Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
This category is about this weblog
I’ve long been concerned that people finding my weblog via Google or
other search engines get directed to my archive or category pages
(like
gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/scrivener)
instead of the individual entries. A whole year’s postings may contain
enough terms to lead people to it, even though the individual posts
don’t.
This is annoying for users and wastes bandwidth. I didn’t know how to fix it until I found this article by Fazad Majil. It described my problem exactly and recommended putting the following meta tags in the <head> of the relevant pages:
<meta name="robots"
content="noarchive,noindex,follow,nocache" />
This will allow the pages to be followed but not indexed or cached.
The problem was how to distinguish chronological archive and category
pages from the main page or story pages. The solution was Barijaona
Ramaholimihaso’s
pagetype
plugin. This gives you a variable you can check against with
interpolate_fancy.
My head.html template now contains the following code:
<?$pagetype::pagetype like="(category|chrono)">
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,noindex,follow,nocache" />
</?>
I haven’t noticed a significant slowdown in traffic to the affected
pages, but that will take some time.
Next up is getting “Previous” and “Next” links up to each story. Barijaona has a plugin for that too, prevnextstory, but I haven’t had time to implement it yet.
Posted at 11:46,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Faithful readers of this blog, all two of them, will have noticed a
temporary interruption of service this weekend. I was in London and was in no position to do anything about it. But now the issue has been fixed and I can blog again! The freedom! The exhilaration!
Ahem.
Posted at 22:32,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve started documenting the podcasts I subscribe to in my
podroll. I
haven’t yet found a simple way of getting the subscription info out of
iTunes, so I’m maintaining it manually for now. I’ll link to the the
website of the ‘cast and to the feed, if applicable.
I have semi-serious intentions of reviewing the podcasts in the
future, but right now I just want to get the ball rolling. Comments welcome!
Posted at 16:13,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve started to amass a few blosxom plugins that I’d like to share, so
I’ve created a new category
plugins
to keep them in one place. Most are pretty basic, and I haven’t had
time to ensure that they’re as general or easy to configure as I’d
like. Comments and patches are welcome.
Here’s what’s up now:
Coming soon: the submit plugin.
Posted at 13:35,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
This plugin allows you to define acronyms and abbreviations. When they
appear in a post, the acronym will be wrapped in <acronym> tags and
you’ll get a handy tooltip explaining what it means.
Download.
(Here is the original post about this.)
Posted at 13:25,
in the scrivener » plugins category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
This plugin allows you to add a description to your categories. I use
it on category pages to explain what the category is about, and also
in tooltips in the category links for each story.
Download.
(Here is the original post about this.)
Posted at 13:20,
in the scrivener » plugins category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
The plugin
rendertime
allows you to see how long it takes to render all or parts of a
blosxom blog. When I tried it, the default version didn’t work on my
site. So I updated it to use the standard Perl module Time::HiRes. You can
get the updated version
here.
(Here is the original post about this.)
Posted at 13:08,
in the scrivener » plugins category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Inspired by this post by Dennis
Forbes I whipped
up a little plugin that provides quick links to
del.icio.us, digg,
and reddit submission forms, and also a quick way to
search Technorati. You can see the horror at
the bottom of each post.
The plugin isn’t ready for prime time: I’ve yet to figure out how to
customize it for differing permalink schemes, and it lacks
documentation. However, if anyone is interested I’ll post it as a
work-in-progress.
Note: I have only tested this with del.icio.us and Technorati, as I
don’t have accounts on digg and reddit. Feedback regarding these
services is welcome.
Posted at 23:04,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I had some problems with corrupted entries in the indexfile for
entriescache recently. Yesterday it happened again, which pissed
me off no end. So I’ve been researching ways to prevent this.
My first thoughts were to use a real version control system, like CVS
or Subversion. I could then use the revision tags to keep track of
creation and update times. But this wasn’t an option for me, as
neither CVS nor SVN exist on my host, and I don’t feel like compiling
them statically.
So I had a look at the entriescache plugin itself. There’s an option
to write a meta-creation_date when the post is indexed. This is
then “authoritative” in case the timestamp in the index file is
changed.
The problem was that I had edited my some of my posts a lot of times
since starting to use entriescache. So I wrote a script that updated
(or rather, backdated) the timestamps according to the data in the
index file (which had been restored from backups). After this, I
changed the option that controls whether the plugin will write a meta
tag, and reindexed.
