Recently in Blog Category

I figure I should start out with the obvious one (and at the same time try to start to fulfill it).

I totally sucked on blogging in 2007. Most of all, it was a time issue, but I think I need to make more time in my life for things other than work, drinking and watching TV (more on those things later). Also, I feel I have lots of document about my life, which is the whole point of having this blog.

I also write for 2 other sites, which I have totally been slacking on.

First is my Dream Theater site http://www.dreamt.org/. I get lots of information in my RSS reader about Dream Theater, but never seem to actually put it up on the site. This has to start now and I even tried to be good about that by posting something today.

Second, I recently was made captain of Metroblogging Boston, a site about local things happening in Boston. I've finally recruited a little bit of help, so now I need to step up and start posting things myself. I am out and about in Boston often enough, I should really have lots to add here and its one of the big things I plan on doing this year.

So, three sites, three different areas of my life, all need to be documented more this year.

As I was thinking about blogging some today, I realized that it was some time around now I started this. So, I looked back and this past Friday was the five year anniversary of this place. Wow :) I don't think I ever thought I would keep this up as long as I have. (Though some would say I have no kept it up). Well, just wanted to mention that publicly since it was something I noticed.

After an ugly first attempt at upgrading to 3.16, SixApart finally released a patch for the issues I was experiencing. After re-upgrading and adding the patch, it looks like things are going just fine now. Woo!

This is the third anniversary of starting this blog. Originally, Skadz's Junt, I finally came up with a better name eventually :) This is post 1353. Damn, I like to run my mouth :)

Movable Type Publishing Platform: Movable Type 3.15 released

This has a major security update, so go and upgrade!

Seems like the comment spammers don't take Christmas off. Got over 160 spams on the blog over the last few days. Finished cleaning them up this afternoon. More later.

I just want to send a very big thank you to Movable Type. Since installing MT 3.14 last night, I have had over 1000 hits on my comment script and my machine is still running fine. And trust me, it doesn't take a lot to knock this machine down.

Movable Type Publishing Platform: Movable Type 3.14 released

It's out and has the fixes in place to stop comment spam from taking out machines (hopefully). I've re-enabled comments, so let's see what happens.

The latest version of MT-Blacklist provides stats on comment spams blocked. I enabled it about this time on Friday and have since have 583 comment spams blocked. Ugh, I hate spammers.

Can someone please explain to me why some blog softwares are not coming with full RSS feeds enabled? Movable Type for a long time came with crap excerpt feeds, but with the the release of MT3, they fixed it so their 1.0, 2.0 and Atom feeds are all now full feeds. The one minor problem is that in an upgrade, they don't upgrade the feeds and leave whatever template was in place. So, anyone who has recently upgraded to MT3, go get the default feeds off the MT site and FIX YOU FEEDS.

So, now that MT is doing it right, why aren't other people? A few feeds I read recently changed over to Wordpress and they ship excerpt feeds now. On some of these sites, I have actually had full feeds turn in to excerpt feeds because of this upgrade.

I'm sorry, but I don't have time to go from site to site reading blog posts. I doubt other people do either. I have over 600 feeds I try to keep up on and having to click through to read things just is not something I am willing to do.

So, people, fix your RSS feeds. Blog software writer, SHIP with full RSS feeds.

Ignore all this ....

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Though I have been a big user and tried helping out a lot with Straw, an aggregator for Gnome, the recent fall off in development and a number of big annoyances in the latest code has made me look around some for other aggregators.

Yesterday, Mikael announced a new version of Blam!, an aggregator for Gnome witten in Mono. It looked interesting, so I decided to take a look.

So far, I like it. It's still missing a lot of features I am used to in Straw, but it is getting there slowly. Since I started playing with it and saw a lot of these missing features, I started bugging it up. Hopefully some of these features will get implemented soon and I will be able to make this my default aggregator.

Technorati launched their new look today. Looks real nice. Also the BETA tag is finally gone. Congrats folks!

Also, they have launched politics.technorati.com to kick off political coverage starting with the DNC.

Press Release Here.

Check out our new header graphic on Bostom Metroblogging!

Welcome DC.Metroblogging!

Jeremy points out that the "Brad Bug" is a known issue over a Yahoo. Good to hear. It freaked me out a bit last night.

Sean announced 3 new cities in the Metroblogging world today. Boston, Seattle, and Vienna.

The most important, of course is Boston, as I am one of the bloggers blogging there :)

Mark has released Universal Feed Parser 3.0.

