Technology

  • Your Feed Appears to be Encoded as UTF-8

    If you receive this message, it means that the feed headers are being sent as one encoding, but the feed itself is likely declaring another one. This can be problematic for the contents of the feed. Generally within an XML document you will see the first line read…

  • Pick a Feed and Stick to It

    If you're like most people, your blog has an RSS feed. Chances are, you don't even know what RSS stands for, but you likely have one (if you're wondering, it most often stands for really simple syndication, but that isn't important). Unfortunately, you may have more than one,…

  • Update Your Movable Type Spam Filters (Please)

    Movable Type version 3.2, released in April of 2007, included a plugin known as SpamLookup. This plugin was able to submit comments to a lookup service (hence the name of the plugin) to one of a number of blacklist services, which in turn would determine if the IP…

  • Displaying Related Entries on your Movable Type Site

    From time to time, I am asked how to display related entries on a Movable Type-powered site (and I frequently have to look it up myself), so I figured that I'd document it here. While there are plugins that do the work, they typically depend on another value…

  • Windows was Unable to Save All the Data for the File

    Anyone who has been reading for any length of time knows that I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to keeping track of data, so a message like The Data has Been Lost is a killer. Some people might even call this behavior anal, but it…

  • Goodbye WS_FTP, Hello WinSCP!

    It's been a long time coming, but I've finally decided to give up on WS_FTP. It started when I kept running into the Failed to Load OpenPGP Keys from Keyrings message last year. It isn't a bad message, it's just one of those things that really irritates me….

  • Reading an Exchange Mailbox from GMail

    So the other day, I'm trying to figure out how to read an Exchange mailbox from GMail and it's really starting to get to me because I just can't get the stupid thing to work. It shouldn't be that hard, because it's possible to use an IMAP or…

  • Integrating Your Movable Type Site with Plurk

    If you've been reading the blog for the last little while, you know that I've been hanging out on Plurk recently. Naturally, that means that I have been playing with Plurk as well, and trying to integrate it into my daily routine. When I used Twitter, it meant…

  • Automattic Stats for Movable Type

    If you read the post where Andy talks about releasing the Automattic stats plugin for self-hosted WordPress, he mentions a few things that make it interesting – notably that the system "only supports WordPress". Then he also mentions that anyone with a thorough understanding of WordPress and XMLRPC…

  • Should You Use Google's Ajax Libraries API for Hosting?

    Thanks to Jesse, I decided to read up on Google's Ajax Libraries API, a "content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries" (their words). In simpler terms, Google will host some of the most common JavaScript libraries for you, such as jQuery,…