Category: Weblogging

Categories
Diversity Technology Weblogging

Links at twenty paces

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Christine staged a Blog Debate, during which Ciscley commented about guys being reluctant to move to Moveable Type because it’s popular. She wrote:

I think (I *know* in my personal blogging circle and I’m generalizing from there) that most of the people that are uncomfortable with the popularity of MT are guys. It’s like it’s a dirty blog word to every guy I know. They use phpWeblog (though I still have to design their layouts for them cause the interface only goes so far). They use geeklog. They’ve thought about pMachine. They’re willing to try anything and everything but MT.

Is it because so many women use and love MT? Is it because MT, if you don’t actually use it and know what a huge part of it Ben does, appears to be the creation of a woman? Is it taking something away from the all male tech industry to consider that a product inspired by or significantly designed by a woman is the best option out there?

Jonathon picked up on it, writing:

There are so many things to like about Movable Type—reliability, elegant interface, customizability, MySQL support, vibrant user community—but what could be more intriguing than Ciscley’s hypothesis of gendered MT use? Has Mena’s contribution influenced the software to the extent that it attracts a disproportionately high proportion of female users?

Christine picked up on both Ciscley’s and Jonathon’s comments, so it will be interesting to see if there is any form of debate on this.

A gender bias with Movable Type just isn’t something I’ve seen. I would imagine that there is a strong gender bias with the other weblogging tools that Ciscley has mentioned, but not with MT.

Any initial reluctance to adopt MT is based on the installation, which can be a hassle for non-techies. However, this seems to effect both men and women equally, and is really dependent on how comfortable the person is with Perl and CGI. Once installed and used, though, MT users can be fanatical in support, regardless of gender. I know — I’m a fanatical MT user.

(“Hello, my name is Burningbird, and I’m addicted to Moveable Type.”)

Why do I like MT? Because it’s a lovely, lovely piece of software. Powerful enough for all my needs, hooks that allow one to tweak if we wish, and now it has the MySql backend, which for a data person such as myself, is pure heaven, with little chocolate sprinkles on top.

Hmmm. Come to think of it, if Movable Type is an example of software resulting from a paired man/woman collaboration team, then I think it’s time for the software industry to look at its development practices.

(Notice how I didn’t once use “—ism”? I’m getting better. And Christine, I have Trackback enabled. Do I get a cookie? Sorry for the double ping, but MT went crazy — it pinged you three times, blo.gs, weblogs.com, and my mother. It also scritched my kitty underneath her neck, and washed the dishes in passing.)

Categories
Burningbird Weblogging

A start over

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

As with Chris this weblog could go dark around the 4th of November if I can’t get everything moved and set up at a new host quickly enough. I still don’t have a new host yet and a few I have chatted with aren’t necessarily comfortable hosting a “cheap” site that has been slashdotted (i.e. mega-hits within a very short time period). Will I be slashdotted again? I’m writing a sequel to “Parable of the Languages”, but it, like many other sequels, could die an ignoble death. Quick answer: hard to say.

I’m also merging several individual web sites into one (yasd.com, p2psmoke.org, dynamicearth.com, and burningbird.net are being merged), though the weblog will stay at weblog.burningbird.net. The result of this effort means I’ll have some pretty ugly pages and a bit of a mess for a while, but can’t be helped. Can’t spend too much time on this as have to concentrate on paying tasks. Must get money. Money good. Need money.

I wasn’t sure about what to do with the Movable Type move because I have gaps in the weblog page numbers. When re-importing the exported entries, the numbers won’t match and links will get broken. However, I read Jonathon’s plan of copying the individual archives over as is into the previous archives directory, editing the exported data to remove ones I don’t want to keep, and then, after re-importing the modified list of posts, directing archiving to a new location.

That is a plain, good, excellent, outstanding idea! Who says eye candy people can’t think like metal to the core programmers?

With Jonathon’s approach, I can change my individual archives to an .html extension, getting rid of the PHP overhead, and still keep PHP for the main page (index.php). For those archived pages that are being retained in the new weblog, I’ll delete the pages in the old archives, and use an error handler program to map the old pages to the new. (Accessing the old pages will trigger a 404 error, which, in turn, triggers my error handler.)

As much as I like Jonathon’s plan for handling synchronization problems with a Movable Type weblog move, what’s even more intriguing with his approach is his using this time to re-focus his weblog, and literally removing entries that don’t match this focus. The old archives will be there so links won’t break, but someone new will only see those entries that reflect Jonathon’s new focus.

The idea of a weblog start over is outside the “way we do things”, which is probably why I like it so much. And it’s really no different than the opportunities that face us when we move to a new community.

When we move to a new town or city, especially one where we don’t know people, we can re-define what we are. For instance, want to party less? Then re-define yourself as a quieter person in your new home. Want to be more outgoing? Again, re-define yourself and act more outgoing with new people. Since people will only see this behavior, and act accordingly, we’re re-inforced and the behavior becomes more natural.

(As an example, years ago when I lived in Seattle the first time, I couldn’t speak in front of people to save my life. It was terririble — if I was faced with more than four people, I literally couldn’t speak. When I moved to Yakima to attend college, I was determined to overcome this, so the first thing I did was take a speech class. The second thing I did was run for student body President (I lost, in case you’re curious). I forced myself into positions of public speaking, and since people only saw this aspect of me (not my former shyness), my new behavior was reinforced. Now, I love public speaking and regret that I couldn’t get to any conferences this year to indulge.)