Not that anyone ever doubted it, but Joi continues to prove how much of a rockstar he is by getting his face on CNN.com

Very strange seeing someone you know on CNN :)

Hmm, not sure if this is BloGTK or MT, but the last couple of posts which I used BloGTK to post came out really funky.

Pretty much once a week or so, someone in my aggregator complains that they got a ton of comment spam. For some reason these people are not yet running MT-Blacklist.

This is most definitely the easiest and best way to keep comment spam off your blog. I got killed a few times and finally spent the time to install it and LOVE having it every minute. I still get comment spam from time to time, but with just one click, it goes away and the URL is added to the blacklist.

So, people, stop complaining and just install this software.

Well, this blog is 2 years old today. Scares me that I have kept it up this long. Lots of randomness over time, hopefully I'll someday find something really good to write about :)

So, I decided to skip BloggerCon this morning. Needed my sleep and have too much on the TiVo. Also, with Chey not here, I was not all that motivated to go. Hopefully I'm going to meet up with some of the misfits (yes, this is directed at you, Joey) this evening.

From my notes from BloggerCon last year:

Talk about using a Wiki to plan BC2004, Dave doesn't seem to much like the idea, too much ability for people to change. Talked about how he sort of did it, but more of a controlled directory structure.

After the success of the wiki for things like E-Tech is this still disagreeable? It would AT LEAST be nice to have somewhere to post notes and thoughts afterwards. But, why not have something where some of the planning/idea exchange/etc can be a community aspect? We talk alot in the blog community about things like community and echo chambers, well, isn't one person planning a community conference almost the ultimate echo chamber? It's just one person's ideas going off on to other places and hoping it works right and people write about it.

I guess some would argue that they are planning some of this at the Berkman Thursday night sessions, but the limited number of people attending those doesn't seem like a broad enough scope of people to be planning a conference that spans so many different types of people.

Speaking of BloggerCon, I'm planning on heading over to the People's Republic to enjoy the fun. My biggest worry right now is that a lot of the people who made it enjoyable last year don't seem to be involved at this point. Names like Halley, Joi, Rageboy, Accordion Guy (though I would bet he will show up for other reasons), Doc, Udell, AKMA and many more seem to be missing from the list. I worry that losing some of these better known people (I won't say A-list) may take away from the show some. I really hope it doesn't, but I have to find something to worry about :)

Can someone explain to me why MT supplies an Atom feed with full articles, but the default for RSS and RDF are still summaries? Very annoying.

Dave whipped up a hack while at etech to search the blog cosmos for product links, well, more specifically Amazon product links. The output can be seen at Technorati: Top Products, with context. Looks cool. WIsh I could get an RSS feed, but I guess that may be part of the whole paid membership to technorati. Will have to look in to this some other time. Neat stuff though.

seanbonner: Clerks / 237 friendsters?

Bahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Now THAT is funny.

From Jeremy Zawodny:

Configuring MovableType to Ping Yahoo: Three Easy Steps

As usual, keeping up on pings to sites make your site easier for other to find and keep updated on.

After just linking to Dave, it made me realize why anchored permalinks suck. If a permalink is near the end of a page, when viewing the page, the anchor you were trying to point to isn't at the top of the page and therefore renders it useless and you have to read the whole thing anyways.

The Blog Site is a new site about blogging. The amusing part? The top of the page in big letters says "Bloggers, keep informed! Join TheBlogSite.com's Newletter...". This is totally amusing to me, shouldn't it say subscribe to the RSS feed? I don't need any more e-mail, thankyouverymuch.

I hate when the web causes me to lie. Looks like BlogShares is coming back soon

BlogShares has closed its doors. It was a fun game for a bit, but with some early on bugs and a sever lack of time on my part, I never really played with it all that much. I know some people spent some good time on it though. I removed the link from my side bar.

Halley is talking about The Big Saturday Night Lie. She says that many (if not all) of the blog crew are staying in on Saturdays, but not blogging to make it look like they have a life.

Well, I am usually out at least one of the two nights of the weekend. Depends mostly on what's going on, how my cash situation is, my mood, etc. If I am home on a weekend night, one of two things happen.

One possibility is going the exact opposite of what Halley says and blogging like a maniac. Cleaning up the 20 or 30 web browser windows that have been opened over the course of the last few days and left unread usually leads to at least one or two blog posts. Also, I usually have some other thoughts that come through while sitting in front of the computer with the TV spewing random shows off the TiVo.

