Navel Gazing

Entries were kinda light over the last few days because I was finishing up my zombies. (No kidding.) They will be light the next few days because I’m starting a new job. (Yay!) But no fear, I’ll be back.

By the by, I am sick as a dog and stoned out of my head on TheraFlu, so if I say anything really wacky today (or if I said anything really wacky yesterday) that’s why. I keep thinking I’m writing pithy witty paragraphs. I am very probably wrong.

Inspired by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I present shrpshr.html, a global filter plugin useful for mockery and little else.

It’s pretty much traditional among a certain class of geek bloggers to come up with a way to set up an email->blog gateway. I’ve sort of put this off for a while, but since I’m pretty sure I’m about to go out and indulge in a Sidekick (original), the day can be delayed no longer. Thus: this entry, which was in fact posted wholly from within my email client. Which is mutt, and you can’t tell me that doesn’t make it worse.

I’m a geek. I’ve finally given into the desire to make Population: One even more full of cute little Web gimmicks; namely, we’re PHP-based now. If this means nothing to you, you ought to ignore it, which is generally good advice around here. Unless I’m talking about politics; all that stuff is Holy Writ. Anyhow, I abashedly admit that I made the change simply so that I could implement the random quote you’ll see over there on the right of the page under the Search box. There. See it? Yeah. It’s random. ...

Perceptive souls will notice a Creative Commons license in the bottom of the left hand column. Or, if you’re reading the bare bones Population: One, it’s at the bottom of the page. I wound up choosing the very liberal Attribution license. This means that anyone can copy, distribute, or display these pages or works derived from these pages, as long as they give me credit. I doubt anyone will, mind you. This is pretty much just a philosophical statement. ...

I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 2.51 (original). This will result in no visible changes. Huzzah!

ColorMatch 5K: bookmarked cause it won’t work under Mozilla derivatives, as far as I can tell. Conceptually cool, though. Perfect for design gimps like me.

Referrer log spam has to be the best kind of spam ever. For $1,000, they’ll add your URL as a referrer in the httpd logs of thousands of weblogs. (They’ve hit me twice.) Right now, the user agent is “Mastadonte Referrer Advertising”, which is pretty easy to filter out; I assume they’ll change that to something that doesn’t give away the game. The great thing about this spam is that it’s so easy to nullify it. All we have to do is stop obsessively poring over our referrer logs. If we stop caring who links to us, we won’t ever be suckered into hitting one of their URLs. If we stop building those automated referrer display widgets (original) then the spammers get less advertising. ...

Phil Ringnalda makes explicit the Movable Type RSS .91 feed issue to which I just alluded, so yeah. His solution is more elegant than the hard-coded timezone I used (and was too embarassed to explain). I will be installing it at a later date.