etc.

Other than that, looks great!

Posted by: Tuning Spork @ at May 04, 2006 09:11 PM

10 I thank you for your help as well Spork. Now that is approaching being close to correct I can't wait to see I anything comes of it.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin @ at May 04, 2006 11:57 PM

11
Good luck Stephen!

Posted by: Light & Dark @ at May 05, 2006 12:29 AM

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I'm trying to install the latest version of PHP onto a clean machine to run with Apache and MySQL. I've done it before (successfully) with a previous version, on another machine, but this time I'm running into problems. Googling shows that I'm not alone in the trouble.

That's background, now, a simple question:

On Apache, would PHP be listed as a service? MySQL is, so is Apache itself, but PHP isn't on the list (that I can determine).

Thanks,
(starting to cast about for arcane reasons...)

Posted by: Ted at 10:56 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Whenever I login to a cPanel (I've tried three different MuNu blogs), a weird line appears in the upper left-hand corner like so:

Ignoring bad line in /var/cpanel/cpanel.config: ""

It's not aesthetically bothersome, but it won't allow the File Manager app to load properly. Help?

Posted by: Sadie at 07:18 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hi guys. Another question: Does MuNu automatically shut down the ability to make comments on posts older than a certain period of time? Some readers e-mailed us and informed us that when they tried to leave a comment on an some older posts, they got a "Comments are not allowed for this entry" notice. I tested it out myself and it's true.

And no, we have not shut down comments on older posts ourselves.

Posted by: Rhodey at 02:09 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)