On the other hand, if I am home on a weekend night, it usually means there was some reason I couldn't go out. I have had a standby bar for mny years that I have no problem going in all alone. So, if I had a reason for not going out, besides being having something to do at home, it usually means I am in a bad mood. Not being able to go out because of money or not being in a great mood, usually puts me in a even worse mood. If I'm in a bad mood and blog, I usually end up saying too much or whining about the bad things in my life and that's something I try to avoid on my blog, though it does come through from time to time.

So, Halley, track me all you want :) I'm usually out having fun, not hiding from the world trying to put on a big mask for the public.

Well, BlogRolling seems to be rather kerfuxored right now, so it is just sending the same URL over and over again for blog rolls. So, no I have no idea of who this Laura chracter is or why her name is over and over again in my blog roll. Hopefully Jason will be fixing soonest.

Update: Jason has restored from tape and everything is working again. He said it was a tape from Saturday morning, so if you added any links to your blogrolling blog roll since then, they will need to be re-added.

So, Bruce Sterling has a blog (Beyond the Beyond) over at Wired. One gapping problem? No RSS feed that I can find. Is Wired this disconnected from the blog world that they don't realize this is a necessity?

Well, now that I have started down the road of making Movable Type a CMS (content management system) by making the reading list in MT, I am wondering if I should just move all the other pages that are part of this site in to MT. It would make it a bit easier as I would be able to make changes from the web easily, have it rebuild certain pages based on changes to the blog, etc. Plus, it would give me a standard interface to editing pages.

So, anyone who has done this, has this been helpful to you or am I better staying in my Xemacs and SCP environment?

Since Jason put the new BlogRolling code in to place this weekend, I decided to try it out and see if the OPML import function was working now (since it was broken in the previous implementation. Well, I am happy to report that it does! (well, one does, one doesn't, still need to bug this). So, now the Blog Roll on the right hand side of the main page is powered by BlogRolling.

I added James's Solution for comments spams on to the site this morning. Hopefully it will block the Spam Bots for now.

Scott point out a new Feedster feature, comment spam reporting.

Scott has the first part implemented in that you can now report IP addresses that spam your blog. The next piece is going to be an API of some sort to allow people to check against the DB when someone actually posts a comment.

My one small problem? What if a vindictive person deicdes they don't like someone who is commenting on their blog and starts adding them to the database and gives a legitimate person whom someone doesn't like a bad rep? I would say there needs to be some level of a once per user or something protection, so that a person can not get blacklisted due to dislike.

Otherwise, cool service, will have to remember to use it if I ever start getting comment spam, which I would assume will start happening sooner or later as more and more people are linking to me these days.

So, headed over to BloggerCon yesterday for the free Day 2. Was lots of fun. Will have some more stuff up on that later.

Post wrap-up, a number of us, including Dave, Doc, Joey, Boss Ross, AKMA, Si, Jim, Phil, Wendy, Britt and some others headed out for some coffee and continued talk. Some talked, Joey played some Accordion, some danced. Was a good time. Was nice getting to meet and talk to more people than I had had a chance to during the sessions.

After hanging out for a while, a bunch of us headed over to have some dinner. Dinner was fun. Sat next to Dave and got to talk with him a bunch. Lots of good discussion around the table. Lots of talk about politics and weblog.

Dave and I still disagree on how aggregators should work. He likes an aggregator that takes everything and shows it all off in one long list. I still like the 3 pane approach. Though, I do feel that if I could do categories and then have groupings of posts I would be more inclined to read the way Dave does. I need to hack my aggregator so it can do this.

After dinner, Joey and I headed to downtown Boston for some hijinx and some accordion fun. We first went to Sissys to see Greg play. Joey got up and jammed a few tunes with him (pictures coming to Joey's site soon). They played Squeezebox and something else. After that we went over to Clarke's to see Chad and Stu play. Yet again, Joey jumped right up on stage and played a few songs with them. Was a great time and we closed out the bars.

Here, sitting in Joi's talk. Left my wifi card at home, don't ask. Writing some things down in a wiki right now, will try and post things up later.

Dave is asking people to let him know if they are travelling to BloggerCon.

I ask this. Does taking the T from Boston to Cambridge count as travel? :)

A reminder to anyone coming in to town on Saturday for BloggerCon, but not actually going on Saturday, there is a Red Sox game, a playoff game at that. The time is still TBD, but still, it means the T will probably a bit extra crowded. Also, the Kenmore Square area will probably be chaotic.

