archives   ...   blog-on-blog action , new_feature
thu 2005-sep-29 17:54:06 pdt   ...   permalink

Further enhancement to simplify browsing around old entries in my blog: at the bottom of the front page (and other pages which aggregate entries, like section and tag pages), you can now jump back to earlier entries. (Used to be that the front page had the most recent 20 entries, and anything further back was a little trickier to navigate to...)

I still haven't implemented a way of browsing old entries by year and month, or somesuch. I may or may not do that at some point...

But meanwhile, because I know you just can't get enough derf.net content, I'm going to start periodically migrating into the blog structure some of the derf.net content that predates the site's rebirth as a blog. You might say this is cheating, but as a certain television network likes to remind us, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you!

These entries will be back-dated to when I originally wrote them, but will appear at the top of the front page as if they were new content. I'll also tag such entries with a "from_the_archives" tag.

Enjoy.

tagging   ...   blog-on-blog action , new_feature
thu 2005-sep-22 02:48:52 pdt   ...   permalink

I've now implemented tags for my blog. So now you can browse around my old blog entries in hitherto-unpossible ways. How exciting. Of course, I'll have to go through and add more tags to more old entries, but I've done a bit of that already.

But wait, that's not all! I've implemented it so that absolutely anyone can tag my entries. I know you're all dying to. For now, only I can delete tags, though, so don't get carried away -- you won't be able to undo.

As always, let me know if you run into any problems -- if something's broke, don't assume I know about it.

mysterious spam   ...   blog-on-blog action , comment_spam
fri 2005-sep-02 00:59:27 pdt   ...   permalink

So my blog-comment-spam problem has gotten somewhat worse... For a while it was just a few coming in every now and then. A few weeks ago I got a bunch all in one day, which prompted me to finish the code that I'd started some time before which allows me to very quickly and easily delete a comment. When I did that, it turned out I actually broke posting comments entirely for a little while (which turns out to do quite a good job of stopping the spam, actually!), but then I fixed that.

( adventures in battling comment spam )

I don't get people.

probably not what they were looking for   ...   blog-on-blog action
mon 2005-feb-07 18:43:12 pst   ...   permalink

Last week I received two emails regarding the "Pint Pal", from people who apparently thought they were contacting the maker of the item:

I need some info. on the pint pal ice cream koozie: I have a client that is a vendor to Wal-Mart and is interested in getting 250 to 2000 of these. I need them to be gold in color with a 3 color imprint on the side. Could someone please contact me with info. about this. Feel free to call me at [phone number] Thanks...

And the second one:

How can I get one? My local grocer does not have them

So I checked, and sure enough I'm the top result on Google for [pint pal]. That's kind of wacky, as is the fact that these people decided to email me. But what's really wacky is that I got these two emails the same day. Was the Pint Pal perhaps featured on tv somewhere or something? Who knows. I suppose I could email these people back and ask.

(And speaking of queries for which I am inappropriately the top result, see this entry -- note the second and third comments.)

comment spam avoidance   ...   blog-on-blog action , comment_spam
wed 2005-jan-19 19:30:45 pst   ...   permalink

Google has announced a new initiative to eliminate the problem of blog comment spam. Basically the idea is that site providers (or more importantly, blog software developers) can mark links that were posted by users as distinct from links actually put there by the site maintainers. This way Google can ignore user-created links for the purposes of computing Page Rank, thus removing the incentive for the online casinos and pharmacies to post comment spam in the first place. w00t!

Since this blog is not driven by Movable Type, the scripts that automate the comment spam posting process don't work here, and as a result, I haven't really had a problem with comment spam. (I did get one once, which was really strange, since it means someone must have posted it by hand...) But I figured I would go ahead and make the (very simple) changes in my code anyway, so that I now conform to it. Now I guess the question arises of whether I should go back and modify all the existing comments, just for the sake of consistency...

New Year's Resolution   ...   blog-on-blog action
sun 2005-jan-02 18:38:06 pst   ...   permalink

If, as discussed in my last entry, we do in fact start watching more movies, then I'll probably be posting more movie reviews on my blog. Given that my blog lately has already been dominated by movie entries, I'd really like to start posting more non-movie entries too. Also, I'll try to keep my movie reviews more interesting than just "it was good"... I haven't been real good about that lately.

So I guess that's my New Year's resolution -- to regularly post interesting stuff on my blog (movie-related and otherwise).

rss feed   ...   blog-on-blog action , new_feature
sun 2004-aug-22 17:28:48 pdt   ...   permalink

Okay, beta version of my RSS feed is now available. I've tested it a bit with bloglines and my yahoo!'s new RSS module, and they seem to deal reasonably well with it (though not exactly the same as each other). Let me know what RSS aggregator you're using and how well my feed works there.

Eventually, I'm planning to extend this so you'll be able to subscribe to a feed for the whole site, or a feed for individual sections of the site, or even a feed for each entry, with comments appearing as new items in the feed.

I might also rig up something so you can sign up to receive email notifications of new posts.

Whee!

photos now commentable   ...   blog-on-blog action , new_feature
sun 2004-jul-25 17:55:31 pdt   ...   permalink

My phone photos are now commentable! Woo.

Not surprisingly, implementing this turned out not to be as hard as I'd feared. It's still not as elegant a solution as I might have liked, since the phoblog front page and archive page are still being handled differently from everything else, and although the regular blog code is driving the phoblog entries on the front page page and photo pages, that code still special-cases for them. But anyway, it works, and it's not too terribly ugly underneath. Incremental development.

commenting system   ...   blog-on-blog action , new_feature
tue 2004-jun-01 21:36:27 pdt   ...   permalink

My commenting system is up and running! Woo. Give it a whirl, let me know if you notice any problems with it -- I've tested it some, but of course you never know...

looky, derf is blogging   ...   blog-on-blog action
sat 2004-may-29 02:04:17 pdt   ...   permalink

Woohoo. I've got a blog now. Exciting, isn't it?

I've written the underlying software myself. This has a number of advantages, but one disadvantage is that I don't yet have an RSS feed or a commenting system. These will be along shortly (for some definition of "shortly").

The entries before this one were written while I was developing the code to drive this system. The comics section was populated with pre-existing content. Some of the other pre-existing content from my site may eventually be converted to be part of the blog as well. When I do that, I think I'll probably back-date them, but I'll at least post a new entry up here linking back to such entries.

Right now, the phone photos are not properly integrated as true blog entries, but hey, they show up on the front page, so that should be good enough for now. Once I have commenting set up though, I'll definitely need to properly integrate the two codebases.

Enjoy!