Some of you may have noticed that /dev/null is particularly inaccessible today. More so than usual.
It turns out that the problem can't be blamed on Comcast (the cable connection looks good) or Belkin (the old Linksys router has been delegated to switch-only duty), and technically it can't be blamed on my server hardware...but the server did reboot itself spontaneously a handful of times as I was trying to plug a monitor in.
The problem can be blamed primarily on spammers, and secondly on my blogging infrastructure (Movable Type, Perl, MySql, and IIS). One of the spam bots managed to figure out a way to tie up my Movable Type comment threads so badly that IIS was timing them out one-by-one and killing them. This managed to slam the server so badly that I couldn't even log into it.
So I've temporarily disabled comments, and as a long-term solution, I tried installing updated Perl binaries and the native x64 ISAPI DLLs so the scripted Movable Type content would get loaded much quicker...but it turns out that there still doesn't exist a Windows x64 DBD-Mysql package, so I had to rip all of that out and replace it with the x86 versions, which means no ISAPI for me.
At some point in this process, I managed to break my Perl installation and IIS mapping ... so everything in my blog that relies on Perl (publishing, comments, RSS, etc.) is now dead.
And since publishing is dead, I'm writing this in an email, and it'll be posted when I square all of this away. Gross.
That's why eventually ended up going to Livejournal for everything. No comment spam in the 2 years since I've been with it.
Yeah, having all of that managed for you is mega-win.
But I'm turned off by the social-networking bullcrap. Maybe something like Slate (or Blogger—but for me, Slate) would be a reasonable option.
At this point, the biggest problem is moving around 1400+ posts and 2000+ comments. Oof!
I keep thinking I'll move to my own hosting for my blog, but LJ is too convenient. It's already got most of the features I would end up having to hack together.
Danny: really? I've had tens of comment spams on my LJ. That's not bad, but it's not 0.
Bill-
Do you know if you can export LJ entries en-masse in some manner of convenient (e.g., WordPress) format?
--D