With regards to scalability: we’ve now implemented one of the major scalability improvements in TypePad into Movable Type–speeding up the archive list generation by using the MySQL or PostgreSQL processing engine rather than MT.
That’s good news, and I’m glad to see that the heavy lifting has been offloaded to MySQL and PostgreSQL.
There still seems to be some skepticism about TypeKey and what it does/who it benefits (weblog owners or SixApart and it’s constellation of plugin authors).
There are two initiatives here:
* a fix for a longstanding performance problem. Everyone will want to install this as soon as it’s available, from ISPs and hosting services to self-hosting types like me.
* some solution to the comment spam problem. I think I agree in principle with the notion of some authentication, even if it requires would-be commentators to cough up some details. Where this breaks down for me is the idea of giving up those details to SixApart (or whoever acquires them: no one’s talking about that but it could happen) instead of to individual weblog proprietors.
While small-time operators might not offer the same Fort Knox-style security as an enterprise, cracking my trove of private information wouldn’t be as damaging as the burgling the master repository. And I think there are sufficiently robust encryption systems out there to make this difficult.
I prefer a decentralized system: I should think every weblog operator has seen what happens when a centralized resource fails to scale. Now that MT-blacklist is being deprecated in favor of TypeKey, what options will we have if we don’t want to sign up for it?