Just to let everyone know, Ben's Friends we'll be moving to another server in the (hopefully) not to distant future. We've had a bit of trouble with our spam protection causing serious server load issues.
What this means for everyone is that during the process, Ben's Friends will be unavailable for posting, commenting, and searching (except via Google) for about 3-5 days. The content will still be there, however, so anyone who wants to read our blogs will still be able too.
Another thing I've pondered is making the move to MT 3.15 (the current version of MovableType). SixApart is an amazing company and MT is still one of the best blogging software packages available. That said, the license we'd need to purchase costs around $100.
The other option would be to hack WordPress 1.5 to handle multiple blogs in the same database. This has some major downsides, however. WP does not natively support the kind of multiple blog community we run. It also would be a bit of a "culture" shock for those who are more novice in their use of the web or who have greatly customized their templates, etc.
A third option would be to look into something like Nucleus. Nucleus is another good, fairly widely used blogging software that supports multiple blogs per installation, but it too would carry a pretty heavy "price" in the way of time to re-customize everyone's sites.
The forth option, is we could write our own bloggin software that uses MT Templates (or something exteemly similar). [throwing this in for good measure]
So, if you have thoughts, concernes, donations you'd like to contribute to the cause of our blogs please comment below.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. Other than the small amount of downtime, the move should only make things better for everyone.
Grazie.
Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin was released last month. I just found out about it, but hopefully it will ward off some spam.
How it works
Google and many other search engines have agreed to rescpect the "rel='nofollow'" attribute and value on anchor tags. Adding that to an anchor tag (<a>) will now keep search engines from indexing routes to those links and increasing the page rank of the linked web sites.
The new MT plugin (which has been installed) adds the "rel="nofollow'" code to anchor items in comments and trackback entries. It doesn't add it to blog entries, however, since you'd probably like to be able to promote things via your blog.
So, all that to say, hopefully we're at least not helping the cause of spammers, even if they keep annoying us.