Movable Type is the new Microsoft Word

By Todd Stadler · Friday, November 2, 2007 1:02pm

When you read that title, you probably thought this was going to be a boring paean to blogs and empowered people who blah blah blah. Nope. But it still probably will be boring. Sorry.

Anyhow, do you remember back in 2003 how the British government was busted when a tech-savvy guy read the revision history on a Microsoft Word document they'd posted on a Web site? (No? Well Google News does — go read up.)

Anyhow, I bring this up because blogging software also often stores metadata (that is, data about data — in this case, information about a blog entry not contained in the entry itself). In particular, Movable Type adds a munged version of the blog title to the last bit of its URLs.

Well, that's not exactly true. What it does is create a URL that's a munged version of the title that the entry was first created under. Which might be interesting if, say, someone was improperly editorializing when they first saved the blog entry.

Like say, this story on Sheriff Giusto over at OregonLive.com*.

If you're too lazy to actually hover over that link (and boy, are you lazy!), the last bit of the URL reads: "giusto_boilerplate_do_not_publ.html". Oops. Look like someone went ahead and "publ"ed it, anyhow.

So let this be a lesson out there to those of you using off-the-shelf blogging systems. Don't put anything into your blog software that you don't want to see published.

(Hat tip: Jack Bog.)

*I feel honor-bound to point out in any story that mentions OregonLive.com, such as this one, that neither I nor anyone else likes OregonLive.com and it's a poor substitute for the paper version of The Oregonian, which is probably the point. The sooner The O ditches that horrible Advance.net template and gets a real site, the better. It has menus that still only work in Internet Explorer, for the love of Pete!