Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Good to see

Ed Cone shined his journalistic light on Karl Martino and Philly Future in a nice question and answer interview. Philly Future is the Philadelphia equivalent of The St. Louis Bloggers, and then some–that aggregator is a nice option. Perhaps we need a Planet St. Lous.

I liked Karl’s advice for integration between alternative media, such as local weekly newspapers, and webloggers:

—What would your advice be for us in Greensboro — both at the N&R as
it tries to set up a community web presence involving bloggers, and for
bloggers who want an independent online alt-media?

I notice you already have some great advice shared to you by folks who
know far more than me. But I’ll try my best. Take it with a grain of
salt. It appears you have two camps: those that think N&R should host
blogs, and those who think it should aggregate the independent
community. There are some that say do both and I’m with them.

* Aggregate your existing and growing local blogger community.
Encourage folks to join it. Provide them with pointers and advice on
how to do so. Get them to publicize their feeds. Greensboro101 us a
great start.

* Host blogs for those that are not comfortable to go elsewhere. Your
paper is a brand that inspires trust and some folks will be far more
comfortable using tools you host. Empower these folks and watch what
happens.

* And here is the most important point, right from Dave Winer’s “How to
make money on the internet”: use editorial staff and the community
itself to find the very best writers and posts within your hosting
solution and within the larger community. Highlight what they do and
stories they have posted. Put these posts of yours in a place where the
community will see them. In the paper. In the sidebars of your
newspaper’s online edition. Right on it’s front page. All over the
place! It will encourage participation.

Considering the recent problems with the local weekly, Riverfront Times and the former weblogger that I wrote about last week, seems to me that RFT might take some of this to heart.

Karl also had some very nice things to say about me that I’ve been thinking about since he let me know this interview was online. He wrote:

You need to really put yourself out there to do a good job of it. You need to be personal. Philly Future didn’t have enough personality (a problem it still has I think) and I didn’t put my heart on my sleeve the way I do off the web. Look at http://weblog.burningbird.net/. She has a community because her online voice is so authentic. I’m still too reserved.

I think there is personal and then there’s personal. In the last post I wrote about the famous strip tease artist, Lili St. Cyr, who created art out of the erotica, while only exposing brief and tantalizing glimpses of herself; as compared to the bump ‘n grind girls who just dropped trou and swung their boobies.

I know some great writers that can weave a truly intimate story around a simple act like buying a computer, designing a web site, attending martial arts classes, carving a Santa out of wood, or sitting outside a library getting busted by the cops; while other writers will provide every detail of the sex they had the night before, and not tell you a word about themselves.

When I write, I strive to be the former, but sometimes stray to the latter. Well, except for the sex, thing.

Categories
People Weblogging

The Lady Cyr

I finished up the base functionality for the OsCommerce application, including replacing the category implementation. OsCommerce is one of the more used applications for store fronts, and is open source to boot. However, the code is obtuse and cumbersome, and not especially well documented; you change the code in one spot, you end up breaking it in half a dozen other places.

I’ve also been working on weblog coding, and helping Feministe move from Movable Type to WordPress. I installed the application and handled the permalinks and htaccess changes, and Lauren did the import and a lovely, and amazingly quick, design. Other than forgetting to remind Lauren to turn off MT auto-generation, and her losing her initial index page, the move has gone relatively well.

Note to current WordPress users: As of a day or so ago, the default template for a WordPress installation has been moved into a theme, and the contents of the index.php file reduced to a few lines of code, easily replaced. What does this mean? This means that what happened to Lauren won’t happen after the 1.5 update.

Yes: 1.5 — the developers skipped 1.3 and 1.4, and the next release of WordPress will be 1.5.

While I was working on her site, I noticed she’d posted her results of a new quiz, Which Classical Pin-Up are you. Much better than the what kind of vegetable is one quiz. I broke away from coding a few minutes to take it and found out that:

You are Lili St. Cyr!
You’re Lili St. Cyr!

What Classic Pin-Up Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The other classic pin-ups were Betty Grable (of course), Marilyn Monroe (must we), Brigitte Bardot, and Bettie Page.

All in all, I was rather pleased to ‘be’ Lili St. Cyr, one of the more famous of the 20th century strip teasers. Beautiful, but with a stronger face than the norm for the time, and an imperious tilt to her head. Unique in her performances, too. A classically trained dancer, when other strippers would do the usual bump and grind, Lili’s acts consisted of her taking a bubble bath on stage, or having her maid dress her rather than remove her clothes.