Voila! I now have a meta tag in each and every post that can be used
to keep track of the posts creation time if all else fails. And since
it’s added by the plugin, I don’t have to add it manually in the
editor.
Addendum
I made a slight change to the plugin too: the default timestamp format
is in the middle-endian US way (MM/DD/YYYY). I modified it to write
and read ISO 8601 dates instead.
Posted at 20:25,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I sat down and made some minor changes to Frank Hecker’s most
excellent feedback plugin.
I “removed” the email option from the submit page. In the standard plugin, if someone
submits an email address, it’s displayed and not obfuscated. I don’t feel
that’s right. Even if I would say that the email is displayed, I
doubt people would notice. And if they did notice, they’d demand that
I do something about it. So now the option only reads “URL”, even
though you basically can put any string there anyway.
I downloaded version 0.19 from Frank’s site, but a quick diff didn’t
show any big changes. I’m going with my version (0.16) because if it
ain’t broke, why fix it?
To continue an immortal Engadget neologism, props be to Frank for
producing a plugin that easily enables comments in Blosxom.
Posted at 21:17,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I glanced at the Archives yesterday and was shocked to see that
all entries before this year were dated in January 2005. The file that
entries_cache uses to record timestamps was corrupt. I
restored the file from backups, but I was a bit tense. Although most
posts aren’t date-specific, there’s enough stuff in there to make me
nervous of losing the date part of the post.
I’ve been looking at Wordpress for a while, mostly as a new way of
doing stuff. I’ve moved away from using Blosxom as an “online
notebook”, with an emacs open in a screen session all the time. I’ve also
started using WP at work, and I think it’s a really slick tool.
An eventual migration would be a bore though. I’d have to generate
post titles in exactly the right way to keep permalinks, and I’d have
to hack the templates to something I like. Sure it would be fun if I
had copious free time, but that particular commodity is in very short
supply right now.
Update: blergh, just installed WP to have a look and there are a lot of issues to solve before a migration:
- Permalinks — I don’t dare experiment with this on the live server due to
mod_rewrite magic.
- Import will have to be either by RSS or by pushing stuff into the DB directly. The latter option will enable me to keep Markdown syntax where appropriate, which I’d like. I noticed that when moving from Movable Type to Blosxom the editing of old posts was much harder using HTML. But if I go that route I have to learn the database structure and stuff.
- Appearance. Man, Kubrick gets old…
Posted at 21:26,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
My recent work fixing posting via email to this blog, coupled with my
previous efforts getting my del.icio.us
links posted, has got me thinking that
there has to be a better way of handling this.
My post-by-email is basically “grab the content of the body and put it
in a file”. The del.icio.us integration is a custom script that reads
the RSS feed for my links daily, munges it into Markdown syntax, and
then writes to a file. This works fine for now, but what if I want to
use Blogline’s clippings, or Newsvine’s blog? I
don’t want umpteen blogs floating around: I want one, which I can
update in multiple ways.
So what’s needed is a RSS/Atom reader that subscribes to the feeds of
the content I’m creating, fetches the relevant data, formats them in a
source-dependent fashion, and then posts the data.
Requirements:
- Perl preferred for hacking reasons, but other langs acceptable. Must run on my hosting environment (basically a Linux server).
- per-feed formatting customization (sounds like a job for XSLT)
- per-feed posting customization (I want to aggregate all links into one post, while other stuff might as well go up immediately)
Writing my own stuff for this feels like inventing lots of wheels at
the same time. Any tips?
Update: Looks like
Blagg may fit
the bill. It’s very blosxom-like in style.
Update 2006-02-01: The Perl module
XML::RSS::Parser
looks like it can do a lot off stuff. I’ll have a gander at the docs
during the next few days.
Updated on Wednesday, 2006-02-01.
Posted at 23:42,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I encountered a weird configuration change in the remote server I’m using, which meant I could list directories with tramp but I could not open and edit files. This put a cramp in my writing style.
After enabling debugging I found that the default method I was using (“scp”) wasn’t working anymore. Changing it to (“ssh”) fixed the problem. This post is mostly an excuse to test this.
Update: yay, it works!
Posted at 08:53,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I was fed up with mixing native ISO-8859-1 content (generated by me) with external content (from del.icio.us etc.) containing UTF-8. So I used this script to translate all the ISO characters into UTF-8.