The BloggerCon 2003 Press Release

I should be around day 2. Also, we may be trying to get some people from #joiito who will be around on Saturday, but only going on Sunday together. Joey and I have already talked about trying to possibly find some Guinness around Boston. Somehow I think we will succeed in that quest :)

At least someone thinks I have a good blog name

People who don't use GUIDs. My aggregator is NOT very good at figuring out updated posts versus new posts without em. So, please folks, use GUIDs. It will make aggregators much happier. Thanks!

This public service message brought to you by the letter Q and the number 3.

at being a pain in the ass, as can be seen over at cms's blog. Hopefully he finally is all done playing with it and will now just keep posting.

The BloggerCon 2003 Weblog: Blogroll for BloggerCon

You should head here to sign up for the Blogrolls for BloggerCon if you are coming to day 1, 2 or both.

I'll be there for day 2.

People who have full feeds to their sites (which I think EVERYONE should have unless they are trying to make money off of it) who do something (most likely upgrade their software) and end up NOT having a full feed anymore. This happened to one of the sites I read about a month ago and now happened to another one today. No pointing fingers, but it is VERY annoying.

If you aren't already, you should be pinging BlogRolling. I noticed that my entries were not being picked up by it and therefore I wasn't getting updated on some people's lists. You can do this by sending a ping to:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

That's my helpful blog hint of the day.

Weblogs Compendium - RSS Readers

A pretty complete list of RSS aggregators.

Craigslist RSS

Well, this guy has made it so at least I can read all the titles in my aggregator. Still would rather have the full articles. I think I am going to have to write something to do this.

dwlt.net | tapestry

A whole bunch of your favorite comics available via RSS. Now, can they just add Userfriendly?

a) People who don't have RSS feeds
b) People who don't have FULL RSS feeds (unless its a place that makes money on ads, there is NO reason to not have a full feed)
c) People who have an RSS feed, but don't have a link from their page to it.

I'll probably have more at some point.

I love people who don't understand blogs at all. This post (from almost 2 months ago), got a comment today from someone today who obviously doesn't. Or at least doesn't understand this thing called an opinion. Says in his comment "Mate, if you aint got nothin good to say shut the fuck up!". Umm, no, this is my blog, my place to write, I can say whatever the fuck I would like. And anyways, do you send letters to every critic that says bad things about something you like? Somehow I doubt it. The funniest part, he put a fake address in as his e-mail address, so not only is he a whiner who doesn't understand opinions or blogs, but also is a fuckin coward that someone might actually respond to his useless comments.

Big ups to Juri for fixing just about every problem I had with Straw, my news aggregator, over the course of the last 24 hours.

Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It is a NY Times article about what people write in their blogs. Interesting read. Though I go in to my personal life somewhat I try not to talk about my friends or anything. Also, since I have no dating life, I don't need to worry about blogging any of that, well, at least today. Who knows what will happen in the future.

All in all, definitely makes you think some about the content you put out on your site. I keep telling myself I need to find better things to write about rather than random things that happen in my life. I really should get better at posting the random thoughts in my head, some of them would at least be somewhat amusing.

I do find that I am not very good at organizing my thoughts, so writing something entertaining is difficult, but if I did it more and more often, I probably would get better at it.

Well, I guess its my blogiversary(sp?) I posted my first post here a year ago today. Yay, me!

I'm not sure if this just DIDN'T cause an warning in MT before or if it is representative of a new problem, but has anyone seen a lot of failures trying to ping weblogs.com lately?

well, damn boring. Some change in the CVS code of my aggregator broke it completely this morning. I submitted a bug straight away. It seems as if the coder works either while I am asleep or in the early morning, so hopefully it will get fixed in the morning. But, due to this, I was without one today, so I didn't read any of my blogs. Considering my blog roll is DAMN big these days, its going to mean A LOT of catch up tomorrow. Ugh.

Dave is coming to Harvard next week to do a live version of his weblog. Could be very interesting. May have to stop by this one.

Can everyone do two things here:

a) Make sure you have a valid feed by running it through this.
b) Put your content in your feed! This bugs me when I am reading a feed in an aggregator and have to actually go out to the actual web page to read the text of the information. It's real nice to be able to just sit in the aggregator and read from there rather than having to spawn new windows.

