And yes, I know it’s been a while since I posted. I’m out of town, although that’s no particular excuse. I’m trying to catch up now. See, I updated the books on the right side…

I’m in San Antonio, recording voiceover and video for a training series we’re doing for the US Courts. Long hours in the sound booth, woo.

There’s a lot going on, both at work and at home. And in the world. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to comment on some of it soon.

It’s been over a week since I last posted. Since then I’ve been out of town, been busy at work and busy outside of work. And I’ll be out of town again Friday-Sunday for a Men’s Retreat our Church is putting on. Hopefully next week will settle down. At least enough so that I can go see The Passion.

Ugh. Sick. Headache, sore throat, runny nose. I look like a cold medicine commercial.

MovableType 2.66 has been released. Most notable change:

As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we’ve released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We’ve included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable. We’ve also added a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time. Of course, there are no perfect defenses, and if you’re truly concerned about the comments on your weblog, the best defense is prevention by closing old comment threads.

Lance found and squashed a couple of bugs in the BlogSphere Domino blog template that were causing invalid XML in the RSS feeds.

I finally got around to updating the templates for the archival pages (monthly, daily and individual) so they actually look like they belong to this site. Now if you click on the monthly links on the left-hand side, or the individual entry links (the times at the end of each post), you’ll get pages that are styled appropriately.

One more check mark on the to-do list.

I just figured out why HTML wasn’t coming through on my RSS feed (for those of you subscribed using a reader, such as Ranchero‘s NetNewsWire). Basically the default RSS template for MovableType was stripping out all HTML instead of encoding it via a CDATA tag in the XML. To fix yours, modify your RSS template to include the line

  ]]>

directly after the tags. Note that you leave out the encode_xml=”1″ bit.

Well, well, after two weeks I’m back and posting. I took a little hiatus over the holidays, but plan on getting back on a regular schedule for the new year. Belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Busy Times. Lots going on, not only for me, but the world in general.

I was in San Antonio on Friday, visiting an existing client and a prospective new client. The trip went well, but rain caused my flight back to be delayed.

The weekend was quite busy, with Church things and Birthday parties to go to and all. Then the news came Sunday morning that coalition forces had located and captured the rat himself, Saddam Hussein. Great day!

Monday was back to the hectic schedule, with a day or more worth of work to get done before lunch. Afterwards, I ran FOH sound for the Salesmanship Club’s annual roast/initiation dinner. The crew I was with put on a full multimedia show, including two-camera live shoot, pre-recorded and edited video segments, etc. All this while the audience was pelting the guys on stage with dinner rolls. Just like a fraternity party. I’m just glad I was back in the sound booth and not running a camera up front.

I’ve got two projects to get finished up this week, and two more are kicking off. Not sure when I’m going to get my Christmas shopping done. Woot!

Yes, I’m working on rearranging some things on the site. I’ve got some new stuff I want to add on the side and I decided to move to a three-column layout so that I’ve got more room. It’ll probably also make the main body a little more readable.