I’ll be keeping an eye on the content in the future to see if anything slips through.
Also, this post is composed in vi. Because anything is better than nano.
Posted at 22:43,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve long wanted to automatically add a <acronym
title="explanation">TLA</acronym> to all the TLA ’s and FLA ’s in my
posts. And I don’t want to do it by hand, not when I use Markdown for
everything else.
I asked around on the Blosxom list and got pointers to two existing
plugins, Autolink
by Fletcher T. Penney, and Automatic
LuckyGoogle
by Todd Larason. I found
Fletcher’s code easier to grok, being more or less what I started
hacking myself before I got bogged down in the plugin internals of
blosxom… So I copy-pasted some stuff and now I can type XSLT and get a cool dotted underline and a tooltip.
One small step for me, an even tinier step for the semantic web.
Update 2006-03-02: you can get the plugin here.
Updated on Thursday, 2006-03-02.
Posted at 21:28,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
As much as I think Dave Winer is an ass
sometimes, I must say that the free-form blogging he engages in —
just post a link and a comment to it — is pretty attractive
sometimes. Having to invent a descriptive title every time you want to
write something gets old fast, especially in Blosxom, where your
title is essentially your filename in your text editor.
Thus “Observations”, a new dubious feature of The occasional
scrivener. Inspired by Fredrik Lundh I
will use these as a scratchpad for random thoughts and
one-liners. Todo: add anchors so people can link to the nuggets. This
will have to be automated somehow, or perhaps
Markdown has support
for this now.
Update 2005-11-20: I hacked together a little Perl script for
this. Next plan is to use this as an input method for mails sent from
my mobile. Ubiquitous blogging, ahoy!
I also created a new category for them. However, due to the fascist nature of the Atom plugin, I won’t move the already created posts there.
Updated on Sunday, 2005-11-20.
Posted at 20:19,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Question: what is defamation?
Answer: An attack by speech on the good reputation of a person
or business entity. Speech that involves a public figure—such as a
corporation—is only defamatory if it is false and said with actual
malice. It also must be factual rather than an expression of an
opinion. In the United States, because of our strong free speech
protections, it is almost impossible to prove defamation against a
public figure.
Question: What is the difference between libel and slander?
Answer: Libel is a defamatory statement expressed in a fixed
medium such as a writing, picture, sign or electronic
broadcast. Slander is a defamatory statement expressed in a
transitory form such as speech.
Question: What is disparagement?
Answer: As defined in Black’s Law Dictionary (7th ed. 1999),
disparagement is “A false and injurious statement that discredits or
detracts from the reputation of another’s property, product, or
business. To recover in tort for disparagement, the plaintiff must
prove that the statement caused a third party to take some action
resulting in specific pecuniary loss to the plaintiff.”
(From FAQ about Protest, Parody and Criticism
Sites.)
Posted at 22:26,
in the scrivener » sued category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Om personuppgifterna behandlas uteslutande för journalistiska
ändamål gäller i huvudsak bara bestämmelserna
om säkerhet i PuL. Inom ramen för ett journalistiskt
ändamål ligger att informera, utöva kritik och
väcka debatt om samhällsfrågor av betydelse för
allmänheten. Undantaget är inte avsett bara för
etablerade massmedier och personer som är yrkesverksamma inom
sådana medier utan även andra kan behandla
personuppgifter för journalistiska ändamål.
Uppgifter av rent privat karaktär omfattas normalt inte av
undantaget, även om uppgifterna publiceras i ett sammanhang som
i övrigt har journalistiska ändamål eller rör
personer som det också lämnas andra uppgifter om som
omfattas av det journalistiska ändamålet.
(Ur Vad gäller när personuppgifter behandlas på
webbplatser?.)
Posted at 21:58,
in the scrivener » sued category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Update 2005-11-04: this post has been edited in accordance to the wishes of H & N Consulting.
[Note: I’m posting this during my lunch hour.]
A mail today [2005-11-02] from H & N Consulting:
Dear Mr. Erikson,
We regret to inform you that our company today has decided to take
legal actions against you and your employer.
You have not lived up to the agreement you sent us yesterday. You
are still slandering our company and CEO. We have proof that we did
not spam any web blogs. These proofs will now be used against you in
a court of law.
Unfortunately, we will also sue your employer since you have posted
these accusations during regular business hours.