Standing five-foot-six, and featuring nearly ideal 36-24-36 dimensions, she was built to please. But it was her seductive moves that made her a star. She was most famous for a bathtub routine, in which she emerged from a bubbly tub, froth clinging strategically to her naughty bits. But her repertoire also featured narratives like “Suicide” in which she tried to woo a straying lover by revealing her body, and “Jungle Goddess” an exotic number where she appeared to have relations with a parrot.

Lili was a fiercely independent woman who married six times, leaving all six when she got bored. She appeared in magazines and movies, was adored in Montreal, and at the time considered the queen of burlesque. After close to three decades on stage, she retired and started her own lingerie line, where her catalogs would feature drawings or photographs of her wearing her products.

Her life was not a happy one, though, and she had problems with both alcohol and drugs. When she sold her business and retired, she withdrew from the public eye, living in seclusion with her cats until her death at age 80, in 1999.

The glamour photographer Bernard of Hollywood, creator of the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe wearing the white dress standing over a exhaust grate, took many pin-up photographs of Lili St. Cyr, calling her his ‘muse’. But I don’t know if he was the photographer who took one picture I found of Lili that stood apart from the typical cheesecake shots.

In it, Lili is posing under a bed canopy, seemingly swirling a sheer cape around herself, as she strikes a pose for the photographer. But the camera, rather than move in to tightly focus on her, is pulled back and much lower to the ground, exposing the obvious nature of the set. Because of the angle, rather than a spontaneous swirl of cloth, it looks like Lili’s cape is actually wired to be pulled up and out. Additionally, as you can see in more detail in this larger photo, the walls of the set slant in and down, drawing you into the photograph; and in the crack between them walls, a photographer’s light shining on the floor in front of the dancer actually competes equally for attention.

Off to the side is a dresser with a parrot in a cage, and you can’t tell from the photo whether the bird is fake or real; and if the latter, alive or dead. The bed, which should look inviting and seductive, seems cold, remote, and hard as bricks for all that it is draped with velvet. Rather than seduce, the image makes one’s back vaguely hurt.

What’s especially intriguing about the shot is that it looks as if someone had carefully contrived an image, and then impulsively rejected it. However, there’s more than a hint in the photo that the scene you see is exactly what was planned, and if the camera were to pull back more, yet another set would be exposed.

A compelling photo of a genuinely interesting woman.

Categories
Weblogging

St. Louis journalist loses job because of weblog

Oh, look. A real title, just like in the papers.

I’ve been out in comment threads the last few days. Sometimes you feel like a conversation, and sometimes you don’t. The last two days I felt like conversing.

One conversation today was at the St. Louis Weblogger site – a writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was fired (note, resigned after being put on suspension) for his pseudonymous weblog, after it was written about in the Riverfront Times.

The initial exposure was here, with followups here and here. Be sure to read the comments for some interesting, and fresh, perspectives on the entire situation.

We might as well get used to this, boys and girls. Right now the media is giving us just enough rope to hang ourselves with, with their Weblogs of the Year awards and shining the light on us as we gloat about Dan Rather.

Next year, they’re going to move in for the kill.

Staci Kramer of Paidcontent.org has two good posts on this topic: the first after Daniel Finney was suspended, the second after he resigned. In the latter post, she wrote:

One thing to think about if you’re keeping or thinking about writing an anonymous blog that includes commentary about people you know: if your identity became known would you be able to work with them? More important, would they be able to work with you? A talented writer who apparently didn’t think that through is now looking for work.

Categories
Weblogging

Real link stuff

I’m not normally a link and comment person, but I’m feeling in a ‘chatty’ mood, so here we go:

American Street has created adjunct Perranoski award categories to the Wampum awards. There’s also a contest for best poem featuring the Rumsfeld infamous quote You go to war with what you have. Personally, though, I prefer my poetry sans Rummy, but the contest is still fun.

Just in time for the holidays, Ken Camp has posted a recipe for Tequila Cookies. I think I’m going to take liberties with the recipe, though, and create “Jug o Margarita” cookies instead.

I like Molly’s new Medusa look. But then, she used green — I’m partial to green. And her logo is fun. Looks like she’s been into Ken’s Tequila cookies.

Congratulations to Liz Lawley for the new Lab for Social Computing she’s been made director of at RIT. The creation of this lab is an impressive accomplishment.

I miss Phil.

