Categories
Weblogging

Welcome back Noah

Noah Grey is back with his incredibly elegant weblog, and his beautiful photographs.

I am just now dipping my toes into the Black & White photo world. I’ve long been held by the rich hues of color photography, enamored of bright blues, vivid reds, sunny yellows. It was only in the last year that I realized that B & W photography allows one to portray thought and feeling, form and opinion without the distraction of color.

However, I have a sinking feeling that my B & W photographs are going to quickly demonstrate the flaws in my photos, as well as my lack of skill and experience.

Still, one can’t grow from the rooftops; one has to be in the basement with the rest of the fungi.

Categories
Weblogging

Weblog spam bot

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It looks like the evil email spam bots have discovered my little virtual neighborhood. Tom Matrullo received a junk email seemingly addressed by me today, at the exact time I also received an email from me with the same subject. Well, since I didn’t send an email with the following in it, I knew it was junk:

I AM JONATHAN KANU , A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF RWA AGENCY. WE ARE EMPOWERED TO ADMINISTER TRUST FUND WELL OVER TEWNTY FOUR MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS (US$300,000.000. 00) FOR THE PROVISION OF RELIEF MATERIALS TO TROUBLED SPOT IN THE WEST AFRICAN SUB-REGION.

I wrote the following to Tom as likely explanation of what happened:

You have people who link to you that also link to me (we’re only 1 degree of separation apart in the loosely joined pieces game). It would be very easy for a spam bot to grab these links and follow them back to our respective weblogs. Both you and I also embed our email addresses directly in our web pages with the mailto hypertext link. This means our email addresses are easily scrapped from the page.

The very nature of weblogging makes this type of spam bot activity easier, because we all link to each other – we provide a web of opportunity for these nasty little critters.

What we’ll need to do is send our agents in South Africa, Mike and Nithia, out to beat the crap out of this JONATHAN KANU.

Show him not to mess around with webloggers.

 

Categories
Weblogging

Out and about

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Euan of The Obvious? has made the move from Blogger to a new MT-based weblog in a new location (time to update links, folks). Congrats on the move, Euan. And remember – if you need help with MT, all you have to do is holler. Since you’re having template – and most likely CSS – problems, I won’t be able to help you, but I’ll commiserate nicely.

Speaking of MT, it sounds like Ben and Mena’s server is being overwhelmed and they need to make a move, themselves. I’m not exactly rolling in dough at the moment but I’m finally plunking down a bit for my MT installation – especially since I’ll be extending my use of MT throughout all of my websites.

I was going to send a well done to Dorothea for duckling rescue when I realized it was David who did the rescuing. So – well done, David!

AKMA’s thinking about creating a U Blog gift shop. There’s a problem though – we have no school colors. We have no school motto. (We have no school, but that’s besides the point.) Life’s issues may march on – the good with the bad, the happy and the sad – but everyone knows a school needs school colors and a motto. Something Latin. What’s Latin for blog? Now, what’s Latin for blog that doesn’t sound like a disease?

A quiet thanks to my favorite songbird, Shannon: Smoochies, girl – you made my day yesterday.

And now, this blog will self-destruct in five seconds: one, two, three, ….

Categories
Weblogging

The lady has a voice

Sheila Lennon is celebrating both her birthday (Happy Birthday!) and her two-week vacation by creating a new, experimental weblog, The Reader. And folks, I’m telling you – Sheila has a Voice.

How’d we get from bragging about 2.6 readers per newspaper sale to newspaper websites that demand personal information about each reader to get beyond the headline, go ‘way if you won’t pony up?

Sheila, I can already hear your boss back at the ‘paper pop the lid on the Tums bottle.

This ought to be an interesting two weeks.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Zip-zip

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I like Movable Type’s trackback, but the problem with it is that now there’s two areas whereby the popularity of a posting is judged – the comment count AND the trackback count.

If a posting is a zip-zip, should it just quietly fold its tent, wonder off into the desert – the dog seeking an elegant death? Or is the posting so powerful, graceful, and eloquent that the readers are literally struck silent by the sheer beauty of it.

(In this crowd? Are you kidding? The only way to strike this crowd silent is to hit them with a 2 x 4.)

This same issue comes to mind with ThreadNeedle – the very fact that you register a posting with ThreadNeedle implies that you think the posting is strong enough to generate comment, but what happens when the weather’s nice, the readers are lazy, and you score zip. If you use Movable Type and allow comments, your score would then be:

zip-zip-zip

Geez, only the strongest and most confident personality could survive this with ego unscathed.

This is changing one of my overall views of how to incorporate ThreadNeedle into a weblog. What I did NOT want from ThreadNeedle was another measure of ‘popularity’, which I dislike.

Thanks to Ben and Mena for the cool new technology. Also thanks for opening my eyes to a potential new problem with ThreadNeedle.

(Should I track this? Huh? Huh? Should I? Should I? Go ahead, you know you want to…)