So, I did it. I downloaded the archive of Tip of the Quill and cleaned out the spam comments. I probably didn't get all of them, but nearly all of the 25,000+ spam comments are now gone, which shrank a 23MB file to a 1.4MB file. Now all I have to do is recreate the TOTQ templates using the new MT3 features and I'll be all set. This will probably happen sometime this weekend (if I can finish up a couple other high-priority projects first) or sometime next week.

Until then, any comments made will be living on borrowed time; they probably won't show up in the new edition, unless I do a little fancy tap-dancing with a secondary import (which I suppose I could do, if there are a ton of new comments). Regardless, that's a huge amount of progress, and I can't wait until this is all cleaned up and rolling again!

Oh, and just a reminder for my regular readers and commenters: you're going to need a TypeKey account to comment here in the future. It's free, it's easy, and it'll prevent me from ever spending 12 hours deleting spam comments again. I really hope the extra step won't prevent you from joining me in the next generation of this weblog -- I love hearing what you have to say, which is why I'm taking the time to rework the way comments function here, instead of turning them off permanently. Stay tuned.

Update. Hah! Between the holidays, client projects and a bunch of other hijinks, it was February 2005 before the migration was finished, but now the new version's up and running at last. Progress!