[…]
Sincerely,
H & N Consulting
[This email did not have a confidentiality agreement attached.]
This is my reply:
These accusations are absurd.
The are no references to the name “XXX” in my posts.
You have crossed a line. Go ahead with your lawsuit. When I have
been served, I will comment on the situation in accordance to the
rights of free speech. You may be assured that the name “XXX”
will, in the future, be associated with suppression of free speech
and legal posturing.
Good luck in trying to build a business with a reputation like that.
[The referenced name has been altered to “XXX”.]
Update 2005-11-03: after the first white heat of anger, I’m feeling
much more sanguine about the whole affair.
I have contacted my hosting provider, and he suggested (but did not
require) that I remove all references that may give cause for
offence. I have now done so.
I have contacted my employer and explained the situation to them. By
the way, this website is covered by a
disclaimer.
The fact that the legal threats were not delivered by a legal
representative gives rise to the suspicion that no-one within the
profession will touch this with a ten-foot pole. That, or financial
constraints.
I have uncovered some interesting facts about the Swedish data
protection law, PuL. Specifically the Ramsbro case, where a man was
acquitted for publishing the names of bank presidents and financiers
on the internet.
Basically, you can publish personal facts (including names) if you do
so in a “journalistic manner”, to inform, critizise, and cause
debate. I feel that the fact that a 2-bit “search engine optimisation”
company can use vague legal threats to shut down free speech on the
internet to be cause for debate.
As to the accusations of slander, I cannot see how that applies, as
slander is “defamatory statement expressed in a transitory form such
as speech”.
Thanks to the good people in #mobitopia for their support and advice.
Updated on Friday, 2005-11-04.
Posted at 13:27,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Jakob Nielsen has a list of top 10 design mistakes by
weblogs. Here’s how I stack up.
1,2 No author bio and pics
Well, I have nice (updated!) pic on my About page. The bio could be more extensive, but hey, who reads that stuff anyway?
3 Nondescript posting titles
Could get better there, I suppose.
4 Links don’t say where they go
Also something I could do better, but I have been aware of it.
5 Classic hits are buried
Hmm, nice idea. I need to find the classics though.
6 The calender is the only navigation
I have both date based and category based archives.
7 Irregular publishing frequency
Huh? First, this is not my job, second, get an aggregator and stop surfin’ like it’s 1999, Jakob.
8 Mixing topics
As before, this is my site, I post what I want to.
9 Forgetting that you write for your future boss
Always worth thinking about. I feel that the skeletons in my digital
wardrobe are pretty few, but I haven’t really done a full scan Google
on myself.
10 Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
No probs there, unless the guys behind AllAboutSymbian kick me out.
Conclusion
For what it’s worth, I think Nielsen is a bit of an ass sometimes. But most of the above stuff makes sense.
Update: removed the butt-ugly <h4> tags.
Updated on Tuesday, 2005-10-18.
Posted at 23:17,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I had an unusual number of blog ideas today, but the implementation
was spoilt by buggy software and non-existent connectivity. So I’ve
saved those ideas for another day.
Posted at 23:11,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Frank Hecker has enabled
comments, lets hope I
can emulate him. His plugin is called
feedback.
I’ve been posting more and more comments on other blogs lately, so it
would be nice to have a reciprocal relationship in this regard.
I’ll be looking at this in my copious free time.
Updated: looks like my time is a lot more copious when I’m doing
something I enjoy. Comments are enabled. Moderation is per
email. We’ll see how it works out.
Posted at 23:53,
in the scrivener category. Comments [1]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I removed the WordPress installation after reading Natalian’s
experience
with an earlier version.
As I’m not using it, I don’t want to maintain it security-wise.
Posted at 13:24,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’m thinking about including posts in Swedish in the blog, mostly
about politics and local issues that no-one outside our little country
cares about anyway. If I do, I’ll prefix the subjects with the string “[SvSe]”, which is a geeky way of saying that the contents of the posts are in Sweden Swedish, and not, for example, Finland Swedish (“SvFi”).
Posted at 10:25,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve implemented a parallell metablog containing interesting referers
for now. I plan on expanding it a bit, but can’t be arsed to
re-implement AWstats or something. Basically this was just a perl
hacking fix.
Anyway, you can see the results here; login is
metablog/metablog. I’ve put it under lock and key to keep the referer
spammers out. It goes without saying that this is beta.
