Categories
Technology Weblogging

Bad Webloggers. Bad.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

As you can see, I’m still getting pingbacks, even with removing the link to the pingback server from my page header. The reason for this, most likely, is because in the WordPress code somewhere, my site is responding affirmatively to an XML-RPC request, and the pingback is then sent. I’ve since moved the xmlrpc.php file elsewhere, though this means I can’t remotely post for now. But I rarely do anyway.

The pingbacks are from a post that Jonathon Delacour wrote on the recent trackback and nofollow issues, over at Writable Web, the new weblog he’s writing in conjuction with Marius Coomans. In this writing, Jonathon provides a nicely done comparison of pingbacks and trackbacks and how the two have become somewhat synonymous in most webloggers minds, primarily because of trackback autodiscovery. He also covers the new nofollow attribute, automatic addition of in weblog tools such as TypePad has led the spammers this last week to basically hit webloggers across the nose with a rolled up newspaper, going “Bad, webloggers. Bad.”

In the meantime, here’s a surefire method of preventing comment spam:

Open up robots.txt, or create one, and add the following two lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

It could take a couple of months, but eventually you’ll find you’ll have no more comment spam. Of course, you’ll have no Google or other search engine pagerank, either. But why bleed pagerank out of the weblogs slowly with nofollow, when we can do it quickly with robots.txt?

Seriously, bite the bullet, cut the cord, and be comment spam free. Isn’t this what everyone wants?

Categories
Semantics Social Media Weblogging

Introducing Tagback

Recovered from the Wayback Machine (includes comments).

The purpose of Trackback initially was to ping the readers of another’s post about something they may want to know about. Of course, we immediately started using it as a referrer link (“Hi, I linked to you!”)

So, we’re dropping trackback and we need something in its place. I provided the how-tos to add Blogline citations and Technorati links in the previous post, and these will provide you a listing of who has linked to the article directly. But that’s the limitation: these solutions are dependent on a link. How can we point a person’s readers to another post or article, without linking to the post directly?

Easy: Tagback.

For each post, I create a tagback consisting of the words of of my individual post, stripped of white space and dashes, preceded by ‘bb’ to differentiate my posts from other people’s posts. I also include a link to the Technorati tags page for this tag, which forms my ‘tagback’. You can see the tagback for this post at the end.

Now, you can either use the tag with a photo in flickr, or you can use it in del.icio.us to annotate any bookmark: your post, another person’s post, an article, a reference to a specification, whatever.

Since Technorati scarfs up delicious tags and flickr tags, all of these items will eventually appear in my Tagback page, along with weblog posts where people have linked to the tag directly in the post. And if Technorati excludes googlebots and other bots in the tags pages, thereby denying any pagerank to the tag pages, there is no incentive for spammers to spam this page.

As long as Technorati denies pagerank for the individual tag pages. Hint. Hint.

Now, regardless of what weblogging tool you use, including Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad, ExpressionEngine, whatever, you can participate in discussions, and without having to install any code. Just use whatever tags or function calls you use in your weblogging tool to get the title, and create your own version of a tagback. Or you can manually create a tag for each post you’re interested in designating as a ‘to be discussed’ item, and leave it off from those posts you don’t want to create a tagback page for.

So, you guys were right – tags are handy. I could get the hang of this folksonomy stuff.

I did have to update the code to strip out dashes, and just create a one word tag. I don’t like it, but flickr can’t deal with dashes, and it seems like del.icio.us wants to use spaces, and Technorati seems to not care. Since there is no standardized word delimiter with all of these systems, I just stripped out anything that isn’t a alphanumeric character.

Categories
Technology

Daily hits via Technorati

Through Technorati I found a post where Roland Tanglao referenced my post on trackback being dead. There was a discussion in comments about Technorati opening up Watchlists and API queries.

Hmmm.

I then created a watchlist of my base URL, http://weblog.burningbird.net, which you can access directly with this URL. This returns an RSS feed of the watchlist for the entire weblog — a watchlist being all links to my weblog on any specific day.

I took my old Backtrack application, which used to backtrack trackbacks and print out who else has trackbacked a specific post, and modified it to consume the RSS that Technorati provides, instead. I then posted a link to this at the top of my sidebar, and you can also check it out here.

If you want to do the same, create a watchlist for your weblog, copy the source code for Backtrack, and then modify the look and feel to match whatever you want. You’ll want to leave the PHP bits in the body alone, except to replace my watchlist URL with your own.

This will give you a list of links to your weblog, tracked by Technorati, on a daily basis. The question remains, though, how this alternative to trackbacks will scale, because Technorati is a centralized service, and one that can get sloggy at times.

Update: to add Technorati and Bloglines links to your posts

I’ve added Technorati and Bloglines links to each of my posts.

For WordPress, the Technorati link is:

<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=fresh&url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>” >Technorati Links</a>

If you’re not using WordPress, you’ll need to replace the function call to print out the permalink with whatever your tool supports. Just see what the tool uses for your permalink and copy this into the placeholder of the Technorati link.

For Bloglines citations (thanks to Dare for pointing this out):

<a href=”http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&submit=Search” >Bloglines Citation</a>

Again, replace the WordPress permalink function call for whatever your tool uses.

These will return the links, in Technorati or in Bloglines, for a specific post. Now, Bloglines was just bought out by Ask Jeeves, so who knows how long this functionality will last. And I’m sure someone somewhere is about to buy out Technorati, so ditto. But might as well make use of the functionality for now.

Categories
Weblogging

Some things aren’t worth saving

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I remember back when Trackback was first introduced. I was like everyone else, jumping up and down at this new way of ‘threading the void’. Well, we’ve just been hung dry on the threads and we’ve all come crashing down.

