Category: Blog

This blog

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Apple Blog Mozilla

It’s all Coming Soon

I’ve got a bunch of things in the works:

  • mozPod (iPod sync for Thunderbird), version 0.1
  • reporter tool (extension and webtool)
  • new blog design, and new toys!
  • a secret something? (more a long term thing)

So things may be a little quiet as I wrap some stuff up, and keep up with school work. All are looking pretty good at this point. So I’m rather excited. So much work being done, and so little to actually show right now. But hopefully at some point in the future things will start seeing the light of day.

So keep your eyes on this general space for a new amazing design, big announcements (some bigger than others), and a secret something to be unveiled (the secret may be under wraps for quite some time) to be unveiled on a day of the week that ends in ‘y’. And yes, that’s the only hint I’m giving.

Don’t you love it when I post stuff like this?

Update [12-26-2005]: It’s out, and available here.

Categories
Blog Google Internet

No more Spam!

Google, MSN, and Yahoo… plus a ton of blog developers sat down and came up with a fix. And there talking about rapid rollout on this one. Google Blog has the details.

Basically you need to have your blogging product of choice ad

<a href="URL" rel="nofollow">LINK</a>

to any link a visitor can add themselves (trackback, comments, etc). That will tell the search engines not to boost their rank based upon the linking. As a result spamming weblogs will serve no purpose. There will no longer be a page rank increase.

I’ve already hacked WordPress to cover part of this. It won’t do within comment fields, but will do so when you enter a website into the URL field when filing a comment.

Sorry spammers, the world decided: GO AWAY. We don’t like you, never have, never will. Your a bunch of “businesses” with unethical business plans (I have business in quotes since most aren’t even businesses, they are just people trying to scam someone out of some cash).

Thanks to:

Google, Yahoo, MSN, LiveJournal, Scripting News, Six Apart (MovableType), Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, blojsom, Blosxom .

It’s good to see widespread coordination.

Now what about email spam? When will they come up with a DomainKeys, SPF, solution.

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Blog MacVillage.net

Static Building

I’ve started building static pages with WordPress, to see if I can speed things up (even more). I started experimenting with it a week or so ago, and have been toying around. At this point I think it’s pretty good, minus a few small glitches (all I can live with for the moment).

One apparently is that in WordPress 1.3, it doesn’t correctly show how long it took to process. For example I see:

Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.182 seconds
Static Page Served in 1,105,325,889.680 seconds

No, it didn’t take that long. It actually loaded quicker than the dynamic page.

But yes, I’m feeling even better about WordPress, it’s a solid platform to run a Blog on. Easy to setup, configure, install, tweak, skin. I love 1.5, but I won’t be moving over until it hits final.

I’ve been somewhat quiet these past few days, since I’ve been spending a ton of time coding away on various projects. It’s starting to get close to some of it being put into production. Though some larger projects are far from completion. Other than that, not much else to say.

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Blog

I’m now spam free

I installed hashcash on this blog the other day. I’m well over 24 hours spam free. I disabled all other methods of spam prevention. It’s been flawless.

If anyone has trouble commenting, please contact me.

Update: Having some problems. Turned off for now, all commenting should work, even if it’s long and has several links.
Update(2): Trying again.

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Blog

Word Press 1.5 A first look

I decided I needed some geeky play time this evening, so I downloaded the latest CVS build of WordPress (yes they skipped numbers) and ran it in a dev environment, just for me to look, poke, and play. I’m floored. A rundown of what I see/like:

  • Themes – Makes sense, needed to happen. I love this feature a lot already, and I don’t actually have it yet, as the production blog is in 1.2.
  • Static Posting – This is another thing I’m digging. I need this as well.
  • Much Better UI – The User interface is so much better in WP 1.5 it’s amazing. Small changes but they make the app feel much more complete.

There’s no indication of a target release date. I’m hoping it’s sooner than later. Projects go on forever. Eventually one has to stop collecting new features and decide to start fixing bugs and getting things release worthy. Hopefully it will be out soon.

I’d like to use it a bit more professionally for more than just blogging, but I need things to be stable and release worthy. These are big features I could use.

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Blog Mozilla

w.bloggar 4.0, now with Gecko

w.bloggar 4.0 RC2 is out, my favorite Windows blogging tool. So much simpler than using the web interfaces for small posts. Some great new things:

WordPress support
Multiple Categories Support
XHTML friendly tags (option)
Edit Templates
“More” Feature has it’s own Tab

The sweetest feature is using Adam Lock’s Mozilla ActiveX Control… still to come. But I can’t wait to check it out.

