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Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Irony, copyright, and site design

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First, read what this gentleman has to say about the appropriation of content from other weblogs:

I was reading Dawnkeyotie’s blog and she links to the story of Tequila Mockingbird and how some young punk wannbe blogger has been stealing her material.

Now I’ll admit to being influenced by other sites, like my About This Site page borrows rather heavily from the About page at Ani Moller’s site, but stealing word for word… Just not cool.

Etiquette is the name of the game… If you want to use text, at least give proper credit, or a trackback if possible.

If you want to steal my life, go ahead, I dare you… I Double Dog Dare You™ Mofo! I may not display a copyright notice, but it’s in the source of every page on this site.

Now, with that firmly in mind, head on over and check out his site design.

Look familiar? It looks awfully familiar to me. Funny, there’s no credit given, and he’s replaced the copyright notice in my code with one of his own, implying that the design work is his.

According to his about page, the last major redesign to his site went live on Monday, Feb. 2nd of 2004. Checking his archives, here’s what we find for the redesign announcement…

You like?

I though I’d lost this new look, but luckily a few files were still on my server so for the last 12 hours I went through everything with the virtual equivalent of a fine tooth comb and cleaned it all up and finally finished what I started some 2 weeks ago.

I think it’s much nicer, but then anything is much nicer than the old b2 default template, so it makes this place my own at last.

Before you ask, yes, it looks a bit unaligned in Internet Explorer, but it looks great in Mozilla Firebird and seeing as that’s the browser I use mostly, get used to it. If I can find a way to realign in IE I will, but until then it’s just cosmetic differences.

Yes — he definitely made this place his own — as long as “his own” is rather loosely defined as “blatantly stolen from someone else”.

Sigh.

The really ridiculous thing about this, though, is that I actually do like the way my design translates to a two-column layout. Considering I occasionally toy with the idea of going back to a two-column design rather than this single-column design, if I used the same base overall look, I’d end up looking nearly exactly how he does now. Would I then have to turn around and give him credit for inspiring some of the design?

Again — oh, the irony.

(Many thanks to Firas for the tip-off.)

Update: All’s well that ends well.

I’ve got a fan!

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In January of 2003, I put up a post pointing out Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Top ten web design mistakes’. Though his advice is generally aimed more at commercial sites than personal sites, many of the concepts will cary over from one to the other, so I used the list to evaluate my own site and see how I was doing.

That March, a visitor by the name of ‘Deakster‘ [Deakster’s site may come up with a ‘403 forbidden’ error if you attempt clicking on his link, as I think he may be denying any visitors referred by my website.] came by the page and left a mildly snide comment about Nielsen and his company. Not in itself a big deal, but when I visited the URL left by Deakster, I found that his own site was coded in such a way as to require Internet Explorer, and would not load for me using Safari on my Mac or Mozilla on my PC. I mentioned this in a reply comment, that was that, and I didn’t think any more of it.

Last week, almost a year since he left his original comment, Deakster came back. This time, apparently incensed by my reply to his first comment, he took it upon himself to critique myself and one of my sites (specifically, what little is left at djwudi.com) in two comments left back-to-back.

Needless to say, I was a little amused by this (not just that he attempted to take me to task, and that he did so quite poorly, but mostly that he came back nearly a full year after his last and only previous comment to my site), and responded in turn. Again, Deakster wasn’t thrilled, started to leave more comments, but soon requested that I remove all of his comments from the page, declaring that he “no longer wanted to be associated with the site.”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t actually at my computer when his request first came through, so twenty minutes later he made the same request again.

It wasn’t long after that that I did get the message, however, and while I didn’t remove the comment placeholders from the page (I saw no reason to remove my comments, and as they were replies to his, I didn’t like the idea of out-and-out deleting his comments and ‘orphaning’ mine). I did, however, remove the text of his comments, indicating that I had done so at his request.

Apparently that wasn’t good enough.