Thankyouverymuch

Why can't places like diaryland and xanga provide external RSS/XML feeds? Rather annoying. I have a number of friends/blogs I read that are on these services and its a pain in the neck to go check them all the time (especially now that I have a news aggregator working). Anyone out there work for these guys and want to fix this?

I FINALLY have a REAL news aggregator up and running. I'm using Straw which is a Gnome2 aggregator written in python. It took a bunch of work and fighting with LOTS of python packages but now its all up and happy. I have 38 feeds going in to it. I thought I had more than that. I guess now that I have a real one of these working, I can start adding other feeds which seem to be interesting. The one last thing I need to do now is yell at my friends who don't have XML feeds (yes, this means you Lukas). Ok, hacking done, feeds added, time to sleep.

This is post number 200. Considering I started in late April this year and only had three posts in April, May and June combined, I think I have done pretty good in keeping this up. It has been a nice outlet for thoughts in my head as well as music and movie reviews, tech stuff, news happenings, etc. I really am liking this whole thing. I think if I put up 200 posts in 6 months (well 197 to be exact), I can't wait to see how much posting I do next year. I have definitely gotten more and more in to this as time has gone. I still need a real news aggregator considering the amount of blogs I read daily has gone up considerably over time, but other than that, I am really enjoy the whole blog world.

A nice article over on digitalMASS about some "important" Boston-based bloggers. Scott says he normally does a technology trends for the next year article around now, but doesn't really see any. He says watching these blogs may help you see things as they are coming up. A good list. I've added those I didn't have yet on my "aggregator" on to it. Only small problem is 3 of the 7 don't have XML feeds. Boo hiss. Blogs are supposed to have XML feeds so they can be aggregated. Get on this guys.

It seems like everyone and their brother is blogging the SuperNova conference out in Palo Alto today and tomorrow. You can find out some of the names here at the group blog. From there you can probably find a list of others who are blogging it as well. Sounds like some interesting talk going on at this point. Its nice to be able to "watch" a conference and "hear" what is going on. The even better part is hearing pieces from many people's perspectives. I saw some of this when Jeremy Zawodny blogged the pieces of PHPCon he went to (which can be found here), but have never seen it on this level. I wonder how promoters will react to this. At a conference like this one where decentralization is the main topic, I would think they will be excited about it. On the other hand, a show where people are attending classes and such, would there be a worry that less and less people would show up because this was being done? If I could attend all sorts of conferences virtually would I ever want to pay to go to one? On the other hand, if I am doing this, isn't it my duty (that may be too strong a word) to return the favor and go to conferences myself and blog them for the masses as well? All very interesting stuff to think about.

I am turning in to a total blog whore. I find ones that I find interesting and start reading them. Any that have RSS feeds, I throw on to the news page and keep up with them. The ones that don't I stop by at least a few times a day to see what they are saying. I definitely am finding this an interesting way to find out about people and see what is happening in their lives.

I even keep too many blogs. I keep this one, my Dream Theater site, and I even keep one for work. That one is locked away at this point, but I do have grand plans of bringing a proposal to some of the higher ups to set them up for everyone at the company. I think it would be both a good source of knowledge management as well as a good way for people to express ideas about parts of the company they are not necessarily involved in. I know that my last 2 companies were very open. The last one we were told very often that we should express our feelings and not fear anything bad coming out of it. We set up lots of mailing lists to let people vent. I think this is somewhat a step above that. The company before, well, I took over. I'm like that sometimes.

I've even gotten very good at keeping this place up to date. I hope to keep writing as often as possible. I like being able to talk about the random things I either think about in my head or talk to myself about. Yes, I talk to myself. Live alone for a while, you end up doing it. Hopefully my forum here will help me slow up on some of that.

I upgraded to Movable Type 2.51 this evening. Its only a bug fix release, so hopefully there will be no other changes. The changelog is here if you want to see what has changed. The big thing for me is that it fixes my bookmarklet for pinging Trackback on individual articles. Yay!

I set up category rss feeds with some help from andersja after reading this post on his site. Now to read the rest of the optimizations.

Oh yeah, they are at http://www.skadz.com/junt/archives/categories/CATEGORY/index.xml

You would replace CATEGORY there with whatever the real category is.

I set up skadz.com: in the news tonight. It's basically a news aggreagator of some of the pages I read on a normal basis. Going to extend it as I find more pages to read (and as I figure out RSS feeds for some friends sites). It was built using Rippy the Aggregator as its backend.

Found this today:

How do I make Movable Type output valid RSS?

I did this on the site. Anyone else running MT should do this too.

All Too True