Boblet Learned things and Japan diary, by Oli Studholme

James AC Joyce goes trolling

By Oli
At 12:54 PM · Thursday, 5 February · 2004
To The ‘Net · Weblogging

I came across an interesting article by James AC Joyce entitled Why your Movable Type blog must die. Straight away you’ll notice that this is definitely a well thought out, balanced piece ;-)

In summary:

• MT users are all idiots (this seems to be the main point)
• MT’s “bad design” makes attacks (DoS and comment/crap flooding) easy
• MT weblogs are killing Google because TrackBack makes MT pages rate higher than they should

The funniest part about this is that MT 2.66 (released 14th January, 2004) came out about two weeks before James’ article (3rd February, 2004). The release contains two changes to combat crapflooding (throttling and banning by commentor IP), and another that will reduce weblog page importance in Google by turning comment author links into redirects.

There are scripts out there which can automatically hammer your blog into tiny, tiny bits by someone with a room-temperature IQ and just a few keystrokes of effort.

While I’m sure there are still lots of ways to kill MT, how is this not true of most other web applications? Hell, there are scripts that can kill OSes. I can’t see how this is a problem for someone who doesn’t use MT.

You are fucking stupid - The idiocy of Movable Type bloggers is most evident when they become emotional about a topic. When this occurs, they tend to make all kinds of massive, grating rhetorical faux pas.

A emotive, sweeping generalization followed by a description of why such a thing makes MT weblogs bad? Too funny ;-)

Whenever you discuss a subject about which you all fake your knowledge, such as “metablogging”, the lot of you tend to throw out random and completely false opinions

Considering the recent changes in MT James seems to be blissfully unaware of, this is another pearl of irony.

Your blog is fucking up Google

While James’ article is an uninformed rant identical to those of webloggers he so despises, he’s finally written something worth discussing. The way MT by default spawns pop-up windows for comments and trackbacks is stupid. By removing them from the page they relate to, MT effectively kills the conversation it supposedly encourages.

I mention Movable Type specifically because it’s the only blogging software which is doing all of the things I’ve stated, such as breeding idiots and raping search engine rankings. I’ve never seen masses of b2 or WordPress blog entries in my Google search results

I’m a little surprised about this, as I’ve never noticed trackback pages in my search results before. I wonder what he’s searching for, as he’s already said that MT users don’t write about anything of interest ;-) However I finally understand the reason he hates MT — it’s because he doesn’t know how to use Google! From Google’s “Advanced Search Made Easy”

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign (“-“) immediately in front of the term you want to avoid

Instead of ranting maybe James should just type “-tb.cgi” (just “-tb.” will usually be enough) to remove trackback pages from his search results. Alternatively he should just accept that he’s using Kuro5hin as a weblog, and that his posts are as pathetic as any weblog ;-)

From the Movable Type manual:

Using TrackBack, the other weblogger can automatically send a ping to your weblog, indicating that he has written an entry referencing your original post

On the other hand I also question the validity of “me too” style trackbacks — I think the purpose of trackback was to allow others to reference a post they’ve expanded on, similar to the academic use of citations. A paragraph saying “check this out” doesn’t add anything to the original article, but a more detailed explanation or a different perspective does. Time to change my comment policy. I sure hope MT 3 drops the pop-ups, and includes trackbacks and comments on the article page, where they should have been to start with.