Since the rest of the world has been running blogging software that is less than 3 years old I thought it may be time for me to catch up to 2004. So here I am, running (test testing testing 1,2,3) a new MT 3.15 installation. Really, not a hard upgrade, except for the one part where I tried to follow instructions.. I should have known better.. (I never read README files, I don't know why I tried it this time around).

Instructions say...

If you are upgrading from version 2.6, 2.61, 2.62, 2.63, 2.64, 2.65, 2.66 or 2.661

Run mt-upgrade30.cgi, then mt-upgrade31.cgi.

.. and script says...

It's a 2s perl hack to fix it.. but really.. (change 3.0 to 2.6 on line 47 in mt_upgrade30.cgi.. then again in mt_upgrade31.cgi)

So now that I'm running this spiffy new version of MT (and it is spiffy) it's probably high time I should redo my templates... and that ugly css file.. and those hideous category archives.. and.. er.. the whole site really.

You may also notice my blogroll is gone.. I've been using blogrolling (mostly out of laziness) and since I liked it, I made a donation a while ago, well it seems they've gone pay service and chose to bombard me with daily "upgrade now! expiring! mayday! mayday!" messages.. That's annoying, so I'll have to work on something all by my scripty self.

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a writer. I would spend hours writing stories and "novellas" (in quotes, because I don't think I ever actually finished anything longer than what qualifies for a short story). In fifth grade I had a Polish teacher who felt style was a very important aspect of writing. Translate this into fifth grade world where most kids were lucky to form a coherent paragraph! That year was a joy for me -- I felt my ability to write well (for an 11 year old anyway) was finally appreciated! My short essays span far longer than assigned wordage and my imagination was unrestrained.

That is the very same teacher responsible for an affliction I've had ever since. Over use of words. If a word is used more than once in a sentence or paragraph (and it isn't out of necessity) it bothers me. Much like the reaction to a nail dragged across a blackboard. That badly.

What brought this on? I just read a comment in another weblog that used the word "dreadful" in three separate sentences. One after another.

Use a thesaurus people! Otherwise it's just dreadful!

I just noticed today (well, Derek pointed it out) that my blog is empty! Eek, who knew? With the holidays and job interviews, home-made cooking and my new running training program my days just sort of go by fast. Did I mention the book review? That's almost done though.

I'll come up with some witty, clever and semi-amusing entries.. I promise!

Oh, and I think I may be employed soon again, so will be back to regular geekery for me.

usage: mt_close_comments.pl [options]
options are
  -f                      Fake mode - don't actually do anything, just
                          provide feedback on what would have been done.
  -h                      Print usage and exit.
  -t                      Close trackbacks too.
  --days=num              Close entries older than these many days (default 15).
  --db-type=type          Type of database default is mysql
  --db-host=host          Database host  default is localhost
  --db-user=user          Database user name
  --db-pass=pass          Database password

This script closes movable type entries to comments and trackbacks with a simple
SQL query.

This is meant to be used from a cron job, sample cron entry:
# Close movable type entries that are older than 15 days to comments once a day at 4am.
#
0 4 * * * mt_close_comments.pl

I have not previously required a posting policy since the only comments I've ever deleted were spam. I am saddened to say that is no longer true. With the proliferation of blog trolls I have been forced to delete comments that were not spam but simply because they were disruptive, insulting to my readers or simply ridiculously stupid.

This policy goes in effect immediately and is subject to change without notice at my discretion.

Kasia's comment policy

Comments on this weblog are welcome from anyone. I do not require registration, your name or your real e-mail address. If you do supply your real e-mail address it will not be displayed on my website (subject to the below clause) or divulged to any third parties. If I choose to e-mail you it will only be as a response to your comment and will not at any time be commercial or soliciting in nature.

Comments that are a combination of one or more of:

1. Spam
2. Personal attacks
3. Disruptive
4. Insulting to other posters
5. Off-topic
6. Stupid

Will be removed at my discretion. I do not guarantee that I will remove comments that match the above criteria - I may choose to leave them visible and post identifying details of the idiots instead. I may also ridicule them publicly.

Further attempts at similar comments may result in the IP address of the poster being blocked. I may choose to use other filtering means (email, name, browser ID string, posting style) if the abuser persists. I may decide to contact their ISP, mother and embarrass them in front of their girlfriend if they really annoy me.

I didn't occur to me until this morning (my mind works in funny ways) that I have been running this weblog for over two years. The anniversary actually passed in July.

That's two years of mindless rambling, some silly rants and technical information nobody needs.. and all this fits in a 4.5MB MySQL database and 18MB worth of HTML pages. The MySQL apache log on the other hand is up to 1.2GB. What could one do with 1.5 years worth of apache logs (since March 2003) for a personal website?