I now have 75 bogus trackback pings on that post, courtesy of my new friend, with messages such as “Michael is a first class prick and should keep his mouth shut,” “Take on a haxor an end up with an app that autopost shit to yer crap site,” “Your blog aint sexy and neither is your bald spot,” “Why are yanks such fools — cause they are all like Michael,” and his final ultimatum, “Had enough Michael — i will leave it if you delete everything I want deleting and I mean everything.”

Why, I do believe I’m being harassed, ladies and gentlemen.

All of Deakster’s comments over the past few days and every one of the bogus TrackBack pings has come from IP address 81.152.149.121. Unfortunately, while I could ban that IP address from commenting, I don’t believe that there is currently a way to ban TrackBack pings by IP.

So what now?

Obviously, I certainly could “delete-everything-i-want-deleting-and-i-mean-everything” all of Deakster’s comments (and TrackBack pings) easily enough, but something tells me that he’ll likely not be satisfied until I also expunge my reply (which contains quotes from his comments) also, which I’m in no great hurry to do (hey, I had fun responding to his attacks…). Besides, giving in to script kiddies (a category I wouldn’t have put Deakster in until I got the TrackBack ping flood) isn’t my idea of a good time. ;)

Welcome to the neighborhood

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After watching Phil struggle with his hosting provider for a couple weeks over system resources, he and I got to talking, and in the name of good geek-karma, I offered him a spot on my personal webserver. We spent the weekend getting everything configured, tweaked, and generally doing what it’s supposed to (I’m not much of a sysadmin, really…some parts of the setup involved me giving Phil root access and telling him to figure it out himself…), and as of sometime last night, everything’s up and running.

So now I’ve got four domains running off of my old G3: djwudi.com, hanscomfamily.com, geekmuffin.com, and interalia.org. I just may have to look into a G4 upgrade card if this keeps up!

iTunes: “Breathe (Peff)” by Lizette & from the album Breathe Remix (2001, 4:40).

Well-Designed Weblogs

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Looking for some design inspiration? Good pointers to quite a few very impressively designed sites at Well Designed Weblogs Part One and Part Two.

And no, I’m not on the list. ;) While I like what I’ve got at this point, I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m doing that well!

iTunes: “VIT” by Future Sound of London, The from the album Lifeforms (1994, 6:48).

More on the genealogy project

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I spent some time last night following up on playing around with software for tracking my family’s history on our website. So far, things are actually looking fairly good — with the one caveat that I only have so much information in my head.

The first piece to the puzzle is GEDitCOM, a Mac OS X application that reads and writes standard GEDCOM files (I had no idea that there was a standard file for genealogy software before I started looking into all this). While it’s not the prettiest application in the world, it does appear to be very powerful, and I’m quite pleasantly surprised by the amount of information that the GEDCOM format supports.

Of course, I’m not sure why I’m surprised — I’m obviously not the first person to look into how to track all this information using a computer. I guess we all just like to think that we’re the first to come up with a good idea… ;)

The second piece is the web package I stumbled across the other day — PhpGedView. A set of PHP scripts, it was very easy to install and get up and running, all I had to do was copy the scripts into a directory on the webserver, tweak the permissions on two files and one directory, and I could log into the interface and start putting things together. Again, it’s not as pretty as it could be, but it does look like nearly (if not entirely) all of the functionality that I was looking for is there.

Once PhpGedView is installed, all you need to do is upload a standard GEDCOM file and PhpGedView parses it and creates the final website. Here’s the one spot where I ran into problems: each time I uploaded the GEDCOM file that GEDitCOM created, PhpGedView wasn’t able to parse it correctly, and I got a bunch of garbage data.

Turns out that the solution is fairly simple, and ties into an age-old issue between Mac and PC file formats. Mac systems use a different character to signify the end of a line than PC (DOS/*NIX) systems do, and when the scripts tried to import the GEDCOM file, they saw it as one really really really long line. I was able to get around this by running the file through BBEdit and switching the line break style, I’m sure there are many utilities to do just that floating around the ‘net for people who don’t have BBEdit.

