Fashion-Incubator will be offline sometime today for about an hour. The blogging software (Movable Type) is being updated to the latest version.

The look and feel of Fashion-Incubator won’t change much or be much different to visitors but hopefully, functionality will be better.

Keep your fingers crossed that the site survives the upgrade. Installing movable type is a bear! I did it the first time; I’ve hired someone to upgrade it this time. I tried to upgrade it last Thanksgiving and what a nightmare that was. I lost the whole site and had to beg my web hosting company to restore it!

Post updated
Well thanks to Chad, we seem to have survived the upgrade. I’m still poking around the hood so I can’t give you a complete report on new features but here’s a brief run down on the two biggies:

Comments
As you may have noticed, comments are disabled on older entries. This was because they collected a lot of spam. With enhanced spam monitoring, I will be opening comments on all of the older entries. This is a manual process so it will take time for me to update each individual entry (there are nearly 600 entries now) . As ever, you must put in a valid email address in the comment box. Your email address will remain unpublished; the only person who can see it is me and if you think I’m going to spam you, you’re on the wrong blog. As ever, if you use a fake address, your comment won’t be published and your IP address will be banned.

Trackbacks
Trackbacks were also previously disabled. Again, with enhanced monitoring, trackbacks will be enabled. If you don’t know what a trackback is, it is a small blurb that appears in comments. It means that somebody else -on another blog- has written their own blog entry about the given post. You can follow the trackback link to read what somebody else has said about the F-I entry. These are useful because they often contain criticisms and additional information and resources that bear on the topic. Likewise, this is also a manual process and I plan to have this completed by the end of the week at the latest. If you are sending trackbacks here, be advised that all trackbacks are held for moderation. No offense is intended or implied, it’s just that trackbacks constitute over 90% of blog spam.

I probably won’t be posting again today because I’ll be tinkering under the hood. If you think you’ve found a bug, let me know. Capabilities-wise, Movable Type is probably still the best blogging software available but it does require more programming and hacking from the blog owner. It’s not your best choice if you don’t want to deal with a steep learning curve or are uncomfortable with modifying scripts. Word Press is a great blogging program, easy to install, easy to configure and that might be a better choice. Also, my version of MT is commercial which means you have to pay (quite a bit) for it. I think Word Press and others are free so check those out. If you’re using another kind of blogging software that you’d recommend to others, please leave that in comments. Thanks.