Hovering over the referer will get the user agent; over the target URL, the timestamp.
Nice to see the mobile clients, and also the hits from Google’s mobile portal.
I had help in implementing the search term extraction features from
Nelson Minar’s
searchspy. Kudos
to Jim for the pointer!
Posted at 00:33,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Wow, the server restart certainly made a difference. The blog is back
dynamically.
I’ve been hacking a bit on a way of getting referrer info from my
server logs. I’ve written some perl scripts that’ll push them into a
“sideblog” where they’ll be organised by date. Due to the extreme
hackedness of the code and the desire to avoid referrer spam I’m
keeping it under wraps for the time being. Maybe I’ll put out
something when it’s a bit more polished.
Posted at 23:49,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
The blog is running under static rendering at the moment, the response
times were horrendous. I don’t know if I’ve pushed through some weird
Perl barrier or if the server is feeling poorly. At least RSS feeds
seem to be working OK.
Update: server box was rebooted, much snappier now.
Posted at 12:55,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I updated Eric Davis’ rendertime
plugin to use
the Time::HiRes module instead of Perl’s syscall function. The
original version didn’t work on my hosting site.
You can grab the updated plugin here.
Update: Time::HiRes is a standard module in later versions of Perl
(from 5.8, I think). If you don’t have it on your system, you can get it
from CPAN.
Updated on Saturday, 2005-09-03.
Posted at 11:45,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve installed the Atom feed plugin for
Blosxom and it
should be working OK. I’m having some issues reading the feed in
Bloglines (links get squished in the text) but that may be due to my
choice of plugins.
When faced with a choice, I usually pick Atom feeds over RSS, if only
to annoy DaveW.
Posted at 00:06,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I don’t know why I bother with the design of this blog. 90% of the
blogs I read I read in Bloglines anyway. Perhaps it’s just so that
random visitors will get something other than the stock Blosxom look.
Posted at 11:12,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
It’s with some amusement that I saw a question on the blosxom
list go from my own hapless
contribution to a full fledged
plugin in
less than 24 hours. (The gory details are
here.)
My idea was
category_desc,
the code was Stu McKenzie’s. I guess I’ll take up the baton and write
some documentation.
The basic premise was that I wanted to provide a more detailed
description of a category when viewing its “front page”
(http://www.foo.com/blog/bar/ for the category “bar”, for example.)
The link between categories and descriptions is in the %descriptions
hash. This hash is accesses by the head sub and the variable
$category_desc::description is accessible in the head.foo flavour.
Caveats: you have to know how to write Perl for this plugin to work
for you.
You can see it in action at
http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/alt.
You can also do this with the config plugin and with
postheadprefoot. In both those cases, a file has to be created in
each category directory. This method keeps everyhing in a central
place.
Update 2005-08-28: the information is now available in the story flavour too:
Stu explains it
here.
Update 2006-03-02: you can get the plugin here.
Updated on Thursday, 2006-03-02.
Posted at 10:39,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I got the
postheadprefoot
plugin to work, after some frustrating days. I actually printed out
debug info to a file to find out what was wrong. But this
message put me
straight: simply uncomment a line in the plugin to get it to work.
(In my defense, I had already identified that line as the problem, but
didn’t really feel that I could change it — it was by Rael, after
all.)
So now the archives live on their
own page, no longer cluttering up the sidebar.
Some small CSS changes were also made, mostly to try to balance
semantic markup with some sort of aesthetics.
Posted at 00:11,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
The links section of this section is now listed on
the main page, and not hidden by the hide plugin. If you’re
subscribed to my del.icio.us feed
you’ll now get my links from two sources. The links here contain
basically the same info as the del.icio.us ones, so you may consider
dumping that feed.
Posted at 00:57,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Argh. Why is it so hard to get a decent commenting system in
Blosxom?
I’ve tried
writeback, which
although simple has the following cons:
- hard to integrate into my blog — it would entail duplicating a lot of code from my
foot.html template.
- stores entries in a hard-to-parse format — this makes the retroactive moderation of comments a pain
- security issues
- no easy way to turn off comments based on the post’s age
I got a tip about pollxn (thanks,
Dave!) and installed on a test installation. It was easy to get
started, and the comments are stored in their own text files, making
moderation easier. Automatic comment closing was implemented. But
there were some cons too:
- fugly code that’s non-trivial to enhance
- a separate system, with limited access to Blosxom plugins that you may have installed
- comments are separate from posts, so that you have a separate window containing the comments. This is too close to Radio to be comfortable.
