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I have upgraded to Movable Type 4.21. I am still exploring all its new features and functionality. With every upgrade, Movable Type (MT) becomes much more powerful and yet more streamlined. For example, the user interface is much more intuitive and easier to navigate. And, so far I am very impressed with its increased speed and efficiency. The upgrade process was amazingly straightforward.

As part of my upgrade, I have turned on the comments and trackbacks once again. Although I do not get many of comments, I certainly do welcome your thoughts.

My personal favorite RSS reader is now free: FeedDemon v2.6. Previously, I paid for FeedDemon. That is no longer required.

For those unfamiliar with FeedDemon, it is an extremely useful and powerful program that allows you to efficiently read your RSS feeds. Rather than me trying to highlight all the important features, I urge you to click on the link above, read more about FeedDemon, download it, and try it.

I have used FeedDemon for several years and am a very satisfied user of Nick Bradbury's software. He created FeedDemon and TopStyle Pro, CSS and HTML editor. Both products are extremely well designed and functional. Again, I urge you to try FeedDemon v2.6. It is now being offered to individuals for free.

While I still have more work to do on my weblog, it is now operational.

Although I liked the look of my old weblog, I prefer the look of my new weblog better.

Thank you for your patience while I made my changes.

For those interested in more discussion, particularly of a political nature, concerning the Alberta Royalty Review, I encourage you to read Ken Chapman over at his blog. I have not followed his blog closely; however, by reading several of his recent posts, I get the strong impression that he is a voracious reader with strong opinions. And, I note that he has some hecklers that participate in his comments, which is always a good thing. A few hecklers and doubters always spice up a blog.

I have largely ignored the political aspects of the Alberta Royalty Review. I have read and heard some media commentary on the Panel's work, but found the media coverage wanting. I do not think the media has a solid understanding of the issues, or how and the fiscal terms were created. Lacking a strong background, the media tends to parrot various sources.

Again, for those looking for more of a political interpretation and analysis of how the Royalty debate is progressing in Alberta, I urge to read Ken Chapman's blog.

I have written two prior articles about reducing spam on your Movable Type weblog: Movable Type: Reducing Spam and Movable Type: Another Spam Reducing Technique In this article, I will show you another powerful technique to reduce your spam.

There is a free and paid version of a program called Xlogan that is available here. The program provides useful statistics regarding your website. I often download a few days worth of weblog data, and then look at the visitors tab. I look to see which ip (internet protocol) addresses have been making the most requests and which have been consuming the most bandwidth. When I find an ip address that has hit my site 500 times in one day, I then go to the raw logs, again inside of Xlogan, and look at which webpages have been hit by this particular ip address. When I see that it is trying to hit my comments and trackbacks, I know it is a spam bot. In addition to seeing which pages it accesses, I often do a WHOIS lookup to see if I can learn more about the spam bot. So I can then decide if I want to block it or not by using my .htaccess file.

I should note that I often find a family of ip addresses that originate from the same internet service provider (isp). Usually this isp is located in Eastern Europe or some other country that does not usually legitimately visit my weblog. When that is the case, I simply determine that isp's complete range of allowable addresses and block all of them.

Checking to see which ip addresses consume the most bandwidth is also helpful. The same technique applies here: determine if the ip addresses that consume most of the bandwidth are desirable guests or not.

Sometimes I will organize the ip addresses by entry page. You can do this readily by simply clicking entry page row header. As I scan down the page, I will notice that several ip addresses will hit the same comment or trackback. Obviously, several computers from different locations are trying to insert a comment or trackback. It is hard to block these bots because they are coming from all over the world. In this situation, you can rename your comment and trackback scripts, which I highlighted in my first article. This technique tends to slow them down for a while.

I also moderate all my comments. So even if the spam bot gets through my initial defenses, I must examine the entry and approve it.

I hope my techniques outlined in my three articles help you to reduce your spam load.