That's 6,855,670 requests from 350,965 unique IPs (that query took 6min 15.30sec in case you're curious, no index).

Firing an employee for blogging without a discussion, warning or an official policy is lame and a sign of a company that has its priorities backwards.

I'd cancel my account with them, but damned if I remember what email address I used. Instead, I'll just have to link to Jeremy's screenshot. Almost as good.. not quite.

[via: Jeremy]

I used to use a news aggregator.. no really, I promise I did, but then along the way something happened... I decided I was receiving too much information - I suppose one could call it an overload.. or maybe I just got tired of reading so much all the time and I nixed my aggregator.. So for the last year and a half or so, I've just been reading a few weblogs from bookmarks.

Life was good.

Until recently when I realized I was not reading enough. What can i say, it's not easy to make me happy.

So I'm back to using an aggregator and subscribing to more feeds than is recommended by the American Dental Association.

Let's see how long this phase lasts... Honestly, I wish I could just pick one way of doing things and stick with it.

Providing a webservice free of charge is work intensive and it costs money. We all know that, but users sometimes forget that behind every website there's a frustrated administrator, a large bandwidth bill and tired hardware. Running a busy, public website requires either money to hire a competent administrator or security and systems knowledge - otherwise it'll be hacked before you can say "google ads".

Why do this at all then? People do it for various reason.. exposure, name recognition, often just the satisfaction of providing a service that others find effective and desirable - even if only because it's free (as in beer).

So now that we covered it's grueling, thankless work, let's cover the other side. Responsibility.

As soon as you have at least one regular user that depends on your service, you are no longer the only person affected by the site. Yes, you still own it, yes, it's still yours and yours alone to do with what you please, but now you have an ethical obligation to the users. Most community websites survive based on content supplied by users. That makes users a vital part of the website, after all, who would visit an empty site? Face it, an Internet site without traffic is like a postman without mail. Sad, lonely and largely useless.

Things happen, sometimes unexpectedly, that may require you to stop providing the free service to your users. We all understand that free to us does not mean someone else isn't paying for it and that sometime maybe that person will no longer wish to do so. That's fine and dandy, Here are a few ethical and pain-free (well, relatively) ways to discontinue the free service with as little discomfort to the users as possible. After all, just because they took advantage of a free service it does not mean they don't deserve a notice and a chance to find a replacement.

• An announcement ahead of time stating the service will be discontinued is vital. We all know things happen, but nobody wakes up at 7am and decides to pull the plug on a busy site before their first cup of coffee. There's a period of time before a decision is reached. The users deserve to know the service is going away - this is particularly important if the website contains content they may wish to retain.
• Offer to transfer the ownership of the website to someone who has the resources to continue the free service. This would, of course, have to be done with a long list of terms to prevent a bad guy, or worse, a large corporation taking over the site just for the user base.
• Ask the users for help before things become dire. This one may even help you keep the site afloat after all! It's amazing how many technically competent people are willing to work for free just to keep their favorite site going. Many users of free services are very willing to donate money to prevent discontinuation as well. Taking advantage of a free service does not make anyone a free-loader.
• If all else fails - offer the contents of the site to volunteers to be hosted on mirror servers. Not next month, not even in two weeks but the day the power light goes off on the server.

The worst thing you could possibly do is just turn the site off without a warning. Not because of bad press, but because the users depended on it.

Every color theme I pick looks beautiful on the powerbook and utterly sucks elsewhere.. so you know what? You should all just buy macs.

Er, actually, I've a bunch of stylesheets and will add a cookie-setting-style-sheet-switching thingy given time and motivation tomorrow. For now I might just keep switching them every hour or so to drive my visitors crazy.

How can anyone do graphical design on a mac? There's obviously some distorted view of the universe using these machines, because the ugliest color combinations look just fine.. It's really quite depressing.

These looked a lot better on my powerbook, now that I'm at work I see they look more yellow than tan and frankly too bright. So tonight I'll create several versions and see what works best.

I should learn that macs make everything look a lot better than any other pc.. I've noticed this before.

After neglecting it for months, I have finally upgraded my gallery to something more current, mainly version 1.4.2.

It appears that previous versions have a serious security issue, so if you're running gallery, grab a newer one. The upgrade process is dirt simple (essentially, untar over old files, re-run config and upgrade albums through links on the page).

Thanks to David for a reminder to get off my behind and do this.

I'm attempting to do something a bit more interesting with my stylesheet and since I don't feel like setting up a test copy I'm doing it on the live one.

Update: No, this isn't the final look, I'm just playing.

