After refreshing this long dormant weblog I came to a quick realization that the version of Movable Type I installed in 2003 to power it is long out of date. A lot has happened in the Movable Type world since I downloaded and installed version 2.64 as an experiment and used it to record a daily journal of our family’s summer trip to Disney World.

Among other events, the spammers found a way to add their silly advertisements to people’s MT-powered weblogs as comments. Since this was accomplished through automated scripts many servers were brought to a crawl by the deluge of spam that arrived targeted at MT-powered blogs. I got to witness the phenomenon of “comment spam” firsthand when I received an email advising that comments had been left on this blog and they all turned out to be spam. Since MT 2.64 is vulnerable to this I have turned off commenting for now until I either upgrade to a newer version of Movable Type or switch to a different blogging system.

My friend Giles advised me that he is moving his blogs over to WordPress. WordPress has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that it is based upon PHP and MySQL and generates pages dynamically instead of having to rebuild the entire site every time that a change is made the way MT does. The folks at SixApart who developed MT have also changed their licensing scheme which means that using MT is no longer a free ride for a lot of people. This combined with the comment spam plague has caused a number of people to switch to WordPress which is free and reportedly has better defenses against comment spam.