So what do I want from a system?
- easy to install and maintain — no stupid security holes
- notification and monitoring via email or separate web interface/command line tools. This is needed for dealing with the inevitable abuse and spamming.
- speaking of spamming — good countermeasures. Easy to install CAPTCHAs, hashcash solutions or abstruse math hacking.
- comment closure
I would have thought that there would be more tools and plugins for
this. Maybe everyone is waiting for Blosxom 3, or blog comments are
thought of as a lost cause due to spamming.
Posted at 21:46,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’m resisting the temptation to do something radical with this blog. I’d like
a new look — the basic content/menu structure is OK, but I want to
play around with colours and fonts.
better control over the umpteen little scripts that do dynamic
stuff; update the now-reading list, del.icio.us links etc.
enable commenting — with strong anti-spam measures.
Update: the todo page has been updated
with some new ideas.
Updated on Sunday, 2005-08-14.
Posted at 20:12,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’m a bit torn about how to handle the “meta-strip” below each post,
the one containing the posting date, permalink, and so on. The
octothorpe (#) is almost universal for denoting permalinks. Some
people have recommended the ‘paragraph sign’ or pilcrow (¶) instead, but I’m
not happy with that in Verdana. I’m going to try with the ‘N-ary
product operator’ (∏, ampersand notation: ∏). The big Pi
suggests P as in permalink, and also the kind of Grecian edifice that
stands the tests of time.
The small pi is included here for possible future use: π (π).
I got the ampersand codes for above from this
page, which weirdly is
a subset of a Jane Austen-oriented site.
The vertical bars separating the fields was getting too bold, so I’ve
replaced them with non-breaking spaces. I’m looking for a good,
unobstrusive character to separate the fields. Maybe I’ll just style
the bars differently.
Update Digging around on Alan Wood’s Unicode resource
site, I found the following
interesting candidate for permalink characters:
- hash/octothorpe: # #
- pilcrow: ¶ ¶ (
¶)
- n-ary product: ∏ ∏ (
∏)
- small letter pi: π π (
π)
- lozenge: ◊ ◊ (
◊)
- nabla: ∇ ∇ (
∇)
- reference mark: ※ ※ (
※)
- double-struck capital P: ℙ ℙ (
ℙ)
- strictly equivalent to: ≣ ≣ (
≣)
- place of interest sign: ⌘ ⌘ (
⌘)
- OCR belt buckle: ⑄ ⑄ (
⑄)
- OCR fork: ⑂ ⑂ (
⑂)
- Black star: ★ ★ (
★)
Update 2006-02-02: some more chars I want to mess around with:
- Latin cross: ✝ ✝ (
✝)
- open center black star: ✫ ✫ (
✫)
- eight spoked asterisk ✳ (
✳)
- eight pointed black star ✴ (
✴)
Updated on Monday, 2024-11-08.
Posted at 14:11,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve relegated my del.icio.us links to
the sidebar, and hidden the links category
from the main page with the hide plugin. This is in keeping with
other “mainstream” blog packages way of handling external links.
The solution is extremely crufty at the moment — this whole blog is
aquiring behind-the-scenes cruft at an alarming rate. I hope to do
something about it soon, in my copious free time.
Posted at 22:23,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
When it comes to maintaining this blog, I’m trying to stick to the DRY
principle expounded in The Pragmatic
Programmer (“don’t
repeat yourself”). I’ve recently discovered
del.icio.us, and it’s every bit as cool
and tagalicious as everyone says.
It’s pointless to grab URLs and post them here as linkblog
entries and then do the same thing on
del.icio.us. That service is way better than anything I could come up
with, and it has an API. Keep it simple, and don’t repeat yourself.
To that end, I’ve spent a happy evening coding a little perl app
that’ll grab the latest entries from my del.icio.us account. If
they’re tagged with linkblog, they get posted here too. One place to
enter the data. Maintaining it will be a bit different, there are some
things, such as attributions, that can’t easily be handled in the
del.icio.us interface. But I can always fix that later.
The app is not ready for prime time yet. I’ve based it more or less
blatantly on this code but
tweaked it for my setup. I’ll post a link when it’s finished.