The thought of applying this re-definition to our weblogs is unique, and interesting, and opens up a host of new possibilities beyond just cosmetic changes, or changes in technology. Weblog start overs — a new trend perhaps?

(I just wish I could erase incidents from the past as easily as I could drop old postings. There was the time with the water cooler full of margaritas…)

Categories
Connecting Weblogging

Can anybody hear me?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Anil Dash wrote about the battles he’s had with depression and encouraged other webloggers to discuss their own battles. Pretty gutsy thing to do, and smart — making good and healthy use of the increased exposure he received after his recent difficulties with the Little Green Football cartel.

Dorothea responded about her own fights with depression — not necessarily an easy topic to write about and the effort deserves quiet and thoughtful respect. And today Jeneane pointed to Anil’s suggestion, agreeing with his assessment that blogging can be good therapy.

I agree that weblogging can be cathartic, can connect us with others, and can open previously closed doors, internally and externally. However, weblogging as therapy isn’t for everyone.

The cathartic experience of writing our fears and troubles to a weblog can be accompanied by an increased vulnerability as we feel the pressure of such public exposure. And the experience of sharing our thoughts can be offset by the sadness one experiences when one reads about others’ happiness, family gatherings, companionship. Especially in the upcoming holiday season.

Ultimately, there’s the existential question that can take a weblogger down, and I’m not talking about web pages:

If I write a weblog and no one reads it, do I exist?

If this invokes laughter, it’s hollow laughter indeed.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Comment spam quick fix

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Both Sam Ruby and Phil Ringnalda had good advice — don’t spend a lot of time on developing a solution to fixing the comment spam problem. Whatever I can do within the form, it’s a relatively simple matter for a spammer to read any form value and duplicate it in his spam blast.

I appreciate both their help in gently pointing out that I was spinning my wheels (but I have to get practice for ice driving).

So, here’s a quick fix — it will keep out the lightweights at least. It’s a start as other efforts are underway.

This approach will require you modifying the following MT templates:

Individual data entry
Comment Listing Template
Comment Preview Template
Comment Error Page

You’ll be adding the following field, on the line before the </form> tag:

 

<input type=”hidden” name=”snoop” value=”goaway” />

 

You can change both the name and the value field, as long as you’re consistent with the name throughout the templates and the code.

Next, open your mt-comments.cgi (or mt-comments.pl) file and add the following code just after the “use strict;” line:

 

use CGI qw(:standard);

if ($ENV{‘REQUEST_METHOD’} eq “POST”) {

my $data = param(‘snoop’);

die unless ($data);
}

 

Most everyone should have the CGI.pm perl module installed. Make sure to change ‘snoop’ to whatever your little secret field is (let’s all use different fields, make the spammer’s job a little tiny bit harder.

That’s it.

What happens is that when you post a comment, the code checks for a form field of “snoop”. If it doesn’t find it, it dies. Nothing fancy at all. This will show in your error log or web log file as a premature end to the script. It doesn’t prevent others from using the application, and doesn’t crash anything.

Again, this isn’t fancy, but it’s a start. Holler if you have questions. If you’re uncomfortable modifying mt-comments, let me know and I’ll help you. If you have a better solution, or see problems with mine, please let me know.

Again — thanks to Phil and Sam for advice, help, suggestions.

Update:

Mark has put together a nice re-cap on the whole comment spamming thing. What I just created is a ‘club’. I’m going in for an interview tomorrow and when they ask me what was the last application I worked on, I’ll answer “A club”. .

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Comment spam problem continued

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In regards to the comment spam problem mentioned earlier, one idea kicked around was checking the http_referer to make sure that the comment post came from the same server as the form.

We talked about the possibility of empty http_referers — not all browsers send a referrer and proxy servers can strip out the referrer. The solution would be to allow empty referrers in addition to referrers from the server. Unfortunately, though, allowing for empty http_referers will also allow in the comment spammer.

The reason why allowing empty referers opens the door to the spammer is the comment spamming code would invoke my comment code directly, not through a link from an HTML page. In this case http_referer would be empty.

I could become more restrictive, remove the permission for empty referrer, but if I do, I won’t be letting some of you through (as you’ve been kind enough to let me know via email tonight).

Sam Ruby had some good ideas such as putting hidden form fields into the comment forms and testing for these and this will be a next step. This means adding form fields to all templates related to comments, and then adding code to mt-comments.cgi. Doable, and many appreciations to Mr. Ruby for excellent ideas. (If you don’t know Sam, he works on some weird sounding things such as “Comanche” and “SOUP” — stuff like that).

A really nifty and difficult to crack approach (IMO) would be to take the person’s login name and the comment id for each comment and use these to create an encrypted value. Stuff this into an HTML form field. When the form is processed, test to see if the encrypted value checks out. If the person’s login name isn’t exposed, which is should NEVER be, it becomes a ‘key’ for the encryption, easily accessible to the MT program and the MT user, NOT to the spammer. And the different comment identifiers would make sure that the encrypted values changed with each comment.

Only problem with this solution is it would require cracking into the MT internal code.

Question: what do you think of this as a solution, and is it worth the time to do it?

(However, by now, Phil or someone else of like cailber will have found and coded a solution and have it half way distributed throughout the world. I should just leave these little challenges to others — what do I know?)