I get about a ton and a half of daily e-mail about my weblog. Oh, alright that is an exaggeration all those bytes do not weigh that much, but I do get a rather steady volume. Which is great, really.. I love hearing from people and it makes me feel all warm and tingly inside knowing that others actually read what I write.. and some appear to enjoy it (I have a number of a good psychiatrist to share, ring me).

Here comes the "but".. (You knew that was coming..).

I don't always answer my e-mail right away.. sometimes it takes me days, sometimes longer (weeks!) for a number of reasons.. often I'm just really busy. Which makes me seem rude, really I'm not trying to be.. I'm a horribly, terribly polite person.. I say "thank you" and "excuse me" on regular basis.. I'm just busy, alrighty?

Personal connection -- this is a bit odd to write, but I have to clear this one up. If i had a "personal connection" to every person that wrote me to say as much.. well.. I'm just me, one person.. that's all.. any connection to another person alive or dead is a pure coincidence and not intentional, unless it's intentional, then it's ok. Not that the dead write to me much.. but you never know, need to cover my angles. I'm sorry, but the only personal connection I'm feeling lately involves my powerbook and lots of typing.

So.. right.. thanks for writing.. and reading. If I haven't answered it probably was just that old lack of time everyone else uses as an excuse too. Sorry.

If you haven't heard about this yet, congratulations on being removed from society so well! The mt-send-entry.cgi script in Movable Type allows anyone to send email to anyone using your server, much like formmail.

There is a fix, of sorts available.. although it's not a particularly good one. Spammers can still spam using that, they're just restricted somewhat.. I would suggest everyone just remove the thing altogether, there's no true need for it, it's not part of default MT config and anyone who really really wants to allow people to email entries should just code a better way of doing it. Like with validation of origins and such..

Jeremy is right Karl is right on as usual.. well, okay, almost usual. I just wish he'd blog more.. maybe I should nag him daily!

kasia: "Yo Karl, update your blog"
Karl: *block kasia*
*sign off*

hm, maybe not.

Here's to lemonade stands and sweet old grannies.

Julia thinks it takes gumption (I think she wanted to say "balls" ;))to "take on" Dave Winer. To be honest, I'm not so sure.. if I had thought my comment would generate such a response I probably wouldn't have posted it. Which probably means I'm just as much of a wimp as anyone else.. but I really shouldn't be.

It shouldn't have to take guts to disagree with something you know is obviously wrong, unfortunately, more often than not, people tend to attack people.. not their words. Which makes me want to curl into a fetal position and whimper about everyone getting along and love and butterflies and pretty flowers..

So sorry, I'm not gutsy, I don't have balls (physically speaking anyway) but I'm not making apologies either. I don't have anything to apologize for.

Dave Winer:

And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user who actually installed it (an amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly) hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere.

Information that can be very easily verified as false.. at many levels, but for the sake of argument let's pretend we're talking about RedHat, undoubtedly the most popular linux distribution, which 'ships' (and has for a couple years now) with a fully configured firewall, turned on by default, and all insecure (telnet, ftp) services turned off.

One less weblog for me to read.. anyone who refuses to correct an obvious error that's been pointed out to then by numerous people (yet takes the time to call them 'zealots') isn't worth my time.. Not a great loss for Dave, I'm sure, but still a disappointment to me.

Go figure, the Bush weblog is using Movable Type.. That's pretty funny...

(Tag in RSS feed gives it away if the archive structure didn't).

Remember the good old days when you could make a search phrase on google point to a certain page? Who can forget when the phrase "go to hell" brought you the Microsoft site as the first hit. That was referred to as "google bombing".. simply linking to a specific site with a specific phrase making google ranking for that phrase increase for that site (but you all knew that).

Now there's a new version! Everyone loves their statistics.. of course.. me included.. but many forget, that allowing Google to index your statistics is totally useless for you and the person searching.. and guess what.

Now not only are the bad guys (tm) using your statistic pages to increase their google ranking.. some have discovered this is a good way to play pranks by using google..

Yep, it's just more google-bombing .. Simply hit a lot of blogs that allow Google to index their statistic pages with that phrase as a referer.. and suddenly a whole lot of people wonder why, what where..

It's simple to stop google from indexing your statistic pages.. in your root site directory, add a robots.txt file with something like this in it..

User-agent: *
Disallow: /stats/

Where /stats/ is the location of your statistic pages.

[Matt pointed out that search phrase to me.]

Let's have dinner.. or lunch.. or just coffee. What say you?

It's an interesting concept.. Blogathon. I'm always happy to help out with charity work, but I have enough problems writing interesting content sparingly as I do now.

Now if you'll ask me to half-kill myself by running on a hot day in 90 percent humidity on an unshaded asphalt road.. I'm there!

I completely missed it.. It's been a year since I started my weblog..