Posted at 00:32,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Michael nearly pulls the plug on his
blog. Low-life
spammers are responsible, of course. This actually makes me feel less
bad about pulling comments from this
blog. But it still
sucks.
Clearly, something has to be done. I see a great need for a Bayesian
filtering system for blog comments. This has worked wonders for my
email spam, and is a really good weapon to have in your arsenal. But I
haven’t seen anything like it yet, at least for Blosxom.
(Michael’s system, Movable Type, has its own problems with serving
pages. But the base problem is the same.)
I’m thinking about writing my own comment submission form that’ll use
SQLite or Berkeley DB to process the raw entries, apply Bayesian
statistics to them, and present them nicely for moderation. Blosxom’s
file-based layout has obvious drawbacks when it comes to rapidly
handling lots of data from different angles.
When I’ll have time for that is another matter.
Posted at 16:51,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’m fed up with dithering with comments and trackbacks. I’ve removed
everything for the time being. If you have a pressing need to tell me
something, see the contact page for
directions.
I could insert a rant about how commenting should be an integral part
of blogging and what a pity it is that spam is poisoning the commons,
but the fact is I have no visitors and nothing interesting to say
anyway so why should I bother with comments?
I’ll try to get a real hang of how the new-and-improved commenting
plugins work with blosxom in my copious free
time.
Posted at 22:36,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Today it’s been one year since I started blogging. My first
post was a “review” of the
Lord of the Rings. Since then I’ve written 49 capsule book
reviews (one for each book I’ve read),
used three different weblog packages (one homegrown, Movable Type, and
now Blosxom) and basically bored more and more people each day.
It’s been fun until now, and I’m definitely keeping it up for a
while. Resolutions include:
getting comments working while defending the blog against spam
learning more about Blosxom and helping out on the mailing list
maybe writing my own plugin (don’t know what it should do yet,
though)
I’ll also try to write better about interesting stuff and less about
blogging.
Posted at 00:06,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Updated.
I found that I had a lot of site-specific posts about the ongoing
re-design of this here blog, so I thought I’d experiment in creating a
new category.
This is how I moved my entries:
Got the redirect
plugin
from Fletcher Penny.
Found the entries that were site specific from the original
category, and listed them in a
file for future reference.
Created a new directory for the category.
Moved the files to the new directory.
Added the moved files to the redirect configuration file (see
below).
Thanks to Doug Nerad for pointing me to
the redirect plugin.
Anyway, now all site-related entries will be found in the
scrivener category. Enjoy or avoid,
it’s your choice.
Updated on Friday, 2005-01-21.
Posted at 14:25,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Some people want us all to use the ubiquitous XML
icon. Other
people think it’s
ugly. And
some of us wouldn’t care one way or another — myself included — if
we didn’t know that Dave Winer is responsible for
it.
Anyway, I’m replacing that icon with a blogbutton: 
. But before I banish it into the bit
bucket, I’ll share with you how it’s made. It’s not an image, but a
bit of CSS:
<a title="RSS 1.0" href="http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/weblog/index.rdf"
style="border:1px solid; border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
padding:0 3px;font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
color:#FFF;background:#F60;text-decoration:none;margin:0;">XML</a>
that looks like this when rendered: XML.
Cool huh? I got it off the net somewhere along the way. Thought I’d
share. If someone owns up to claim authorship, drop my a
line.
I might add that my objections to the icon is not primarily aesthetic
(after all, the replacement is orange too, but that’s OK, because
orange is the new
black)
but functional. The XML icon implies something else than a link to a
syndication feed. I must admit I was puzzled the first time I
encountered it. Then I found out what it was for. But it is
puzzling. The new icon at least advertises what it is in a better way.
Update: Ned has another CSS logo.
Updated on Thursday, 2005-10-06.
Posted at 14:33,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Updated
Well, as with many technical problems, the solutions present
themselves after a night’s sleep.
There was no problem with the URL rewriting (I had simply disabled the
writeback plugin previously, and neglected to enable it last night
while testing). These are the steps I followed to enable trackbacks.
Install and configure the Blosxom Writeback plugin. There are clear
instructions in the package.
Download the stand-alone Trackback implementation from Movable
Type.
Copy the tb.cgi, header.txt and footer.txt to your cgi-bin directory.
Edit the tb.cgi file. I simply replaced the $Password variable with a good password.