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Blog

Quick Stats

Just thought this would be interesting to some… here are some quick stats on this blog:

  • 534 Posts
  • 1126 Comments
  • 561 Comment Posters
  • 9 Links
  • 80,248 Words

Not quite 2 years… but it’s pretty cool to see so many people reading!

I’ve got some big things coming up soon. I’ve been working hard for a long time, and I’ll be making some announcements here in coming months. Of course any beta program I do for any upcoming project I have will be announced here first (should I do a public beta). And I’ve got a few other things in mind 😉

Yes… it will be a very interesting next couple of months. Keep your eyes on this blog. I won’t give out any more details than I have so far (so don’t bother trying). But trust me. I’ve been a busy bee the past few months.

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Blog

Word Press Still Rocking

Quick status update on the migration to WordPress:

I’m still tweaking, but the site is coming back. Lots of the rendering quirks should be gone at this time. XHTML validation should work for most pages.

Kitten’s Spaminator royally kicks butt. Very good spam protection.

Seems to be quite a few useful plugins. Mobile support seems to be functioning correctly. Those with a cell phone or pda capable of viewing non-wap mobile browsing (HTML), shouldn’t have an issue here 😀

Another great thing is dynamic pages. It would sound more efficient to create static pages, but apparently it isn’t: When a spammer is attacking the comment area, they tend to post in batches of 4 (or more). MovableType then regenerates the page, causing a significant spike is CPU and RAM consumption. WordPress only has to add an entry to the DB. Then it’s done. By using Kitten’s Spaminator, it prevents even that from happening without good reason.

Unless I get slashdotted, I think this is a much better solution. What would be best is if my host would install MMCache. MMCache would also benefit Smarty based applications.

But regardless… as good as MovableType was. WordPress seems to be better.

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Blog

Fun With Wordage 3.0 {Beta}

Last night I shut down this blog for almost 24hrs. It’s now open, but not fully restored. It will take me a while to put everything back, finish cleaning up, and debugging. There are known issues (I’ll talk about those and how you can help in a moment).

I’m no longer using MovableType. Instead I choose to go with WordPress. I choose it for several reasons (in no particular order):

  • Licensing (GPL) – Is very friendly and open source. I’m an open source kind of guy. So that makes me feel good.
  • Good HTML validation – Unlike MovableType, it doesn’t seem to want to put tags everywhere mangling the HTML. It’s very smart. I don’t need to do stuff like make posts all 1 line to get it to stop messing up my code.
  • Compatible – I’m was able to import everything with no real trouble.
  • Feature Packed – look at the comparison
  • Spam Prevention – I find it easier to hack with WordPress than MovableType. So I can put some good anti-spam solutions in place. Rather than wait for plugins to evolve. This isn’t an insult towards Jay Allen. I’ve said more than once his mt-blacklist saved this blog. I just don’t think it’s the best solution. Nor do I like being so reliant on others. His list goes down for a day and the spammers get the upper hand. I don’t like moderating all comments either.
  • Speed – fast UI. Database driven, no rebuilds. Very nice.
  • Learning – I plan to use WordPress a bit professionally, so getting acquainted with a blog is a perfect first step.

MovableType is good, and still is by far the most popular. It’s also the best choice for someone running a large install. If you have an organization for example, MovableType is bar far the best solution (as of this posting date). But for a geeky individual like me who likes to tinker, and likes features and open source, WordPress is better. I found WordPress to be more innovative and open. It’s administrative features are better. Though MovableType has a slightly nicer skin. The PHP based templates are far superior to those proprietary tags.

Overall, I’m pretty happy so far. Some new features already are in place, and more will be coming.

New Features

  • Smilies for your comments. As well as select HTML tags.
  • You should be able to view this site fairly well on a PDA or cell phone now.
  • RSS feeds galore. Including for comments on a specific post.
  • Lower Page Size. Should be much faster for my 56k friends.
  • Highlighting text on search.
  • Much more!

And more is on the way.

Known Issues

  • Images in some posts overextend the div (anyone know why?)
  • Some feeds still broke
  • Some toys on the left hand column are missing
  • Spam Prevention stuff is considered ‘beta’. Checking out how well it works.
  • Contact form hasn’t been brought into new system.
Categories
Blog

Jay Allen takes a break and the Internet Chokes

Jay Allen takes a break, and myself, and many others are being pounded by spammers. His last update seems to have been 2004-10-30 16:18:38+01:00. Since then, it’s been a nightmare. At least 50 since I went to bed last night (at 2:00 AM). Now at 10:00 (no morning classes, so I slept in until 9:00), I’m cleaning up from a few hours sleep.

There’s got to be a real solution to comment spam.

I’m still considering switching to WordPress since I know PHP rather well, and use a nice CAPTCHA system to protect the blog.