Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
My sanguine views about dealing with comment spam have proved to be too rosy. I'm hit bad by idiots posting spam. So I've taken comments offline until I can find an effective way of dealing with this shit.
Summary of the state of play so far.
Number 1 for "gustaf erikson".
Number 6 for gustaf.
Blogs are like tamagotchis -- a fitting metaphor. Incidentally, is our society in deep trouble when tamagotchis are the basis for new metaphors?
Unfortunately, we the Mobitopians have been neglecting our virtual pet. The traffic to the main page is down, and I myself find I've bookmarked the IRC links rather than the front page. Of course, I hang out in the channel all the time, having great fun, but we don't communicate that fun and insight and commentary to visitors to the site.
A quick fix would be to move the IRC links to the front page, perhaps adding a moderation system so that not just anything gets posted. Also, being able to comment on the links would create a kind of Ur-blog (as in the original incarnation, posting interesting URLs), but with multiple commentators.
A way of submitting longer bits of IRC commentary would be nice too, so that visitors get a feel for the vibe of the channel.
Of course, the longer opinion pieces would remain, but they would be relegated from the front page.
The phenomenon of pointless audio blogs shows no sign of going away. The reaction has set in, however. Hear the manifesto here, or read it here.
I'd be tempted to call audio posts the ultimate ego-stroking, but that's already been appropriated by weblogging itself...
(via Mark.)
Let's face it: it's a war we can't win. But in the meantime, here's how I handle the (modest, for now) amounts of comment spam on my site.
I've set up
wbnotify to
mail me when I get a comment. When spam arrives, it's usually
consistent in the form of included URLs, i.e. the same link is posted
more or less at the same time.
I got a script called
blog-grep.pl
from somewhere (if someone recognises this as their handiwork, please
contact me so that I can attribute this correctly). This script makes
it very easy to search your writeback files for the offending string,
and to optionally delete them.
This solution is dependent on you having command-line access to the writebacks themselves, but I suppose it can be used "offline" if you download the files via FTP and run the script locally.
The new URL for a feed for this site is
http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/index.vrss10. Thanks
to Matthias for fixing the rss10 plugin!
Dave Winer is covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston, along with some other accredited bloggers. Good for him.
This post confuses me, however. I'm in Europe, and if I was covering this kind of stuff and could afford the GPRS charges, I'd get a laptop and a mobile to use as a mobile. Any half-competent phone manufactured in the last 5 years can do this. Of course, you have to dick around with cables, infrared, or Bluetooth, but it's definitely doable.
Some bloggers say they're the new journalists. I'd love to see a journalist say: "I can't cover that, there's no Wi-Fi there."
Dave Winer has had blog posts in mp3 format for a while. All I can say is: why?
Listening to a person talk is much less efficient than reading something. You can't skip back and forth, sometimes you miss a word or sentence due to differing accents, and if the speaker is talking in a language you don't understand, you can't babelfish it to get something vaguely understandable.
In Dave's case, it's not always easy to hear what he says. Part of the problem is his American accent. I speak and write English fluently, but I learnt it in British schools. I seldom hear "real" American accents, i.e. not those on TV or movies. This means that I find it hard to understand what Dave says sometimes, even though my English is very good. It must be even harder for someone who is more comfortable reading English than listening to it.
Audio posts are a step back. They don't encourage information exchange, like text does. You can't hyperlink to a specific audio segment. You can't quote it without transcribing it first. The bandwidth requirements are absurdly high for the limited amount of information they contain.
Let's hope the trend doesn't spread.
... is the pointless day-to-day diary of your daily doings.
If you can read Swedish, you can read my form of this sin at huset, my daily recap of my "vacation" working on our house. (I'll leave the fact that it is impossible to afford to pay a professional to do stuff on your house in Sweden for another rant.)
My defence of this practice is that I want to try it out, and also that random thoughts occur to me when I'm sanding a wall or whatever, and I think: "I'm so blogging that". (Of course, by the time I turn on the computer in the evening I've forgotten all about it.) This helps me through the drudgery of manual labour.
Also, I rather like the idea of a free-form database of info like what colours we've used on the walls.
But I'm painfully aware of the blog-wankery involved ... we'll see if I'll keep it up.
This is how I moved my blog from MT to Blosxom. The process is very specific for my case -- you mileage will definitely vary.
I had the following pre-requisites:
I installed Blosxom on my test system and played around with CSS and flavours until I was happy with the look of the site.
Searching Google led me to this post. It concerned moving from MT to Drupal, but mentioned an important thing: the default MT export format is hard to parse. The method used instead was to export to XML, and parse that.