Once I got that figured out, the import went smoothly, and as a result, the first version of our family tree is up. It’s very bare-bones at the moment (though not as bare-bones as it looks at first — just click around and experiment a bit to move around the tree), but mom promised to send me copies of the family’s “history box”. Once I get that and pop more information in, the tree will look a lot less sparse than it does at the moment.

Even better, though, is that PhpGedView does handle one of the bigger items on my wishlist — user accounts with editing ability. I’ll need to put together a simple “user’s manual/how-to”, but this will allow other people in the family to add and edit information to the database. Once changes are made, I can then download the updated GEDCOM file from PhpGedView to my computer, re-import it into GEDitCOM, and keep all the information synced between my personal workspace and the website. Not bad at all!

Every few years of my life, the genealogy bug has bit me — now that it has again, it’s great that I’ve got the technology at my fingertips to be able to store and present it like this.

Now, mom — about that box… ;)

iTunes: “I Was Walking” by Poems for Laila from the album On a Wednesday (2002, 2:50).

Wanted: advice concerning Wikis

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I’ve got a project running around in my head that I believe a Wiki would be a good solution for, but I’ve not done much to play with/experiment with Wikis in the past. I’d like to start playing around with this project soon after I get home, so if there’s anyone out there who might be able to give some advice or recommendations, I’d appreciate some “expert assistance”…

For a while now, I’ve been hosting The Hanscom Family Website. While the original intention was for it to be a collaborative weblog for the entire Hanscom family, so far it’s been acting primarily as my dad’s weblog (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!). Hopefully we’ll be gaining more authors soon, though, as I’ll be sending a “how to” tutorial to Susan, Eric, and possibly Doug and Pam also once I’m home.

One of the original ideas I wanted to include on the website (and actually was started on an earlier incarnation, but lost in a server mishap) was a genealogical record of the family. As I don’t know of a really good way to do a web-based family tree, my idea was for each person to have a single page listing important dates (birth, death, marriage, etc.), contact info (if desired), and biographical information. Each page would also have a set of links to immediate family members (parents, children, siblings) that would allow the user to navigate their way through the family tree. We could then, over time, create a genealogical database (of sorts) of the family.

One of the big reasons I’ve wanted to do this (and this was brought up in a major way during a conversation with my mom last night) was the number of stories that are scattered among all the various family members — some written, but many only currently locked in the vaults of memory.

The difficulty I had in the first implementation was that each person’s page was just a static HTML page, and if there were to be any changes to it, they’d have to be done myself. I’d need to have information and stories sent to me, at which point I’d make the changes to the static pages and save them to the server. It’d work, but it would be slow and somewhat kludgy, especially as it would rely on my own time constraints in order to get any additions actually incorporated into the pages.

Last night as mom and I were talking, though, it occurred to me that a Wiki could be a perfect solution to this problem. The page structure and layout would be essentially the same, but it would allow any of our family members to click an “Edit This Page” link on any one of the pages and add whatever they wanted, be it more biographical information about themselves, memories of other relatives, stories that have been passed down in family lore about ancestors, or other such things. In theory, at the very least, this could work very well.

My limitations (and worries) are simply that I’m by far the most technologically- and web-literate of my family members, and I need to do everything I can to make sure that the interface is as simple and easy to use as possible. I also want to ensure that the site is not publicly editable, so there would need to be some sort of account registration system so that I could grant global edit rights to family members, but prevent random passers-by from making unwelcome changes. I also want to have the system be as resource-friendly as possible, as it will be running on a 350Mhz G3 that is already hosting three websites, two of which use the MovableType weblogging system (which I love, but I also realize that Perl can be a major resource hog as sites grow, and my webserver only has so much firepower at the moment).

I did a quick web search and found the Wiki Wiki Web’s list of Wiki engines, but truth to tell, it’s a little daunting, as there are so many different engines available. Even if I narrow it down to the two languages that I’m sure my system can easily run (Perl and PHP) there are still a large number of possible choices, and I’m not entirely sure which scripting language would be the better choice as far as conserving system resources and ensuring that response time for serving/editing/saving pages is fairly reasonable.