Create the directories tb_data and tb_rss in the same
directory. (To be wholly honest, I don’t need if these directories
are needed.)
Enable the display of the trackback URI where you want it (check
out the flavours included in the writeback package).
All done!
I’ve tested this a bit, and as far as I can tell, I don’t get a mail
from wbnotify when a trackback is received. So something will be
needed to keep track of what’s posted.
Original post
I was forced to disable comments a while
back because spammers were making this blog into a cesspit — as
they’re making blogs all over the planet as we speak.
I’ve been working with enabling comments or even better, enabling
trackbacks. Trackbacks are not immune to spam, but I agree with
oblios in that
a weblog is a publication. By at least requiring the commenter to have
access to a blog of their own, you raise the bar slightly.
All well and good, but unfortunately it seems that
blosxom and trackbacks are compatible, not
many people seem to have implemented them. In particular, I found very
little info on the nitty-gritty of how to configure blosxom’s
writeback plugin and the stand-alone trackback CGI. I found an
additional wrinkle, too. I use Apache’s mod_rewrite to translate
/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi to /weblog/, and I think I need to hack
writeback to reflect this.
All in all, a slightly frustrating experience. I love blosxom and like
its philosophy, but the technological laizzes-faire model of
decentralized plugin development can feel sub-optimal at times.
Updated on Tuesday, 2005-01-18.
Posted at 12:29,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve started posting links with or without short commentaries. They’re
the ones with arrows instead of titles.
You can, if you’re so inclined, subscribe to just the links by using
this link:
http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/links/index.rdf.
However, there’s no way of subscribing to the main feed and not the
links. Deal with it, or write a filter ;-).
Posted at 23:55,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Gotta get this blog mobile-friendly, maybe XHTML-MP is the way to go.
Got these references from Tarek:
- O’Reilly tutorial, pt 1
- O’Reilly tutorial, pt 2
- Openwave tutorial
- Introducing WALL
Update: I added the XHTML-MP DTD to the page, and
everything seems to validate. I’ll check it out on the mobiles I have
later.
Updated on Sunday, 2024-11-28.
Posted at 00:20,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’m gonna do a pretty radical redesign (or undesign) of this blog.
As no-one reads this anyway I figured I could do the changes on the
production sytem, rather than mess around with testing and staging.
So if it looks weird to you, this is the reason.
Update: done, for now. Some tweaking to do, but overall, I’m pretty
happy.
The main points fixed are:
moved the sidebar to the foot of the HTML source. This means that
the content will be shown before the nav stuff when using w3m,
links, or lynx. The techniques in the article “Creating Liquid
Layouts with Negative
Margins” were
used to accomplish this.
I’ve improved the semantics of the layout, with real h3 headings
instead of just strong tags.
Updated on Tuesday, 2024-11-02.
Posted at 00:12,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’ve updated the design a bit (see the footer for attribution). I like
it so far, but may try to make some changes in the next couple of
days. At least I’m not ashamed of the layout anymore.
I’ve implemented the Blosxom meta and interpolate_fancy plugins
(see the colophon for details). This
means that you can now see when a post was updated.
Posted at 23:35,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
I’m dinking around with a new CSS stylesheet. The changes will mostly
be internal. I got my inspiration from Frank
Hecker’s well-designed stylesheets, along with
the pointer to the liquid 2-column layout detailed in A List
Apart.
The first design for this blog was a OSWD
design called Oggle. I found OSWD to
be a great resource to get going with CSS, as you get something that
you can start with and hack around until you’re happy. But ultimately
the cut-and-paste without knowledge of what I was really doing started
bothering me.
The design as it is now is usable, but not something I’m really happy
with. I’ll try to fix things in the coming days.
(By the way, I think this is my 300th weblog post. Go me!)
Updated on Saturday, 2005-01-15.
Posted at 23:29,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
Wow, somewhere along the line I passed 200 posts. This will be the 207th.
There’s the drivel-generating power of emacs for ya.
Posted at 00:21,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
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.
Posted at 21:25,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
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.
Posted at 17:33,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
… 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.
Posted at 23:40,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.
MrX Photographers is a site devoted to digital photography. Terje, the guy behind the site, is a Mobitopian and all around nice guy.
Posted at 15:47,
in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
Submit this story to: » del.icio.us
» digg
» reddit. Search for it on
technorati.