I downloaded the XML export template and the Perl file used to parse it, and modified them for my needs. They are available below:
The changes to the XML template are fairly minor. I added a new Index Template in MT and called it "Export XML". The output file was set to "export.xml".
The convert.pl script was modified in the following ways:
I changed the output from printing SQL insert statements to writing to files. The timestamps were modified to reflect the original posting date in MT.
I constructed new Blosxom filenames from the entry titles.
I mapped my MT categories to new ones via a hash.
After I had debugged these changes, I ran the script on an export downloaded from MT.
After I had this running, it was a simple matter of taring the files
and moving them to the target server. After changing the relevant
paths, I was up and running.
A friendly sysadmin installed a redirect at my old blog which pointed to the new one. The original MT archive posts were left alone to cater to old bookmarks, but I'm working on redirecting those too.
Welcome to my new weblog!
I've given Movable Type a try, and as I've recounted here and here, it's been a mixed experience.
MT is a very polished product. But I'm a command-line kind of guy, and
web applications really don't appeal to me. Give me an ssh
connection and a remote server anyday. Blosxom is a better match for my style of work.
I have a TODO list up, and will be working on this when I have time from renovating my house. Watch this space.
I've been looking for a textmode syndication aggregator for a while. I tried Raggle but it just core dumped on my platform. Rawdog seems promising, but just didn't seem to fit my needs.
I came upon Snownews via Rootprompt and so far it looks promising. No native support for atom feeds but that's (supposedly) handled by extensions.
So now I can read my feeds from within screen, as Ghod intended.
Update: I've since installed rawdog and must say it's a very good piece of software. Have a look at my feed here.
Back to Basics
I'm hoping to go to basics soon. Right, Rafe?
Love and Hate: Internet Communities
This story is a good summary of the recent brouhaha over Dave Winer’s shutdown of weblogs.com.
From the Wired article:
“People have been really afraid to discuss this,” said a New York blogger who asked that his name be withheld. “There’s a lot of concern that any nasty comments will result in Dave not getting around to making a copy of your blog. I think a lot of the politeness and ‘We love you, Dave!’ sentiments that you’re seeing in some Web posts is just pure paranoia.”
That’s it. I now have a cron job running that’ll take an XML dump of
this blog every night. Who knows, maybe
Ewan will crack from England winning
Euro2024 and delete everything around him…
In this post, I promised to hang in on Movable Type and not move to another tool.
Well, I’ve changed my mind.
Why? Simply because MT is too limiting for me. I edit my posts in Emacs, run them through SmartyPants and Markdown to get nice formatting, then paste the result into MT’s edit window on the site.
When using Windows, this works — kinda. But when I’m at home, I use an old laptop running OpenBSD. Running Firebird on that machine is slooow. So I’ve got this multi-step barrier in front of my text and my weblog.
I’ve been playing with Blosxom on a spare unix server. It’s everything MT isn’t: small, spare, configurable — if you know Perl. Also I like the semi-dynamic notion of timestamp-based sorting. Certain posts, such as my reading list are updated often. Under MT, you can’t see this. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you can see that the post has been updated, but not otherwise.
Also, it’s insanely fun to be hacking with Blosxom. Turn-around time for site changes are instant, CSS changes are fast — all because I’m working directly in Emacs, not in bog-slow Firebird.
So as soon as I get stuff in order on Symbiandiaries I’m outta MT. They can take their bloated “CMS” and sell it to someone else. I’m sticking with the tools I know and trust.
MrX Photographers is a site devoted to digital photography. Terje, the guy behind the site, is a Mobitopian and all around nice guy.
Symbiandiaries.com is back online after a longer hiatus. The problem lay in the management interface, not the serving of pages. For once, Movable Type's use of static pages paid off.
I've been chafing under the enforced silence, not realizing until now how much I appreciate the chance of self-expression. I really regret the chance to publish this post (now backdated). Oh well.
I've offered my services to Rafe of AAS fame as ronin sysadmin, so perhaps we can recover faster next time the site goes down.
I really enjoy weblogging. I didn't think I would, but I do. It's the return to the personal web circa 1994, when everybody with a web page put up their hobbies, reading lists, collectors items etc. for all the other people out there to discover.
Now, after nearly a decade, we're back where we started, but with better tools. You don't need a unix account anymore, and you don't need to grok HTML. Anyone can update a web page, a.k.a. a weblog nowadays.
Every day makes me a day older, and even though I find it hard to believe, it's now seven years since I first installed Linux on a 386 by floppy. Now I'm using a IBM Thinkpad running OpenBSD to access mail and IRC on a UltraSparc 5, also running OpenBSD. The company I work for uses Linux on Intel for nearly all its infrastructure. I spend nearly all my days in two or three terminal windows. I read mail with emacs.
