Categories
Idle Tech

Thank you Akismet!

Akismet is a WordPress plug-in for controlling comment spam, if there are any questionable comments they will be held for moderation. While I do need to sort through a few junk comments every couple of weeks, there’s a bunch more I never need to even bother with. Any comment which is obviously spammy goes right into the junk folder and is never even presented for moderation. No muss, no fuss. You really should have Akismet enabled if you’re running WordPress… or Drupal, or Joomla, or Mediawiki or any other platform which supports Akismet.

Empty spam folder button
The “Easy Button” for managing comment Spam

Just how useful is it? This evening while I was reviewing some of the spam comments on my blog I took a look in the spam folder and was shocked to find that in the past week my blog has received almost 6,000 spam comments. Holy cow that’s a lot of junk.

In the old days I would have set commenting on old posts to time out and cull through new comments to delete the junk. The volume was never this huge, but it was still a pain. Thanks to Akismet I didn’t have to sort through a single bit of the garbage.

I started running Akismet a long time ago and only just now realized what a massive time saver it’s been over the years. Thanks Akismet and Automatic!

Categories
Tech Web

Happy 10th Birthday A Little Blog!

Back on November 4th, 2002 I made my first blog post. Ten years later, it’s still going strong.

image image

Yes, my posting rhythm could, at best, be described as indiscriminate… but it is true that A Little Blog has been providing the net with mediocre content for a full decade. Given my unshakable dedication to drivel of questionable value published at random intervals, I know you’re as shocked as I am that the lame stream media isn’t joining with me to herald this momentous occasion.

Have no fear! While the press has decided to ignore this event, the Internet is not. Accolades have been pouring in from all corners of the ‘net, from readers just like you!

Well, perhaps not just like you. Probably not even remotely like you, unless you happen to be a spammer with only the most tenuous grasp of the English language.

“Beats” writes:

I am gonna watch out for brussels. I’ll appreciate in case you continue this in future.

Praise from "white office desks hutch"

Nice blog right here! Also your web site a lot up very fast!

A nice thank you from "Dubai Escorts":

Thank you for making the sincere attempt to speak about this on http://www.little.org . I feel very strong about it and would like to read more. If it’s OK, as you achieve extra extensive wisdom, may you mind including extra articles similar to this one with additional info? It will be extraordinarily useful and helpful for me and my friends.

"Unfongorn" has been won over by my logic:

Undeniably believe that which you stated.

Existential light bulb humor is always welcome too, this one comes from "cheap customizable basketball jerseys"

How many doctors should it choose to use twist inside a bulb? That relies in whether or not it features medical health insurance.

"Stephanie Almasi" knows indistinct pseudo praise is the way to my heart:

It’s nearly impossible to find well-informed people about this subject, but you sound like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks

It’s not all comments from left field, some of the commenters are just regular people too, just ask them. For those who want to know what normal visitors think, check out this rave from "Jodee Halman":

Good write-up. I’m a normal visitor of your website and appreciate you taking the time to maintain the nice site. I will be a regular visitor for a long time.

I have no idea, however, what "Prace licencjackie" is trying to tell me:

Thanks for enabling me to get in mint condition belief about laptop systems. I as well possess the belief that one of the best ways to swear your laptop in perfect condition is by via a remorselessly synthetic defense, or else maybe case, that will tally greater than the highest of one’s computer.

So, here’s to another decade of intermittent posts of questionable quality. For you spammers out there, please, keep commenting. I found about 1% of your comments 100% hilarious (but the spam filter lets 0% through to the normal regular readers, so you can count on privacy for your thoughts).

Categories
Blog

Migrated from dasBlog to WordPress

After many good years of publishing via dasBlog I made the decision to jump ship and start using WordPress. dasBlog has been speedy, stable and very easy to style. It’s a great power user tool but I’m now at the point where I want the simplicity of a more mainstream product.

