Category: Navel-Gazing

Jay Allen is writing something named MT-Blacklist to fight MovableType spammers. I get a couple of people posting spam comments every week, and it’s getting dull, so I’ll be pleased to have this.

I couldn’t resist just one more sampling of VeriSign’s bounty:

innocence89.com
innocenceinmates.com
innocenceprogram.com
innocence-top.com

Had an innocencetop.com a few days ago. Someone’s persistent (but dumb).

Busy day, but I take time to note the following additions to the list of VeriSign referrals:

bareinnocence.net
innocencetop.com

Verisign recommends innocence.com as an alternative to the following non-existent domains:

innocentes.net
brokeninnocence.com
visualinnocence.com (actually, the guy searched for girls.visualinnocence.com)
originalinnocence.com
lamented-innocence.com
innocenze.com
blk_innocence.com
www.iinnocence.com (you know, that probably was a legit typo)

I’m actually kind of tempted by a couple of those. Alas, lamented-innocence.com is taken, it just has no nameserver.

985 posts, 265,000 page views, 100,000 visits, and 5 gigabytes of data transferred. Not exactly ground-breaking, but certainly more than I expected when I got this puppy underway. Happy first birthday to Population: One!

Thanks to everyone who links and especially to everyone who reads. I write all this for myself, but I won’t pretend it’s not ego-gratifying to have readers.

Party hats are available at the door.

After a lot of futzing around caused by my own lack of coordination, the server that brings you this very blog is up to a hefty 1 GB of memory. With any luck, this’ll cut down on mysql crashes. Can’t hurt, anyhow.

Total cost: under $100. I love the future.

(Damn. That post seemed faster… too subjective to know if I’m really getting improvements, though.)

I dropped the Recent Leisure sidebar. Lovely in theory, but I’m two weeks behind updating it. Suffice it to say that I’ve come around to enjoying The Hulk, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was tons of fun and not very intelligent, and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry is incredibly mawkish in the light of day. His more recent work holds up nicely, though.

I just removed my RSS .91 feed, which should discommode almost nobody — I got about 15 hits on that feed over the last week, most of which were from Web crawlers. Conversely, I got seven hundred or so hits on my RSS 2.0 feed. Thus, I’m not too worried about discommoding people, and I’ll point index.xml at index.rdf just in case. Administrivia done; read on if you care about why I’m making the change. (Hey, he rants about things other than politics.)

The last few days have seen some occasionally heated, occasionally peaceful discussion about Movable Type’s use of RSS 2.0. It was triggered when Dave Winer made the off-hand claim that Movable Type does “funky” RSS. The concise version of the question is simply whether or not Movable Type should wedge some RDF into their RSS 2.0 feed. There is no question but that the spec supports what they’re doing. Dave wrote the spec. Nonetheless, he says that their application of the spec is “totally wrong.”

I would say that it could be improved. For example, the RSS 2.0 spec has <pubDate> as an optional element, and Movable Type uses <dc:date> instead. As a scripter, I prefer working with the latter, since <pubDate> uses RFC 822 date format and is harder to parse than the ISO 8601 date spec used by <dc:date>. Leaving out <pubDate> and putting in <dc:date> is valid RSS 2.0. On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to put <pubDate> in as well and it might make some aggregators happier.

However, “it could be improved” is a far cry from “it’s wrong.” And bitching about something in public, then refusing to explain complaints is a terrible way to get things done. From all accounts, Ben and Mena Trott (the people behind Movable Type) are nice friendly folks. If I’d been in Dave’s shoes, I’d have emailed them and suggested adding a couple of fields to the default templates. I bet they’d have done it — why not?

Instead, we get paranoid fantasies in which the Trotts stuck in the RDF in order to gain a competitive advantage. That’s nuts. The only way that’s a competitive advantage is if there are aggregators which will do extra things with the extra information… and if that’s true, then I can’t see how the Trotts can be faulted for taking advantage of that. Nothing’s stopping Dave from doing the same thing.

Long story short, I don’t care to support Dave’s formats. I don’t like the way he writes a spec which permits namespaces, then implies that any use of namespaces is bad. So… no more WinerRSS for me; I’m content with RSS 1.0. And, from the evidence of my Web traffic logs, so are the vast majority of my readers.

In a fit of optimism, I added a Movable Type hack to prevent duplicate comments. Let me know if you have any trouble adding comments.

Well, that sucked. If anyone cares, I’m running MySQL 3.23.55 on OpenBSD 3.2 running on an old Mac. It is flaky — MySQL, that is. Sometimes database access just fails. This happened big time last night; I couldn’t even load my previous entry for editing. All messed up.

Whenever this gets too annoying, I try and get MySQL 4.0 running; it doesn’t ever work, for reasons that are beyond me. The compile goes OK, I can get the daemon running, but the mysql client can’t connect to it. I’d think I was using an old version of the client but the client straight out of the source tree fails too. Go figure.

This time around the trigger that inspired me to go for the upgrade was a corrupt mt_entries table. As usual, the upgrade failed, so I downgraded and managed to recover the corrupt table. But man.

Yes, this would all be much less painful if I ran RedHat on an old x86 box.