So I'm a unix kind of guy. I'd rather write a 20-line perl program to do some data munging than fire up Excel. My windows are handled by screen. I browse the web with links and w3m (lynx is sooo 1998). I believe an app should do one thing, and do it well.
Yet I'm using Movable Type, the CGI version of Word, a bloated, opaque web application that definitely puts style over substance, a blogging tool for Mac users and other artistic types. It straddles uneasily across the Unix/Perl world, with its (nowadays) strong open-source bias, and the corporate make-a-buck world of proprietary source code and expensive licensing.
Well, I've grown to know a lot of people on the mobitopia channel, and one of them, Ewan Spence has a site called Symbian Diaries where just about anyone can get a blog. His installation has a lot of authors, a lot of blogs, and would probably cost $1,200 to license from Movable Type... but that's another story.
Don't get me wrong -- MT is fine for anyone comfortable with web based tools like Yahoo Mail and Google. However, I don't feel comfortable with it. I would rather have a system like blosxom or even my own crude perl hack.
But the central question is: would I post more entries? Would new software make me more productive?
I don't think so. So even if I would have a lot of fun migrating to another system, and even if I can do that while keeping the symbiandiaries.com address, I think I'll stick around MT for now. I'll try to kvetch less, and write more.
And be more interesting.
Essentials [dive into mark]
Here's another strange thing about David Winer's trip to Europe -- he's started a temporary weblog for the trip.
Why can't he update his regular blog, the one read by millions each day? He seems to have a laptop, and connects through internet cafés. So he should be able to update a server somewhere.
I don't get it. I can update this blog from a web interface or from Emacs on a remote box. I'm nobody. Dave Winer is a respected internet personality. Go figure.
David Winer has some strange idea on how SMS works. So the gang at #mobitopia discusses a little, and David writes a post about it.
But how do we let Dave know about it. He's travelling in Europe right now. With a mobile phone.
So now he has an SMS on it from yours truly. Hope he can read it.
Well, this should help my PageRank. Thanks, Jim!
Somehow it's difficult for me to write on this blog sometimes. Part of the problem is lack of time. I have a family and a full time job. I usually compose rather nice entries when walking to the subway in the mornings, but they vanish when I arrive at work and a terminal.
Of course, I could become a T9 god and tap out screeds on my taco, but I prefer reading and listening to music when riding to work. If I've forgotten reading matter, I'm usually too pissed off about that to be able to write anything good anyway.
Work provides almost no convenient times for advanced composition. What free time I doi have is spent reading other peoples weblogs, which are much better than anything I could produce. So that too is a barrier.
So why have a blog then? Egoboost of course. And sometimes you write something or think about something that's worth communicating.
Gmail is a meme spread by Google to help improve their search algorithms.
By tracking references to this enticing service, they can see which news sources and weblogs are influential. By launching on April 1, they can also track arguments against the belief that the service actually exists.
I'm pretty new to weblogging. I guess what I did in 1997 was weblogging, but that was what everything was doing then.
"Returning" to personal publishing, then, is entering a world where people feel strongly about things. Issues that outsiders such as I find arcane, like syndication formats, escalate quite quickly into religious wars.
In these wars, two protagonists stand out. They are Dave Winer, the grand old man of weblogging, and Mark Pilgrim. I haven't really found out what they stand for, weblog-politically. But they are antagonists.
When I enter a community, I instinctively choose sides. I don't know why I've chosen the side of Mark. Maybe he represents the young Turk side of the debate. Maybe Dave's ego is just that much bigger. But there it is.
Thanks to Gadget17 I've got links to the category to which the entry belongs working. See below, to the right of the permalink.
The vodoo code needed is this:
<a href="<MTEntryCategories glue=","><$MTCategoryArchiveLink$></MTEntryCategories>"><$MTEntryCategory$></a>
The first triplet of MT tags (within the HREF attribute) construct a hyperlink to the relevant category archive. The <$MTEntryCategory$> tag shows the name of the category to which the entry belongs.
So now I'm on a Moveable Type weblog, just like everybody else on the planet...
I'm running around looking at all the options, and I'm really happy I didn't do that before I decided to write my own home-grown blog. I wouldn't even have started.
When I first started writing my old blog, I rediscovered the feeling that I had when I first made a homepage back in 1997. The wonderful feeling of seeing your words out there for anyone to read. That feeling was behind many people's websites. Then the web got really big, and the small people got lost.
Now we have Google and easy-to-use publishing software. So now there's less of a barrier to just write something, and your words will perhaps be noticed.
We'll see if mine are.