So, to sum up, here’s what I’m looking for:

  • A Wiki (or similar) engine to allow for collaborative decentralized editing of a set of web pages.
  • User accounts or some form of access control and management.
  • As simple and ‘idiot-proof’ of an editing interface as possible.
  • Low (or as low as possible) system resource overhead.
  • The host webserver is a 350Mhz G3-based Mac running OS X 10.2 (i.e., the Apache webserver, Perl and PHP supported, UNIX-based).

Any ideas? Recommendations? Questions, comments, words of wisdom? Any and all would be appreciated!

Atom feed now available

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Seeing as how an Atom-enabled beta of NetNewsWire just hit the ‘net, I took a few moments to get an Atom newsfeed up and running for Eclecticism.

While TypePad has supported Atom for a while now, Atom feeds were only automatically included on sites using any of the Basic or Plus level auto-generated template sets. Those of us using custom coded Advanced template sets (especially those created before TypePad added Atom support) need to manually add the Atom template to our template sets.

The template code for my Atom feed is in the rest of this entry. It’s almost exactly the same as the template provided by TypePad — the only change I’ve made is to substitute AtomEnabled for the “more info” link rather than www.example.com. Posting this is just a convenience — while finding the template code wasn’t really difficult it did involve a few steps (creating a new advanced template set from one of the default system-provided template sets and go into the template editor to find the code), and posting it here will make it a bit easier if I need to track it down again in the future.

Here’s the template to use:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<feed version="0.3" xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
  <title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>" />
  <id>tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-<$MTBlogID$></id>
  <link rel="service.post" type="application/x.atom+xml" href="<$MTCGIPath$>atom/weblog/blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>" title="<$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$>" />
  <modified><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate timezone="UTC" format_name="W3CDTF"$></MTEntries></modified>
<MTBlogIfDescription>
  <tagline><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></tagline>
</MTBlogIfDescription>
  <generator url="http://www.typepad.com/" version="<$MTVersion$>">TypePad</generator>
  <info type="application/xhtml+xml">
  <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This is an Atom formatted XML site feed. It is intended to be viewed in a Newsreader or syndicated to another site. Please visit <a href="http://www.atomenabled.org/">AtomEnabled</a> for more info.</div>
  </info>
<MTEntries lastn="15">
  <entry>
    <title><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>" />
    <link rel="service.edit" type="application/x.atom+xml" href="<$MTCGIPath$>atom/weblog/blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>/entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>" title="<$MTEntryTitle encode_html="1"$>" />
    <id>tag:typepad.com,2003:post-<$MTEntryID$></id>
    <issued><$MTEntryDate format_name="W3CDTF"$></issued>
    <modified><$MTEntryDateModified timezone="UTC" format_name="W3CDTF"$></modified>
    <created><$MTEntryDate timezone="UTC" format_name="W3CDTF"$></created>
    <summary><$MTEntryExcerpt remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></summary>
    <author>
      <name><$MTEntryAuthor encode_xml="1"$></name>
    </author>
<MTEntryCategories>
    <dc:subject><$MTCategoryLabel encode_xml="1"$></dc:subject>
</MTEntryCategories>
<MTWeblogIfFullRSSContent>
    <$MTEntryAtomContent$>
</MTWeblogIfFullRSSContent>
  </entry>
</MTEntries>
</feed>

iTunes: “Steamroller (Skatenigs)” by Pigface from the album Industrial Mix Machine (1996, 3:29).

Relationships

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One of the things that’s always bothered me (and many other people) about social networking sites such as Orkut, Friendster, or any other *ster meme-of-the-moment is the binary nature of their setups — either someone is your friend, or they aren’t. That’s it. Those are your only choices.

My world just isn’t that black and white, sorry.