AKMA writes today, “Trackback is broken”, and I concur. It was broken right from the start, but we didn’t know it because it seemed to work, or at least, work the way most people thought it should work. As Phil Ringnalda recently wrote:

Where I thought TrackBack shone was as an unembarrassing way of leaving a comment that says “Hey, I said something about this too, over here.” By turning that awkward bit of self-promotion into something technological, and slightly less personal and needy, TrackBack opened up a way to let interested readers follow more of a cross-blog thread. But because they wanted to let TrackBack be anything, not just what it was, and because (I think, based on some really wide open sloppy holes at the start) they didn’t really think about the potential for abuse at all, it’s wound up being pretty much meaningless.

I helped several folk this week clean up their sites, and was fussing around in the code trying to figure out how to protect what is literally a hole into my site, when I read Joi Ito’s newest post, where he was encouraging Wikinews, the new Wikipedia news effort, to get trackback. Stopped me cold, stopped me dead in my tracks. We’re having such fun cleaning up trackback spam that we want to wish this on non-webloggers, too? Particularly a site as vulnerable as Wikipedia?

Oh yes, we can add tricks such as only allowing trackbacks from people in our blogrolls, and put everything else into moderation — but that’s 781 entries in moderation, by my last count. We can add more complicated code to figure out how to differentiate the spam; but at what point do our systems fail under the weight of our cleverness? Trackbacks are a hole. Have a problem with the hole, then you plug it. End of story.

Tonight I pulled my trackback code and the embedded trackback RDF and put in a kill switch into the trackback file, and this is one I’m going to walk away from. I’ve also pulled support for pingbacks, too, and I’ve turned off auto-pinging in all of my posts and won’t be sending trackbacks to others. I don’t like shutting the door in people’s faces (or in my own face, come to that), but if I’m going to fight to save one thing, I’m putting all my time and energy into saving comments. Comments are the one form of communication that allows webloggers and non-webloggers to communicate, equally, and that’s one I’m not giving up.

I figured if nothing else, people can add links to their posts in comments, if they feel it fits the topic. I not only wouldn’t mind, I’d encourage it, and no reason to be embarrassed. In fact, one modification I’m looking at is to add another line to a comment that contains a related URL link, in addition to the person’s primary web or weblog URL. Maybe the key to all of this is to take comments to a new level of power, functionality, and invulnerability, rather than spin off yet more new, and rickety, technologies.

As for referrers, I’ll probably add a link to the Technorati page, and possibly the Bloglines page, for each story. No, not the functionality that counts the number of links — just a plain old everyday link. No annotation. No brand new attributes. No moving parts. And no referrer listing, or have we forgotten how badly that’s been spammed now?

Some will say this is giving in to the spammers; letting them ‘win’. As I wrote in comments at Joi’s, this isn’t a war with a winner or a loser; this is a fact of life. And as a fact of life, I can either spend my time trying to control what flows through trackbacks, or I can work on solving world hunger–I can’t do both.

I’ll be sorry to see trackback go, but in the end we, or at least I, have learned from the technology, so it doesn’t go without leaving something positive behind. Even now we can learn a lot about each other and this environment if we seek to understand why we fight, or fought, so hard to save what is, a vulnerability into our systems. But that’s not my story to write–I have other technology to fry. My chapter on trackbacks is over.

Made this change just in time. I’ve counted several hundred trackback attempts against my site this afternoon. If this had been a moderated, or blacklisted site, I still would have felt the impact of that many hits at once. If the throttle was in effect, you couldn’t have commented while the hits were happening. Now, they just flow off like water off a duck’s back.

I’ve also added a Technorati link for each writing. If you want a how to for this, holler.

Categories
Photography

Close up and not so personal

I am late to this game, but I thought if I was going to be writing about tags, I would try out the various software that people are using. So, I finally signed up for a flickr account. Yeah, give me time and I’ll probably get one of them new fangled touch tone phones, too. And I’ve heard that computers now use more than 64k ram.

Today I took my 60mm macro lens with me to the orchid show and played around with very shallow depth of field. My favorite of the photos I’m posting to my own photo site, where I can more easily control the surroundings and the size. But I uploaded a group to flickr and you can see a slideshow of them here.

I did find flickr to be extremely well organized and designed — very intuitive to use. And the site is very generous with photo storage, and provides some nifty tools and what not. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it does resize the photos and though this can usually be done without too much degradation of the image, I notice a difference. But hey, it’s free and easy and rather fun to use. I think it will be a good place to put photo groupings, and reserve my site for favorites.

Most of the photos I took today were of flowers smaller than a quarter, in some cases, almost as small as this letter ‘o’. I am always amazed at the variety of shapes orchids can take, and how much they can resemble other things.

For instance, I long noticed a similarity between orchids and daffodils. A little research shows that they both come from the same family, as does the iris, onion, and asparagus. I also found this wonderfully charming story about orchids that’s worth a read, as is the rest of the web site if you’re a gardener, naturalist, or just love trees and plants.

But to return to orchids and resemblance, doesn’t the following orchid remind you of the Martian camera from the classic movie, War of the Worlds? No seriously, all you would need is three tiny little lens in red, green, and blue.

Or this — there’s a reason it’s called ‘lady’s slipper’.

Then there’s this, which looks like…well…like…um…right.

I know, stop screwing around and finish the comment stuff and the tags opus. I am easily distracted–no more attention than a jack-daw.

(I tagged these under orchid, flower, and burningbird — let’s see where they show up.)