First entry.. with a comment by Justin who thinks he's funny..

I should do some sort of statistic round up.. but not today!

Have a happy Saturday.

.. and kasia has a new domain name..

As of today this site will be available at both unix-girl.com and unixchick.com.

This must be a good time to buy domains.. I was able to aquire a decent .com name without a hyphen and my friend Karl got even more lucky with a pretty damn nice domain name just a month ago..

There it is.. Just received spam in my weblog (it's deleted already)

IP: 144.13.106.164 and ironically enough came to my weblog via a Yahoo Search for "easy forum posting"..

I guess that was too easy.. time to input some comment filtering.

As many companies do, ours has an internal engineering list to which random co-workers submit random messages with random geeky-urls..

Lately, every single article submitted has been one I've read on another weblog days before.. So in theory I could make a list from my blog-reading list, submit that once a week and beat my co-workers to it..

.. but that's too easy.... fun to think about though.

While I'm on the topic of work.

I work for Tickets.com -- that's the actual company name - Tickets.com. Snail mail is always fun.. today I got one addressed to..

Kasia Trapszo
Tickets Dot Com

I remember seeing one from Network Solutions that proclaimed we can put Tickets.com.com on the web today! One would think a registrar would know better.. particularly our own.

Tickets.com.. it's dot com. (Cookie for the one who gets this).

I think it's about time!

Weblogs can be wonderful campaign tools if done correctly.. and they're practically free to run..
Would be funny if he actually got elected (although not very likely).. "Movable Type - the choice of presidents".. Although he didn't bother donating. What a cheapskate :)

.. perfectly rational people (well, seemingly anyway.. I don't know them in person) behave in completely irrational manner.. that makes me skip their weblogs for a while.. unfortunately then they go and do that in other weblogs' comments.. for no reason.. on unrelated topics..

Can't we all just be adults for once?

Please?

Pretty please with sprinkles on top?

(no, no, I don't want to get into the debate so no links.. I'm just venting to someone that understands.. my cute little linux server.. ain't it pretty?)

Another weblog to add to your RSS feed.. Karl, a fellow liberal-pinko-commie started his own weblog.

Karl is the nice fella behind all those witty headlines and news items at DSLReports that slashdot links to on regular basis.. and brings to you such wonderful, accurate and full of good ol' wisdom advice as..

There's no god damn house, come to think of it. There is no fucking Matrix. There is no golden ring. Whatever you do, however well you think you do it, you could and probably will be replaced with a minimal amount of ripples or tears. Therefore, you should be outside. Maybe eating Cheetos. Naked.

I'm all for naked.. you can keep your cheetos though.

If I see another entry on another weblog referencing to the "A-list bloggers" I'll commit a violent act. Of some sort.. not sure what yet..

No, really, it's quite tiring to keep reading the bitter, sarcastic, often humour-less references to some sort of "A-list". It saddens me that such is human nature.. always categorize into "good", "better", "more important", "more this.. ", "more that..". It reminds me of the time in fith grade when the girls divided themselves into two groups.. the "A-list" and the "B-list".. gee, sound familiar? It ended with parental intervention and a long discussion on "equality between friends".

Get over it people.. some weblogs are more popular than others.. Bitterness won't help it.. neither will sarcastic remarks and poorly worded humour with a pointy edge. In the grand scheme of things.. does it really matter who is popular who isn't? If I talked to any of my Real Life friends about how high (or low, as may be the case) my weblog ranks on some sort of "ecosystem" of useless statisics they would probably think I've gone nuts.. They would be right.

In other words.. it's boring, annoying and not productive. So get over it already and write about something that matters.

A long and interesting discussion in Jeremy's weblog about Google's pagerank and weblogs.. Make sure to read all the follow-ups in trackbacks.. (well, except this one, you already read that, hi!).

I tend to agree with Jeremy on most issues, but not on this one.. Sorry, I just don't think weblogs should be ranked high at all.. only when it's relevant and unfortunately the current trend (looks like they're fixing it, good) has not been following that..

I'm not the most important Kasia.. and for goodness' sake I'm not Yahoo messenger tech support either! Frankly I think that entry (the one linked in the previous sentence) is a perfect argument as to why the pagerank needs fixing...

Jeremy:

It has already happened. And the results are less than ideal. A Google search for "jeremy" now [sometimes] yields something far different than what it used to. Notice that Google now believes that my home page is more important than my blog. That is, for lack of a better term, retarded.

Wrong.. your webpage is about you.. your weblog is not... if person searches for "Jeremy Zawodny" they are most likely searching information about Jeremy Zawodny not what he thinks about various issues.. granted, I could be wrong.. but I don't think I am.