I was grumbling about this in #joiito last week sometime when Tantek pointed me to XFN, which looks very interesting. Essentially, it takes advantage of a little-used link attribute — specifically, the rel attribute — to define the relationship between the linker and the linkee. Various values have been defined, such as ‘friend’, ‘acquaintance’, ‘met’, ‘spouse’, etc.

For instance, while linking to Dad’s site, I can include the value ‘parent’ in the link (<a href=“http://www.hanscomfamily.com/” title=“The Hanscom Family Weblog” rel=“parent”>like this</a>); linking to Kirsten’s site I can use ‘friend’ and ‘met’ (<a href=“http://www.geekmuffin.com/” title="geek*muffin" rel=“friend met”>like this</a>), linking to Mike I can use ‘acquaintance’ (<a href=“http://mike.whybark.com” title=“mike.whybark.com” rel=“acquaintance”>like this</a>), and so on.

Now this, I like.

Of course, now I have to figure out how to work it into my site. It’ll be easy enough on posts such as this, of course, as I can code the relationship values in as I’m creating the post. What I need to figure out, though, is how I want to attack my blogroll.

Hey, Anil, Mena, Ben, et al — any chance of putting XFN into TypePad‘s People TypeLists? That would be enough to coax me back away from Blogrolling, even if I lose the recent-update highlighting! Currently I’m using the Blogrolling service, which has some definite advantages (easy to update, automatically highlights sites that have been updated recently, etc.). ~~However, there isn’t a way for me to add XFN values to the links there, so if I want to add XFN to my blogroll, I’m going to have to go back to updating it manually. A bit of a bummer, that (not least because quite simply, knowing me, I’m more likely to leave it as-is and forego the XFN niftyness).~~ [As it turns out, you can add XFN to a Blogrolling blogroll if you have a paid “Gold” account. Just go to the ‘edit links’ screen, and for each item, add rel=“whatever” to the ‘Extra Link Attributes’ field. Thanks to Dori for pointing that out in the comments!]{.underline}

Still, at the very least it’s worth playing with, and I’ll do my best to remember to do so on all future posts.

And if that weren’t enough, Jonas pointed out that Tantek and Kevin Marks have proposed another use for the rel attribute called VoteLinks: using values of ‘vote-for’, ‘vote-abstain’, or ‘vote-against’ when linking to an article or post on the web to indicate your opinion of the resource being linked to.

Currently, any automated indexing application (such as the robots/spiders that Google or Technorati use) only see a link as a “vote” in favor of a particular resource — i.e., Site A links to Site B, therefore Site A believes that Site B is useful or provides an important resource of some form or another. While human readers can draw upon the context of a link to decide whether that’s actually the case (while I might link to a page about George Bush, for example, it’s extremely unlikely that I’d be saying anything favorable), the spiders aren’t able to do that — and that’s exactly what VoteLinks aims to correct.

Now all I need to do is come up with some simple “thumbs-up” and “thumbs down” graphics. With those, I can work VoteLinks into my CSS so that links that I’ve designated “vote-for” will get a thumbs-up appended after the link, and links designated “vote-against” will get a thumbs-down appended after the link. Will I do this? Who knows. ;)

Some very interesting toys to play with, each a worthy attempt to add a little more value to everyone’s travels around the web.

iTunes: “She and Mr. Jones (Uncensored)” by Lords of Acid from the album [R]Ejected Tracks (1998, 4:52).

Sponsorship

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I’m experimenting with something that I found via Snowman on the TPUG — sponsored weblog entries. Three posts on my site now have small, fairly unobtrusive text ads at the bottom of the post, for which I get some small amount of compensation.

I debated a bit back and forth on this when I first read about it, but finally figured it was at least worth a shot. At least these are paid for up front and are given with my permission, rather than just some random piece of comment spam showing up more or less at random.

And I’m certainly not above trying to make the occasional buck or two on all of this (oh, by the way, have you visited any of my three CafePress shops lately? …[ahem]…)! ;)

Now, if only Google would let me into their AdSense program…

iTunes: “No Sense At All” by Khan, Praga from the album Pragamatic (1998, 7:09).