Category: development

I spent too much time yesterday at OMG Clothing perusing and rating t-shirt slogans. Then, I found the “Submit your slogan” button, and had to throw in some of my own.\
My favorites, which they didn’t accept (probably because of all the funny characters), were extremely nerdy. They were so nerdy that when I sent them to my nerd friends, they called me a nerd. They were so nerdy that only nerds who are nerdy about CSS would get them. So, for your nerding pleasure, I give you my first two CSS jokes:

<code>#me + #you { margin:0; }</code>

<code>#town { color:#f00; background:#f00; }</code>

Oh, but the nerdiness didn’t stop there! I also submitted some search nerd slogans:

• Google told me you suck.
• Your PageRank blows.\
  I know… I’m hopeless. I am now hopelessly nerdy. I don’t think there’s any going back. I used to be just geeky, and proud of it. I’m afraid I breached nerd a while ago and didn’t notice until it was too late. I apologize to my family and friends… I didn’t mean to be a nerd. It just kind of happened.

How cool is this? I found out this morning that AOL has an IM bot for Yellow Pages. So, next time I’m out of town and need to find a movie theater or restaurant, I can just send an IM from my Sidekick to AOLYellowPages and get what I need.\
I love IM bots for mobile stuff. Short messages, text interface, no waiting for images and pages to download that may or may not render on the Sidekick’s craptacular browser. I use ZolaOnAOL to get headlines, and play games while waiting in lines. I hear there’s a mythical bot for MapQuest too, but I haven’t found that one yet.\
AOLJournals will let you post to an AOL blog, but yeah… I know most people who read this don’t have one of those.\
Any other IM bots I should know about?

Big changes at work coming next week. I’ll be doing something different, playing a different role, and it will hopefully be big. Big is good.\
In other news, I got new pants. Not just any pants, smaller pants. I’ve dropped two pants sizes in the past year. My only new year’s resolution this year is to continue. My goal is to lose fifty pounds this year. That would bring my weight loss to a grand total of one hundred pounds. It won’t be easy, but I’ll get it done. It’s only a pound a week… small steps, small changes, gradual improvements.\
And it’s only January, and I already can’t wait for SXSW.

My pal Jon is a genius (he says he’s retarded, so I guess that makes him a savant). His latest Klanko is amazing. It’s my favorite piece of his yet (and I loved the Klanko Discovers His Middle Finger so much, I bought the original artwork). Read it now, before Open Book makes you pay for it.

Wow, Anil went and mentioned my class on the Six Apart Professional Network. That’s like getting your cat on the cover of Cat Fancy or something.\
If you’re coming here from there, the class is for beginners, and covers basics like installation, editing and customizing templates, provides annotated copies of the default templates and goes over some useful/fun plugins. If you’re comfortable doing those things, then the class probably isn’t for you.

So, I’m cleaning out my old e-mail, deleting everything older than a year, and I just realized that in 2004, I received and stored (which means it’s not counting spam) over 24,000 pieces of e-mail to my work address, and over 1,400 (not counting things that get moved to other folders like listservs, comments on my site, breaking news, etc) to my personal e-mail addresses.\
I have no way of knowing how much spam I got, but since my real-to-spam ratio on my personal address is about 1:4 (I have one address that just gets slammed) and on my AOL account, it’s probably 10:1, that’s almost 10,000 pieces of spam last year.\
So, more than 25,400 pieces of e-mail passed through my inbox. That’s about 70 a day. I’m sure there are people who get more e-mail than I do, but wow. That’s just crazy. I can guarantee that I read all of them, and more than half required me to either send a response or do something. I’m surprised I do anything else.\
If only I could figure out how many IM’s I got last year…

I figured that since I spent so much time on this list, I should share it. If you have your own list o’ faves, go nominate them.\
Here are my nominations. If I left out a category, it’s because I didn’t nominate anyone for that category. Reviewing the list, it looks like Dooce and Photodude are my favorite blogs, and that’s pretty much true. Here’s the rest of the list:

• best application for weblogs
  • Flickr
  • Textile
  • MarsEdit
• best asian weblog
  • Joi Ito
• best european weblog
  • Glazblog
• best canadian weblog
  • Consolation Champs
  • Photojunkie
• best american weblog
  • Dooce
  • Davezilla
  • Photodude
• best photography of a blog
  • Dooce
  • Chromasia
  • Photojunkie
• best non-weblog content of a weblog site
  • Textism
• best entertainment weblog
  • The Hot Blog
  • Scott Andrew
  • Super Secret Questions
• best weblog about politics
  • Talking Points Memo
  • Political Animal
  • Photodude
• best web development weblog
  • Molly
  • 456 Berea Street
  • Slayeroffice
• best computers or technology weblog
  • inessential
• most humorous blog
  • Dooce
  • Davezilla
  • Fafblog
• best writing of a weblog
  • Betsy Devine
  • Photodude
• best group weblog
  • Daily Kos
  • BoingBoing
  • k10k
• best-designed blog
  • SimpleBits
  • Mezzoblue
  • Mike Davidson
• best-kept-secret weblog
  • Words for Snow
  • I Will Dare
  • Rashunda Tramble
• best new weblog
  • Tim
  • Words for Snow
• lifetime achievement
  • Kos
  • Matt Mullenweg
  • Jay Allen
• weblog of the year
  • Dooce
  • Daily Kos
  • Dean for America\
    Oh, and happy new year and all that other looking-forward-to-the-coming-year crap.

Guess who’s number one for best poop ever. Yup, it’s me. Check out The Best Poop Story Ever\
Man, I love search engines. They provide never ending entertainment.

You know, if you know someone who wants to learn about blogging, get one set up and learn how to customize it , my class at Eclectic Academy on Movable Type would be a swell Christmas present. Only \$20 for six weeks of online classes, and lots of hands on helps from me? I mean, come on… that’s a deal.\
Or, not. You know, it’s up to you.

This will probably get me spammed, but I’ve been reading a lot the past few days (here, here and here, and the MT Pro list) about the horrors of comment spam, and how evil comment spam spiders are crawling sites for the path to mt-comments.cgi and then spamming the crap out of it. Me? I don’t really have a problem with comment spam. How I’ve been able to avoid it up to this point, I’m not really sure. I have several blogs, and none of them have been hit by more than one or two comment spams in their long lives (three years now for Ultranormal, two for Geekout and almost two for the photo gallery).\
But, I’m getting serious with the preventative medicine. I haven’t implemented all of these things, but I have done some of them:

• Don’t install Movable Type in the cgi-bin if your host allows it.
• Rename mt-comments.cgi (and update the CommentScript line in mt.cfg, removing the # in front of it).
• Use javascript to write out the form action on your comments form. That way, they can’t spider for the location of your comments script (well, make sure the function to do this is in a linked javascript). All of these javascript options screw people who have javascript turned off, but there are sacrifices we have to make.
• Use javascript to write out your comments. This way, they won’t be indexed by search engines, and you’re removing the benefit of spamming you.
• Use javascript to open your comment popup window. The one I use uses the entry id, and has the comment script in the linked script – so, again, it’s not easily spiderable.
• Use the Moderate plugin to close comments on old entries. This gives the spammers fewer available targets.\
  I wrote a tutorial for doing a few of those. I’ll update it to add the form action bit and probably post it to Geekout in the near future.\
  To me, the real problem here is that Movable Type’s default templates are vulnerable out of the box. Maybe if the default template set was a little more protected, comment spam wouldn’t be such a problem. I know the train has kind of left the station on this, since there’s already a huge installed base of people probably using slightly modified versions of the default templates. But, for future versions, a lot of these changes could be included in the default, protecting the vulnerable “newbie” from themselves.