Weblogging

Recovery from covid continues. Allow me to express the sentiment that wearing a mask is a very small price to pay for avoiding literally three weeks of reduced capacity, one week of which was complete downtime. I installed an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, so if you’re a Mastodon person you can effectively follow this blog at @Bryant@popone.innocence.com. This works very well for me, because it means I can easily put my longer-form permanent thoughts here and everything I post on my main Mastodon account ( @BryantD@dice.camp) can be transient. ...

Finished up the work discussed previously; I’m now planning on running an update weekly on Monday, which will aggregate the previous week’s reviews. There are working spoiler blocks. An example post: Movie Reviews: 6/27/2022 to 7/3/2022. The code for all this is now public at https://github.com/BryantD/letterboxd-feed-wp.

This is very obvious in retrospect: the reason my WordPress to Dreamwidth crossposting stopped working is because Dreamwidth made security changes and as a result you don’t get to use your password for the API any more. Good change! If you cluelessly don’t pay attention, though, your WordPress plugin will stop working. Solution: go to the Mobile Post Settings page and generate yourself a new API key. Easy. This is a very light excuse for a weekly post but man, this week was kind of disfocused for various reasons.

Come to think of it, what I’d like to see in comment spam detection next is this algorithm: whenever three comments are submitted within an hour, and all three contain the same URL, add the full hostname in the URL to the spam filter list and notify me. Yeah, it’s open to denial of service, but it’s a weak DoS in that anyone who’s denied service can get around it easily by not posting URLs with that hostname. And there are significantly more spammers than there are people carrying out DoS attacks on my comments.

Ranchero Software released the beta of MarsEdit (original) the other day. My preliminary feeling is that it’s nice and slim and practical. As Ginger has noted more than once, ecto is kind of getting increasingly bloated. The latest version, 2.0, has a WYSIWYG editor that isn’t quite there yet, and it’s all about autoformatting for you, and so forth — and I don’t really want my weblog editor to be a RTF editor. Sure, I can switch into a simpler mode, but why should I buy into all the overhead? ...

Dave Winer, 3/23/04: The Cluetrain says we should be more open and communicate. I’ve bought into that. So have the Trotts and their investors. If they have to walk on eggshells in order to communicate, they’re going to do less of it. So try to give them the benefit of the doubt, and try to work with them. I will too, overlooking how they’ve treated me in the past, because it’s good for the community for us all to work together. ...

Six Apart took another crack at Movable Type pricing. It’s a lot simpler. For non-commercial use, you can pay $69.95 to get up to five authors and unlimited blogs, or you can pay $99.95 to get unlimited authors and unlimited blogs. They’ve also fixed most of the license issues. For me, this license and this pricing scheme work. I’ll be upgrading sometime soonish, most likely. I expect there are still people for whom it won’t work, and I think that’s a perfectly rational decision too.

The only thing I really don’t like about MT-Blacklist is that I have to fiddle around and cut and paste URLs and click a lot when I want to mark a comment as spam. This is mostly my own fault for using an old CRT-based mail reader, but still. So I wrote a little script that takes an MovableType comment email as input and runs MT-Blacklist on the comment. Now, whenever I get comment spam, I pipe the email alert to this script and the comment spam goes away. This works for me. It may not work for you. No warrantee, etc. Test before using. Requires the CPAN modules WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TokeParser.

Full kudos to Adriaan Tijsseling, who tracked down my ecto bug (as bitched about earlier) and will be fixing it in the next version. In the meantime, I skillfully avoid the bug by not using the Text Only option for the toolbar. The fact that he kept track of who was having the problem and let me know personally about the fix wins points with me.

Jon Udell has a very good article about using Bayesian techniques to categorize blog postings. I think this is rather interesting, because I keep meaning to try Bayesian filtering on (alternately) Usenet and my mailing lists. The difference between me and Udell is that he went out and did it and got paid for writing about it. Now that he’s pointed me at the right tools, I may try this on Usenet. Bwah hah ha.