Following the lead of Shan and Mike I opted for WordPress and set about installing it this weekend. A quick web search turned up more than a few helpful pages on migrating content (Kavinda’s post is a good one stop shop). The key components to my migration from dasBlog v1.9 to WordPress v2.9.2 were:

  1. Getting the content out of DasBlog – DasBlog to BlogML exporter
  2. Getting the content into WordPress – BlogML import plug-in (Kavinda Munasinghe’s Version)
  3. Providing a permanent redirect from old links to new – Redirection Plug-in

I would not call the migration painless, but after a bit of tech-turbulence it all came together. I’m now up and running on WordPress and everything is running smoothly.

To share the love I’ve created a page with my tips for migrating from dasBlog to WordPress.

Categories
Idle

I think met net presence is spread too thin

I realize that it’s incredibly important for absolutely everyone to know what’s going on in my life… I’m concerned that the plummeting DOW is due to my lack of blog posts. It’s now clear I need to hire a personal assistant to act as my PR rep and keep all the important place on the net up to date.  To that ends I’m compiling a list of all the places I share info so my new slave can keep all in order.

Here’s my current accounting:

Blogs:

Social networks:

Aggregators:

Linking / News /Reviews

Picture Sharing

  • SmugMug
  • flickr (long since abandoned… but it’s still there)

Music

Categories
Blog

Yay, dasBlog 2.0!

I think it was pure voodo, but I have dasBlog 2.0 installed now.  I hope it sticks.


Now, off to copy all my content back, migrate my modified page layout, …

Categories
Tech

Ah, spaces

So, now that I’m digging on Windows Live Writer it is really easy for me to bounce around several different blogs for posting. I would, however, need a good mechanism for monitoring comments (which is always the issue for me). For a while I’ve been considering slowly teasing apart the content on my uber blog to allow me to have a little more coherent theme.

Does this mean my space is now going to spring back to life? Only time will tell.

Categories
Blog

Turning lemons into lemonade

image

The web, the ultimate tool for the generation and dissemination of irony, hasn’t lost it’s touch.  A recent post by a Google employee intended to illustrate how advertising can be used for issue management created a bit of… you guessed it… an issue.  While I’m sure the movie was not a target but provided Lauren Turner with a great segue into a pertinent topic,  the blogstorm which resulted highlights an important point: when blogging on a corporate site… just how much can you say?

When we were ramping up to do the Windows Live Hotmail beta we knew that in addition to the private beta tester forum we wanted to have a public mechanism for putting out the good word about our new baby.  The Hotmail team blog was a “grassroots” effort, driven by the line-level employees and not by our PR department and, as a result, we needed to make it clear to the powers-that-be that we had our act together and weren’t going to post something which would prove embarrassing.  To smooth the way I wrote up a guide to communicating with the outside world which covered newsgroups, dealing with press calls and, of course, blogging. 

Personal blogs are just that, personal blogs.  Everyone puts the requisite disclaimer on their blog (“the opinions expressed here… blah blah blah”) but it’s pretty much accepted that unless you have a company logo emblazoned at the top of your page there is no other source for the drivel contained within.  There’s no need to set up regulations for your own blog.

If, however, you’re planning on starting a blog for your team, product or whatever you must set up some guidelines, there’s no way around it.  If your company already has a policy on blogging, start there, it will provide a great framework for your new rules.  There are also a ton of great blogging guidelines blog posts on the web.  In the fallout of the Google’s Sicko-gate Matt Cutts wrote a good Company Blogging 101 post with great tips for corporate bloggers.  The article well written and broken into easily digestible sections. If you blog on a site for your employer (or a site which is identified with a work project) I highly recommend you read Matt’s post and figure out how you can work the salient points into your own policy or mental framework.

So, back to my original question: how much can you say on a company-sponsored blog?  The answer: as much as you like… but you have to establish the bounds well in advance.  Corporate America is starting to realize the value of blogging as a tool for customer relations, PR, advertising and more but many companies are still quite shy when it comes to taking the plunge.  Creating a solid set of posting guidelines will keep your boss and PR firm happy (and keeping your team blog on the net will make your customers happy).