Norm, I really like the book, Birth of the Chess Queen, and thanks for pointing it out to me. I need to get around to posting some great quotes from the book.

Uncle Joe, who has a very cute dog is having chicken enchiladas with his holiday meal this year, I’m having ham sandwiches, and PapaScott is NOT having lutefish — good choice, Scott. Dave is probably having the s**t kicked out of him by his daughter Catie for Festivus, while it sounds like this might have happened, metaphorically to Karl in comments. And I agree with the ‘better uses of time’, Karl.

Now is the time for music, friends, family, and fun. But then, every day is the time for music, friends, family, and fun. AKMA is listening to music such as U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”, while Halley is doing the angel thing. Stavros writes of the cassettes he has known and loved. (I’m dated — I think of the old single LPs when I get nostalgic–but at least it’s not gramaphones.).

Lottsa snow and cold about if the number of visits I’m getting to my old How to Drive in Ice and Snow post is any indication. Poor people — I hope sincerely they recognize tongue in cheek when they see it. Don is learning the joys of white snow with small black dogs, while Bill learns that furnace thermostats have batteries (I didn’t know this, either).

And I just had an email from Daliel Leite that the Rock on Rock On site, which I’ve contributed photos to, and mentioned in the past, was just pointed out as a Yahoo Pick, generating visits from over 90,000 people from 120 countries in the last few days.

I remember the site when it was a bare pebble on the beach. Good to see it getting the attention it deserves. Congrats, Daliel!

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Comment spam prevention in Wordform

I believe that, eventually, most comment spam strategies will have to have a system-wide component in place to truly combat this problem — something to watch for comment spam patterns happening on a server, and throttle accordingly. However, that’s something that can’t really be handled with the application. So, I’ll focus on what I can do in Wordform.

My comment spam protections are not going to include a blacklist, in any shape or form. These require too much processing, and are too vulnerable to corruption. Instead, I’ll use a variety of techniques that combined should protect a site — even a heavily hit site.

First, I’ve added individual comment moderation so that you can turn moderation on for a specific post, or a group of posts. When this is turned on, a message will show near the comment form stating that the comment is currently moderated.

Next, I’m adding new capability to search in comments for those that fall into a range of dates, and then be able to delete all comments that match a search criteria. With this, if you do get hit, it should be easier to delete the spam.

(I’m also adding a one-touch button to globally approve, or delete, all moderated comments.)

The comment posting page will have a throttle that can be configured in options. This throttle will check the number of comments received within a certain period of time, and if the count exceeds a value that the user can specificy, will either moderate the comment, or deny it (again, something that can be configured). At Burningbird, the throttles are no more than ten comments in a minute (a WordPress option); and no more than 50 comments in a day (my option). These two values can be changed, and I’m also adding a maximum count for number of comments allowed in an hour. All of this will prevent ‘crapfloods’, which can overwhelm a site, and even a server.

Currently I’m using database queries for the comment throttle I have at Burningbird, but for Wordform, I’ll be using other caching methods to hold timestamps and comment counts. This should make the throttle lightweight and robust.

I’m also adding a configurable option to either close or moderate all comments over a certain number of days old. I use this with Burningbird, whereby the first comment to a post over so many days old gets moderated, and then the post gets closed. This has eliminated probably about 98% of my comment spams, while still giving me the option of determining (from this last comment), whether I want to keep the post open, but moderated.

A new functionality for Wordform not currently implemented at Burningbird is the ability to close a discussion. By closing a discussion, the post (or the web site) is temporarily put into a lock-down form, where only those people who have previously written published comments can add new comments. When they do, the comment is posted immediately. If a person hasn’t added a comment previously (based on the person’s email, which is a requirement for lock-down, though it’s not printed), their comment will be put into moderation.

Finally, I’m experimenting around with a new comment spam prevention method that I’m calling “Stealth Mode”. However, this is one item I am leaving for a “Ta Da!” moment when I release Wordform’s first alpha release.

(Most of these comment spam moderation techniques will also apply to trackbacks. I’m currently wavering on my support of pingback, which is really nothing more than recording a link, and this is accessible via the vanity sites.)

Between all of these–Throttle, Lock-down, individual and weblog moderation, better comment management, closing older posts, and Stealth Mode–the comment spam problem should end up being no more than a minor irritation in Wordform. Then if I can just get people to accept that comment spam is not an invasion of a person’s personal space, and that it’s a way of life and to not spend so much time fretting about it, we’ll have the comment spam problem managed.