Some time ago I wrote an entry about having problems with Yahoo Messenger. It's a simple I-had-a-problem-here's-how-I-solved-it-all-good-now type entry and should have really gone mostly unnoticed.. unfortunately (for my sanity) Google indexed it and, as we all know, Google loves weblogs.. so this entry for a while now has been the number one hit for this search..... which means I get a lot of hits on it and people keep posting comments.. daily. Actually, not comments, mostly cries for help.

Few problems here.

1. People obviously don't read before they post a comment. As far as I can tell I could have said "Leave your e-mail address and I'll sign you up for all known spam mailing lists" and they wouldn't care.


2. Google really ought to stop loving weblogs so bloody much. Some Yahoo Messenger FAQ site should have the glory of being the number one ranked hit for that search, not my old entry that is useless to anyone but an obscure group of linux users who happen to run into the same issue I did.


3. Weblog entries don't die. They come back to haunt you as "a comment was posted" e-mail in your inbox on daily basis.

Who is Matt you ask? (I hope you're not asking what a weblog is, that would scare me).

Matt is a friend of mine (we went to school together, briefly) and a game developer. In other words fellow geek. He's bound to have something interesting to say.

ChasingCoffee.com -- cute domain.

I've changed my individual archive template to simplify the layout a bit and in the process changed it to directly display trackback pings (as opposed to a pop-up).. Of course in the process I discovered that MT does not rebuild individual archive pages on trackback.. google to the rescue and I found this hack by Phil Ringnalda.

Now that that's in place, I need someone to ping me so I can test it!

(or I can ping myself I suppose, but what fun is that).

Edit: (after pinging myself, I'm impatient) It's good to remember when running MT under mod_perl that modules are cached.. duh..

Denis Horgan of the Hartford Courant was told to shut down his weblog:

Despite the fact that this page is operated on my own time and at my own expense, that it does not compete with the newspaper or draw upon any of its resources, the editor has ruled that its operation is a conflict of interest.

This type of intereference with an employee's private life ought to be outlawed, really. Expressing your opinions via a weblog is not a conflict of interest for a journalist, in fact it's a wonderful means of gaining audience and following.

Hartford Courtant claims to be the oldest newspaper (in the US) and they certainly seem to be acting that way...

One thing that bothers me the most about weblogs recently is just how many of them have absolutely no information about the blog's owner.. For anyone who is not a regular reader that becomes a pain.. I don't mean vital statistics, but a line or two about the author would be damn handy if linked from the vast menu every blog seems to have on the right, or left.. or both sides.

It's probably not something that bloggers think about, since they (obviously) know who they are.. so it may not occur to them that a reader who just stumbled accross the weblog is left wondering about 'who the heck is this person? Is it male? Female? Human? Alien? Microsoft employee?"

Now one may argue that identity of the author should have nothing to do with the content of the weblog.. but I beg to differ.. right or wrong, I will react differently to an article commenting on the glass ceiling in the computer industry when written by a female rather than male (first hand experience counts, you know).

So come on.. it's not hard.. one page, two lines.. little info, please?

Hossein Derakhshan:

Sina Motallebi, well-known blogger and journalist was arrested this morning. He is accused of threatening the national security by giving interviews to Persian language radios outside Iran, wrtiting articles both in newspapers and his weblog.

The little things we sometimes take for granted..

A blog about working with retarded kids.
That's a nice disclaimer..

In all seriousness, this site is not intended to mock the retarded, the mentally disabled, or the behaviorally challenged. The authors understand that these people have a difficult life, and sympathize with them. This site does nothing but catalog the funny happenings in a special ed classroom. If you think this mocks anyone, this is because you are bringing these prejudices to the site, they are not here to begin with.

"It's not as if we just seek out opportunities to make fun of retarded kids. I just report what I see them do. That is it. No cruel jokes, no embellishment, nothing. Well, maybe a few jokes, because it is funny, but nothing cruel. I love my tards."

I'm sure she is self congratulating herself on her wonderful sense of humour.. think about it this way.. would you still feel the same if any of those kids read the weblog? The "tard" blog.. there's a term they don't hear on daily basis from other cruel kids, right? Would the kids know this is supposed to be humorous?

"No, I didn't mean to be mean when I called you a retard.. the other kids calling you a retard are mean but I'm not". Doesn't work for me...

Seeing as I finally have time to breathe, read and live in general I've spent some moments today in blissful self-indulging activities like checking who's linking to me (Technorati) and found this. Neat! I inspired someone to start a blog of their own, that's just great.

My own weblog is getting on in age, nearly done with it's first year and entering the terrible twos (okay, so the first anniversary is technically in July but I like to celebrate things early). I suppose I may say that my own was inspired by many others.. really many, but I should give credit to Jeremy seeing as I not only stole his idea of using Movable Type but the first iteration of this weblog looked eerily like his.