Link: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/company-blogging-101/

Categories
Blog

Blogging for the MTV generation

Web pages are complicated.  People want to share their life stories and pictures, but learning HTML is hard (ask Trina).  So the world of blogging was born. 

Blog software has made it very easy to set up and maintain your content, whether it be a running account of how all your cat’s hairballs look like past presidents, or something much, much less significant.  Blogs do, however, have the problem that they often get abandoned for great lengths of time (Dick’s blog comes to mind :D).

So, what’s today’s generation of zero-attention-span kids to do?  Sign up for twitter, of course.

follow Reeves at http://twitter.com

Twitter is, Don MacAskill appropriately called it, a service for microblogging.  It’s optimized for very short, simple posts.  It will even prompt you periodically via SMS or IM to find out what you’re doing.  After a quick setup you can add your mobile phone number and Twitter will send you an SMS every 24 hours if you haven’t updated (a reply to the SMS will post right to your twitter log).  You can also add twitter as an IM buddy if you’re using the right service.

It’s a fascinating little toy, with all the needed components to make it entertaining for all of about a week (friends lists, ease of use and cool little widgets to add to your other web pages).  For me, however, the signal to noise ratio is way too high to be useful.  There is a public timeline which is sure to get crowded with legitimate and illegitimate spam (when I checked there were two posts within minutes from BBC sports) and switching to a private timeline will require a set of friends as exhibitionistic as yourself.

Still… entertaining enough to play with for a while… though I won’t be able to afford to have the SMS notifications turned on (the closest local text is the UK).

Categories
Blog

Migrating content from Blogger to dasBlog

I started my first blog back in 2002 on Blogger but switched to using dasBlog in late 2003 when I was wanting more control of my site.  I’ve wanted to migrate the content over from the old site for a long time but never could find a tool to do the heaving lifting… until today when I discovered Nick Schweitzer’s “Coding Monkey” site.  Nick has clear instructions as well as a GUI tool to help switch from Blogger to dasBlog.  The process was quick and painless and his instructions were straight-forward.  If you’ve been looking to import your old Blogger content into dasBlog but weren’t sure how, check out Nick’s instructions.


Importer UI






It’s more for me than anyone else… but if you want to find my old posts, you can just click on the “Old Blog” topic on the right.

Categories
Blog Microsoft

Hello? Steve? Cancel the Joe Isuzu ad campaign.

CNN: the most trusted name in news?  Must be on the web, because television is loosing ground to the Internet as a trusted source for information.  From that I segue gracefully into… the Edelman trust barometer found Microsoft is the most trusted name in business.



The Edelman Trust Barometer found Microsoft Corporation the most trusted global company, followed by iconic companies in their home markets, including Toyota in Japan, Haier in China, Samsung in South Korea, and Petrobras in Brazil.


I think MS is a great place to work, and having the company get this type of recognition feels good (especially for someone who used to be a closet MS employee).  I realize that Edelman is a PR firm which counts MS as one of its biggest clients, but this was, after all, a survey.


While I led off with the fun part of the survey… for me this is the really interesting part:



In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.


In other words, most people in the US find the average employee is a more trust-worthy spokesman than the CEO.  Any connection to the surge in blogging?  It’s pretty hard to preen cause from effect here but I, for one, am hugely thankful for the change in culture at Microsoft which made it possible for employees like me to feel comfortable blogging in relative freedom about our work.


I suppose that brings me back to the beginning… perhaps the trust in Microsoft will not be limited to a single survey or a fleeting one-year occurrence.  With any luck, as more people are able to get a glimpse of the people working at Microsoft and the pride they have in their work, the world will realize that for us it’s really about building cool software, not crushing your enemies and seeing them driven before you.  While our moniker of “the evil empire” is something I look on with amusement, it’s not a nickname I view with pride.





For a deeper dive on the topic of what can happen for company trust when the employees step out from behind the protective shadow of a company’s CEO and PR machine I recommend you check out Richard Edelman’s essay The Me2 Revolution on his blog.