Joseph Scott’s Blog

I’ve been looking for another host and have decided to give Site5 a try. I would have preferred a provider using FreeBSD (like Pair) instead of Linux, but I can deal with that (time to learn more about bash). The other bummer was lack of PostgreSQL support (like Bluehost).

So if you are reading this then you’ve picked up the DNS updates. Let me know if you notice something broken that I’ve missed.

Several folks noticed a problem with the Official Google Blog recently. I ran into this via Bloglines with the post Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3 (P.S. Just t... by trey. Since that post has since been removed (returns a 404 page not found error) I took the screen shot shown above to preserve the moment :-)

Turns out that Google had deleted their own blog.

Cool, the folks at Search Engine Watch have a screen shot of the full post.

It has been about six weeks since I wrote my review of Akismet. Things had been going fine, but the last week or so has seen a large increase in the number of comment spam items that are not being caught, especially yesterday and today. I’ve asked about this via their contact form to see if this is something unique to me or if there is something going on at Akismet.

UPDATE Fri 24 Mar 2006 @ 4:30pm: I suspect the problems I’ve been having are related to Akismet database problem that was just reported. Interesting that the problem seems to involve taking too long to get a response back for free users.

I’ve been working on a ping service comparable to Ping-o-Matic, with the goal of providing a much faster response time for users. I’m at the point where I need an initial batch of users to try it out and provide feedback before it goes completely public. If you are interested then drop me a note using my contact form and I’ll point you to the website.

Following along with addition of the contact form page, I’ve added a comments page. This page shows the last 15 comments across all posts. I’ve added a link to it on the top menu.

I’ve put up a contact form using Ryan’s WordPress Contact Form plugin. It is available from the menu bar at the top of each page also.

I’ve been putting this off for too long and now that I’m tweaking a few more things that might break comments (but hopefully won’t), I figured now was the time to provide another way for readers to easily get ahold of me. So if you find something broken drop me note.

As I’ve already hinted at earlier my boss (hi Jim!) has a new blog at http://sonicchicken.net/blog/. Welcome to the mad house :-)

Last week Russell brought up the idea of an RSS only blog. The general idea is to only provide content via a feed instead of the traditional web page method. I think this quickly became an interesting question that wasn’t going to develop in to something particularly useful. Producing something usable wasn’t as important the other ideas that this question spawned and the conversation surrounding it.

The next experiment with blogging and feeds that Russell is trying out is forms in feeds. He took the first logical step, adding a comment form as part of a blog entry in his feed. I tried it out in Bloglines and it seemed to work correctly. There are a few problems that I see with this though.

1. Information (like your name, URL and email) can’t be remembered via this method. I suppose there will be some who will see this as a good excuse to extend RSS or ATOM. I don’t think it is worth it.
2. Potential for comment spam. Russell moderates all of his comments so it isn’t a huge issue for him. I’ve said it before, if you are going to try something new or develop a new technology, take some time to think about how it can be used for evil. Yes comment spam is evil.
3. It may not work in all cases. That might turn out to be a none issue, after all there is nothing stopping people from adding comments the old fashioned way.

I think there is some potential here, although I think a variant of this idea will be more useful. I’d like to see a link that pops up a little comment window. It would work similar to the way the del.icio.us bookmarklet does, it would be able to remember your info, ask some additional info to avoid comment spam and should work in most cases because it simply another link. I should work up a WordPress plugin or something to try out this idea. In the mean time try out Russell’s comment form in his feed and see what you think.

If you’ve ever been here before you’ll probably quickly realize that I’ve redesigned the site. I finally took some time over a few weeks to put together my own layout. I borrowed the feel of the layout from Russell Beattie. I’m not done yet, but it seems to be functional, so I figured it was better to get it up an live than to wait for it be complete/perfect.

I’m making more use of WordPress’s page feature and several plugins to get the features that I wanted. Here’s a list of the plugins I’m using (so far):

• WP-GateKeeper to prevent comment spam. This is a plugin that I was already using, but it is worth another mention.
• Jerome’s Keywords Plugin: This plugin manages tags for WP posts. This seems to be one of the best tag plugins for WP, it certainly has a lot of documention.
• Wordpress PHP Exec Plugin: The pages feature in WP is nice, but I needed to be able to run code from within a page, this plugin has worked well for that so far.

In the short term I need to get some sort search functionality going again. Perhaps I’ll just stick with using Google for that. I’m hoping that tagging my posts will be more useful than using the categories support in WP.