December 29th, 2003
Fellow Singaporean Vanessa Tan has a nicely designed weblog, totally deserving of being nominated for Best Designed Blog at the Asia Weblog Awards 2003. One of the nicest bits is the comment postbit (”postbit” as in “forum postbit” parlance) which I had oohed and aahed over for some time before deciding to copy it. Yup copy it I did, and left a comment for Vanessa to let her know I was using her idea. Of course I said that I would take it down if she didn’t like me stealing her idea.
Naturally, it was my bad for assuming that I could do something like this, because Vanessa actually had a no derivative works Creative Commons license and I had not attributed her. I found out when she posted an entry on her copyright notice, and have been trying to figure out how to attribute her in a way that is at once visible yet non-intrusive to readers. I think I have figured out a way by placing this bit of text in the comments section:
The paper doll icon that precedes each comment is an idea conceived by Vanessa Tan.
Want to see it? Post a (non-spam!) comment on this weblog.
December 29th, 2003
Yesterday I received 2 TrackBack pings for my entries on MT-Blacklist Updater and my October 2003 monthly report. What is interesting about these TrackBack pings is that the entries they were sent from had almost nothing to do with what was discussed in my entries. I began to think that I have got my very first TrackBack spam. Am I really famous? The answer to that question, of course, is an emphatic no (thanks for the compliments though, Kyrah).
Being curious and, as I’d like to think, benevolent, I decided to post a comment on one of the suspect TrackBack-happy entries:
I’ve no idea why you sent a TrackBack ping to my weblog entry which has totally nothing to do with the things discussed here. I have deleted it.
I looked through your entries and noticed that you pinged other people too.
I hope you aren’t offended if I begin to think you are a Trackback spammer! Unless you have a good explanation, I will submit your Trackbacks as spam to Jay’s comment spam clearinghouse!
It was later that I found out that at least 2 other guys, Heiko Hebig and Martin, received the TrackBack pings of the same suspect nature as I did. Hmmm… it seemed that we may be onto a spammer here. But that would be jumping to conclusions a little too early. I have been going on without saying anything about the person or the weblog which sent the TrackBacks, but I have to make it clear here that it is my view that the mentioned person isn’t a TrackBack spammer, but rather a (very) misguided TrackBack-trigger-happy blogger.
Christoph Cemper has responded to our complaints with an entry entitled TrackBack Spam complaints. He says the purpose of sending TrackBack pings is to
notify others that you wrote about the same thing
and later goes on to say:
to notify Person B was my intention.
Yes that is very much the reason for sending TrackBack pings, but I have to question how what Christoph wrote about can qualify as the “same thing” when they can hardly be qualified as vaguely related. Don’t think so? Check out my entries and the pings Christoph sent (see bottom of this entry). Ahem! Just because my entry mentions “Google PageRank” doesn’t mean that your entry on Google PageRank is a form of “continuing the discussion”, much less writing about the same thing. At least, that is how I interpret the way TrackBack should work.
As a last note, I leave it to readers to judge for themselves the relatedness of the entries from which TrackBack pings were sent to my entries. For my entry on MT-Blacklist Updater, this is the pinging entry. For my October 2003 monthly report, this is the pinging entry.
December 23rd, 2003
Bloglines just pushed out a new feature they call email subscriptions. I’ve been using Bloglines as my weblog RSS feed and newsfeed aggregator for quite a while and always been pleased with the fast response times and easy-to-use interface. This new feature just about makes wanna be a Bloglines pimp.
So what the heck is this new feature email subscriptions? Let me quote Bloglines first:
Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing lists that don’t provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary email addresses.
What Bloglines does is to setup an email account for you upon request (just click a link) and you can then use this email address to subscribe to your favorite mailing lists or newsletters (like the Mozilla Links newsletter). Any email you receive in that email account then appears in your “My Blogs” section just like any other newsfeed or blog RSS entries! How cool is that? Not cool enough for you Mr./Ms. Cynic? Think of this: you have a way of reading emails without an email client (whether web-based like Hotmail or application-based like Thunderbird or Outlook Express), AND a free “junk” email account just like those described here that you can use for any purposes. What’s more, there is a measure of permanence to these accounts since the email address is yours to keep until you choose to delete it. Even better, Bloglines will be adding the ability to reply to messages soon.
If you haven’t tried out Bloglines yet, give it a shot. You may just like it. Oh and Bloglines doesn’t pay me to do any pimping like this. I’m not even sure how they make money in the first place.
December 22nd, 2003
Movable Type 2.65 has just been released - mostly a bugfix release with a few added features. The mt-send-entry.cgi fix is included (it already was included in any MT 2.64 packages after the flaw was discovered and summarily fixed), of course. As is a security issue with the XML-RPC server, details of which are, I think, intentionally undisclosed to prevent exploitation in the interim. MT users are encouraged to either upgrade to 2.65 or grab the fixed version of XMLRPCServer.pm immediately.
Added features include an Atom syndication template and 2 template tags <MTIfNonEmpty> tag and <$MTEntryModifiedDate$> tag. In particular the <MTIfNonEmpty> tag frees you from having to install the MTIfEmpty plugin to achieve a similar effect.
Details about Movable Type 3.0 were also released, tantalizingly dangling nice new features in front of MT users’ collective monitor-reflecting eyes/glasses.
Support for the Atom API is promised - yummy! Read Mark Pilgrim’s article on the Atom API if you’re clueless about it.
Comment registration will also be added in response to comment spammers. Nice, but I’m still thinking I’d rather not comment on someone else’s weblog if I had to register first - I’m doubtful it will be well-received, but I’d like to be surprised at what Six Apart can do. Surprise me, Six Apart, you hear? What I’d really like to see is something along the lines of Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist incorporated into MT. It is by far the most indispensable MT plugin I’ve ever used.
It also seems that moblogging will also make an appearance, judging from this bit in Movable Type’s news article:
Additionally, for those interested in posting from mobile devices, we expect this to be a welcome release.
The rest of the announced features seem pretty mundane. I’m pretty sure the developers are hiding the good stuff from us.
December 21st, 2003
Some things that could prove useful to myself in future:
- ungreek is what you could call a lorem ipsum generator - it generates placeholder text from a variety of sources including the Old Testament, the US constitution and even the Internet RFC 1630.
- 4096 Color Wheel is a color wheel written in JavaScript. Nice to have an instant swatch at the side.
- Pixel2Pixel is a PHP script that allows you to change any color in your GIF images on the fly. Just upload your image and choose what colors you want changed.
Nice comment postbit from vantan.org
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