The traffic has grown.. from an average of 112 visits a day in August to 2204 last month. Of course half of that is mis-directed google searches, one quarter AOL users jumping from one proxy server to another and the rest.. well, I can't explain the rest but I sure am gratified (pleased, flattered and happy) that you're here! Hi. Which brings me to my next question.. just how many of you would still be reading this if I was a flannel-wearing burly guy with a beard named Bob.

I think my weblog is due for a major redesign.. this look is getting a bit old for me and I'm a person who needs constant change.. so I'll start working on that tonight (when I'm at home as opposed to at work waiting for weblogic to restart and a quick build to finish).

There is one thing in particular I would like to change and wish others would follow.. Mainly my archive sectioins.. right now I'm using the default style of archiving that Movable Type uses -- each archive (monthly, category, daily) is essentially a page with all the entries for that particular archive in their full-textual glory. I will be changing that to a relatively simple page of links to individual entries -- but provide some more information than just an entry title.. (category, date/time, perhaps keywords)..

The full text of each entry will have one place to live and one place only -- on their individual archive pages.. and of course on the main page when the entry is still fresh.

What's the point?

Google.

We all know how much google loves weblogs.. well that love extends to the archive pages and unfortunately that creates a massive misinformation base of searches.. Many of the searches that bring people to my weblog are a combination of words from several, unrelated entries combined together on one, long, lengthy archive page. The change to my archive pages ought to put a stop to that...

I took away the 'subscribe' box and will stop offering that feature.. sorry to those that actually liked that, but the problem with this is that Movable Type does not automatically send updates (which kind of makes sense when I think how many times i tend to edit an entry) and I constantly forget to send one.

Better to not offer it at all than offer it in a spotty and inconsistent way.. (and yes, this entry will go out but it will be the last one).

Those who wonder what the heck am I talking about.. weblog updates via email.

Aren't new servers fun? I didn't count how many hours I spent on this (quite a few) but it wasn't half as bad as I expected. I moved my old MT install and upgraded in one shot and amazingly all works fine. At least it appears to for now.

If anyone's reading this (other than me) that means DNS has also propagated and all should be working!

I'm sure there's some lose ends to tie up here and there and some broken things.. (if anyone notices something, let me know, please?) but if nothing else at least comments ought to post a lot faster now.

Something that has been on my mind for a while.. creating a site that lists weblogs based in Connecticut. There aren't that many of us so it shouldn't be too hard to maintain and it might be useful.

I wonder if there's any interest in such a website?

This is very cool. Jeremy posted a perl script he used to make an entry in MovableType.

Blogging from within emacs coming soon!

I already do that to a certain extent, as I write my longer entries in emacs (use the spellcheck, I need it) and copy-paste them into MT. How cool will it be to post from within emacs!

emacs.. it's not just a text editor, it's a way of life.

Jeremy posted a list of blogging annoyances.. I have to say I agree with majority.. and so as not to be an annoying blogger (to Jeremy anyway) I figured time to put up a page about me.

So here it is, read it and weep.

I find myself amazed by how little I can predict which of my entries will generate interest and traffic. There are some entries into which I put a considerable amount of thought and work that gather nearly no interest and then there are those generated by a two minute break from sanity that become popular for no real reason other than their general silliness.

Good example is the entry I made a couple of days ago about referer links on weblogs. It is useful information but I never thought it to be news-breaking.. and as often is the case, I found myself to be wrong. Not only has this inspired a tutorial on how to use the very technique I described to hijack weblogs (why do you need a tutorial? This is simpler than dirt) but also spawned a Register article and a rather detailed discussion on dslreports.com. Granted that last one was directly related to the Register article, but you get my point.

What is to be my logical conclusion here? Stop thinking? Apparently when I do that I produce uninteresting, mediocre content nobody cares about but when I post whatever comes to my mind the whole world is listening. It's enough to give a girl a complex.

The true conclusion, however, is that while weblogs tend to have a more concentrated, specialized audience they are still victim to fickleness of human interest just as much as news is. Well, hope someone found this to be interesting -- my natural cynicism leads me to think otherwise though.. I spent at least five minutes on this entry after all :)

Not a good idea without first cleaning them.. As I discovered today on another blog, way too easy to hijack via a javascript in the referer!

How is it done? Too easy..

<script>top.location.href='http://redirect_to_this_assholes_page';</script>

Edit: On second thought, this was probably targeting automatically-generated statistic pages... and a blog just got caught.. of course this is assuming someone didn't specifically target that blog but rather used a crawler.

Statistic pages makes more sense as hardly anyone ever visits their own and would likely not notice for a while, whereas with a busy blog it's spotted very quickly.

