The onslaught of comment spam on my Movable Type blog finally made me scream uncle: I switched to WordPress this weekend. MT is an amazingly flexible tool, but it is slow, slow, slow, and it’s not set up well to deal with comment spam. It takes several minutes just to delete a single comment–and then you have to rebuild all the static files–and I just don’t have time for that nonsense, sorry. I spent a month or so fiddling around with the MT-Blacklist plugin, but that’s slow too, and not very effective: Comment spam keeps using new words and new URLs, and MT-Blacklist can only filter stuff that you’ve already flagged. That meant I was soon spending an inordinate amount of time fiddling with MT-Blacklist … and as you can see I have hardly had time to post at all in the last month, as a result.
WordPress, by contrast, is fast, elegant, requires no rebuilding (since all of its pages are dynamically-generated PHP), and makes it incredibly easy to moderate and delete comments, or to turn them off entirely if you choose. I feel like a new man.
Bear with me while I play with templates for the next few days; I’m still trying to find the right look for this site (preferably without doing any actual CSS work myself; I just want to find a nice template and drop it in).