I really like the idea, unfortunately I don't write enough about Java to add my blog as is... so I created rss feeds for each of my categories and added just the Java one.

This should work fine.. they will only index my Java-related entries and none of the other noise I spit out daily.

Now if I could just get that smaller gif to look better..

Jeremy is now ranking pretty nicely for open source blog.. this link should help him :)

I don't even rank.. but that's only fair considering I hardly ever write about open source.

It's a cool idea and I'd add my blog if I actually wrote about Java more often than once a month.

As is, I'll just link to it.

Now if someone setup a site for "rambling blogs about nothing in particular" I'd be a shoe-in.

A pretty interesting article from David Green.

The upshot is that the semantic web may act as a 'collective memory', augmenting individual brain power and accelerating the pace of human learning and discovery. But we will need to careful about controlling its development and our dependence on it if we wish to avoid the emergence of a dystopian digital dictator.

May seem as a premature warning, but who would have predicted thirty years ago just how credit cards will control our lives.. At least in this country, there isn't much one can do without a proper credit rating.. down to buying cell phone service or applying for a job.

It must be having some issues.. for some reason I'm #38 on it this morning which would explain my increased traffic..

Cool new tool from Mark Pilgrim.

Now if only I had the time to read all those recommended blogs :(

Is seriously lacking in information. I noticed this today as a google search brought me to my own page.. a page that lists comments for one of my older entries.

If a search gives you a link to a page like this.. it is impossible to navigate to the rest of the site or the relevant entry from there. I added a link to the original entry the comment belongs to in the entry title, for now it'll have to do, but I'll be thinking about adding more navigational tools there.

This is something that most of us probably don't really think about since comments are not meant to be seen outside of the context of the entries they belong to.. but I suppose someone forgot to tell this to google!

So I'm testing his trackback function for him.. pretend this is a brilliant post or something :)

There's some nice 'well wishes' there.
But I'm really attempting to ping this entry.

Scott has some really good points on why you should keep more than one day of entries available on the front page of your weblog. I completely agree.. If I read all the weblogs I like to read every day I'd do nothing but..

On the other hand.. this made me think why is it exactly that I display 20 days worth of entries on my weblog. To be honest.. I've no clue.. so cut it down to 10. That's why there are all those lovely archive links on the right.. which, on the aside, I grep'ed my logs and these links are being used rather heavily.. so won't be taking them off.

Speaking of Scott. While the design of his weblog is pretty nice looking.. I find the size of the blog entry part very annoying. Why? I have a large monitor at work and in a typical unix geek fashion keep 200 little windows open at any given time. That's right, my browser is one of those teeny little windows.. Sometimes reading his weblog amounts to having 2 words at a time on one line. All that wasted space to frame it..

Mark does a nice summary and critique of possible solutions to spam in weblog comments.

Thankfully I've yet to encounter this problem in my weblog. I'm sure it won't be long until I do so I've already been thinking about a solution to this. I don't like disabling comments as I enjoy input and the little discussions that sometimes sprout at the most unexpected moments.

I also don't like the idea of making users register just to post a comment. Sure -- it may detract from spam to a certain extent but it inconveniences those who just want to leave a comment and be on their merry way.. Spammers already make our lives difficult enough, I don't want to add to that just to protect myself from those slimey rodents.

Since I don't receive all that many comments my solution involves a combination of several approaches:

1. Comments from regular contributors (email address - user/name and/or ip address match) show up automagically.
2. Comments from everyone else go to a queue for human-approval (that would be me *wave*).

The second part can be nicely refined..
- the typical ways of bot detection (time, agent, etc.. )
- keyword trap (typical spam trap tool)
- manual (me again, hi) black list.

Sounds like a lot of work.. I should get scripting.. right after I finish the ten other projects I'm in the middle of.. sigh

Seems this is now of more interest.. wired just did a story on this new spam form.

Referral logs, intended to collect information on who visited a website and how they happened to arrive there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious bloggers who click on a logged link to see who visited their site are instead led to pornography or advertising sites.

No kidding.. I wrote about it here, here and here.

Spammers, once again, take something useful and make it less so.. and where's our legislature in all this? Oh yes, too busy protecting rights of corporations instead of the people they're supposed to serve.

Repeat after me..
It is NOT okay to use someone's resources to spam them with marketing messages..
It is NOT okay to interfere with someone's usage of email to spam them with marketing messages.
It is NOT okay to interfere with someone's usage of system logs to spam them with marketing messages.
It is NOT okay to interfere with someone's usage of the internet to spam them with marketing messages.
It is NOT okay to fill peoples lives with marketing messages.

Fictional entities (corporations) should not have rights above those of living humans (dead ones can't be spammed).

How long before http://www.weblogs.com and http://blo.gs can no longer defend themselves from spammers and will discontinue their services? I'm guessing less than a year. Thanks a lot.

Not going to link to the page, I refuse to provide them more traffic.. I hate advertising enough as it is, but I hate it even more when they use *my* resources without my permission to spam me with a message I don't want to see. I've already been spammed with this method before and I hate being duped this way. Get out of my system logs.

From the spam service website:

We are doing referrer marketing: adding your URL as a referrer in the logs of thousands of weblogs. If you are seeing this page, referrer advertising worked with you.

Thankfully, no, read this on Inluminent. Here's hoping nobody is stupid enough to actually pay them money.

You might also see it as a PR tool for bloggers.

Q: How many weblogs can you reach?
A: We are currently reaching 55,250 weblogs, more being added every hour.

The best PR tool for a blogger is to create interesting content that others want to read, not make others visit through deception. This could only turn me off from reading a weblog. In fact, I should start checking my referrer logs closely and keep a list of weblogs that subscribe to this service, just to make sure I don't visit them. In fact everyone should do that.. just to make sure this company makes no money from spamming other peoples system logs.

Q: How mush does it cost?
A: The cost of a referrer broadcast is CAN$ 1500, which converts roughly to US$ 1000. We accept Visa and MasterCard.

Anyone who has to pay money to get others to read his writing probably isn't worth my time anyway.

How low will marketing companies get before something is done about this? Why are advertisers still legally allowed to use peoples own resources to spam them with unwanted marketing messages?

There's a bug in how IE 6.0 renders stylesheet. If you're using Movable Type templates you probably noticed that the part of your blog entries below the end of your side section is not visible.. reloading or moving back and forward sometimes fixes that. Here's a screenshot of Jeremy's Blog to show you what I mean.

I found a workaround for it using a stylesheet element.. seems to work fine. Simply add:

float: right;

To the #links section of your styles.css file. If you're not an MT user, it's the section that's causing IE to cut off content.. that's where you want to add it... of course if the section is on the left, you want 'float: left;'.

Edit: That breaks how mozilla renders the page, but that can also be fixed by adding a width attribute to the same section:

width: 30%;

So far this seems to work for me..

Thanks to the RSS Validator both my feeds (1.0, 2.0) are now valid. I never actually realized MT 2.2 didn't provide valid feeds.. I should read more.

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby and Bill Kearny for this great tool.

More info at Mark's site.

Mark has a good point. I've had my news aggregator set to update once an hour.. that's really excessive and unnecessary.. I read it maybe once or twice a day, what's the point of constant updating? Changed it to once every 4 hours, and since it now runs on my laptop it'll actually be closer to once or twice a day.

A large percentage of my traffic is news aggregators.. a quick calculation puts it at 25%, I'm probably off on that though.. so far it's not a problem, yet, as I don't pay for my bandwidth and if it does become a problem I have other options I can utilize.. (I do a lot of little sys-admin work here and there for friends and aquaintances, that gets me freebies.. like bandwidth). This isn't a complaint.. just more or less an agreement with Mark -- no need to update hourly something that isn't read that often.

No comment necessary.

[via: scriptingnews]

Seems to be going straight to the dogs..

The Register presented us today with this article which seems to be annoying at best. A long, pointless ramble making fun of some poor girl's weblog.. as far as I can tell simply because she happens to be a Microsoft employee.. Now whether this -- what can only be described as a rant, is deserved or not, I honestly don't know as I haven't read the blog in question.. My question is, how is this news? Even a tabloid would have better sense of newsworthy material... If this blog was required reading, I could see the point.. but as it is, I just don't.

It just stinks of spite and meanness.. not something I look for when I want to read news.

A blog is poorly written and has a parody.. whooptie freaking do.. there's a news story of the year for you..

A homeless guy finds a refuge on the Internet.

"Online, the only thing that can be judged by others is your communication, your voice, your opinion. Before anyone says a thing, all people on the Internet are considered equal. It's a level of equality so pure it creates a tension that's hard to deal with."

http://www.thehomelessguy.blogspot.com/

Being the hip chick that I am, I just upgraded to Movable Type 2.5 to run the newest and greatest...

All seems to work so far, except for the old search plugin, but that can be fixed..

Tip for those running MT with mod_perl: need to restart apache before running the upgrade script.. yes, I know it's common sense since mod_perl caches perl, but I managed to forget that..

At least this forced me to backup MySQL for once.. so if this server crashes (Steve, you are doing backups, right?) I'll be able to recover the invaluable information (yah, right) I have in this journal blog.

Steve, Lynne, Wendy, check your blogs, guys..