weblogs

I’ve been blogging since around November 2000 (arguably, earlier than that, that’s just when I started using software on the backend); this is for posts generally about blogging.

Untrusted content, nofollow, etc.

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Phil Ringnalda pointed to an idea that Ian Hickson just tossed out while brainstorming ways to battle the ever-increasing issue of comment spam.

I’m thinking that HTML should have an element that basically says “content within this section may contain links from external sources; just because they are here does not mean we are endorsing them” which Google could then use to block Google rank whoring. I know a bunch of people being affected by Web log spam would jump at that chance to use this element if it was put into a spec.

Personally, I’d love to be able to wrap the comments section of my individual entry pages in something like this — and actually, it reminds me a lot of a technique I used to use when I had my website running on my own webserver. At the time, I had a good number of pages that weren’t part of the weblog, so rather than using MovableType‘s built-in search engine, I used the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine (May 9 2019 update: This link is now dead and has been removed).

FDSE is a very solid system, and one of the things I liked was an extra FDSE-specific tag that allowed an author to designate sections of a page that the search engine would ignore when performing its page scan. In addition to respecting the standard meta tags of index, noindex, follow and nofollow for a full page, FDSE also allows you to use those tags within HTML comments to section off areas of a page that should be treated differently from the page as a whole.

For instance, on my individual entry archive pages, the only real important content as far as a search engine is concerned is the entry itself. As the sidebar in my design is repeated on every page on the site, there’s really no great reason for a search engine to include that text in the database for every page, so I would wrap the entire sidebar inside a noindex, nofollow declaration.

I’d also do the same for things like the TrackBack section headers that appear on every page. As they are repeated on every single archive page, trying to search for an actual discussion on TrackBack is nearly impossible — but when I was using the FDSE and hid that section header from the search engine, it was very easy for me find discussions about TrackBack, as FDSE was only indexing the actual content of each page, rather than every little bit of text that the page contained.

I’ve wished for a long time that Google either supported a way to do the same thing, or just adopted FDSE’s method. According to FDSE’s author, he submitted his technique to Google as a suggestion quite a few years ago, but nothing more was ever heard about that.

Maybe Ian’s suggestion will get something moving in this direction again. Here’s hoping, at least.

iTunes: “Never Say Never (Hot Tracks)” by Romeo Void from the album Edge, The Level 1 (1995, 5:47).

It’s not all bad, really!

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Last month, I mentioned that I’d been in contact with a magazine reporter who was working on a story about weblogs and some of the potential pitfalls that can come about when recording your life online for the world to see. As I mentioned at the time, while I at first wasn’t terribly concerned about the tone of the article, as our conversation progressed, I started to worry that it was going to end up all gloom-and-doom.

It appears that Anil has also been contacted by a reporter working on a similar story (possibly the same reporter, or another reporter also working on the story for the same publication, though I can’t be absolutely sure about that), and he ended up having some of the same reservations that I did. In his response to the reporter who contacted him, he expressed a desire shared by myself and, I’m sure, many others in the weblogging world: rather than focusing solely on the things that go wrong, that the media also look at the things that go right, and just why we all keep our weblogs going even in the face of the potential downsides.

One thing I would suggest is considering a, well, more uplifting angle. There have been an awful lot of “blogs can cost you your job!” or “make money fast with blogs!” stories, and very few that cover the positive reasons people have weblogs.

For a lot of your audience, this is their first impression of what weblogs can be, and frankly, if they were all about dire consequences, there wouldn’t be millions of people publishing weblogs every day.

Most of the people in my social circle have met their spouses/significant others, gotten apartments, gotten jobs, made friends, or (in my case) all of the above because of their weblogs. All that plus they get to participate in a new medium instead of just passively consuming media.

From what I know of [name of publication], the audience is one that appreciates a good positive human story, and it’s also much more likely that you’ll get some good cooperation or participation from people in the weblog realm who can help strengthen your story.

I’ve just sent a link to Anil’s post to the reporter I’ve been talking with, in case we are dealing with separate people. With any luck, should this article eventually appear, there will be a bit more to it than mere horror stories.

Meme Propagation Test

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This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4

(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers):

  1. I found this experiment at URL: http://www.jluster.org/node/249
  2. I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing or Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software – NetNewsWire
  3. I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.michaelhanscom.com/
  4. I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03 August 2004
  5. I posted this at time (24 hour time): 00:30:57
  6. My posting location is (city, state, country): Seattle, WA, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

  1. My blog is hosted by: TypePad
  2. My age is: 31
  3. My gender is: Dangly Bits
  4. My occupation is: Copy geek
  5. I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NetNewsWire
  6. I use the following software to post to my blog: ecto
  7. I have been blogging since (day, month, year): Verifiable: Nov. 25, 2000. Unverifiable: Sometime in ’98 or ’99.
  8. My web browser is: Safari

iTunes: “Lovesong (Extended)” by Cure, The from the album Mixed Up (1990, 6:20).

Google to me in eight clicks

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Meme time, started by A Whole Lotta Nothing, and being tracked by Kottke: how many clicks to get from Google’s homepage to your website without using the search box?

For me, it’s eight.

  1. Google »
  2. More »
  3. Blogger »
  4. Knowledge »
  5. Working With Blogger »
  6. How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog »
  7. Seattle Times: Microsoft Fires Worker Over Weblog »
  8. eclecticism

Awww, shucks!

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This was rather flattering to run across tonight…

Which blog has your favorite design?

Only one? eclecticism, by Michael Hanscom. It is the most intentionally designed blog I know, and the design is significant, a protest of stereotyping blog designs according to gender. Go Michael!

Thanks, Alicia!

Amusingly enough, I’m starting to run ideas around in my head to expand the choices a bit, too. No clue when they’ll show up, but hopefully they’ll be appreciated also. :)

iTunes: “Happy Phantom (Live)” by Amos, Tori from the album Y Kant Tori Read (and Other Rarities) (1994, 3:37).

Happy Birthday Jacqueline

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Prairie and I spent a very pleasant evening last night at Jacqueline Passey‘s birthday party. There was a wonderfully odd mix of people there, as she’d invited people from all the various disparate areas of her life: webloggers, economists, libertarians, sci-fi conventionists, and school friends. Needless to say, this made for quite a few very interesting conversations over the course of the night, and we both enjoyed ourselves.

Her “crazy peace activist” friend Fred introduced us to a few pieces of slang that he’d discovered recently while following news from the troops in Iraq that he thinks might be recent additions to the long list of military slang soon to become part of the popular consciousness:

Salmon Day
You spend all day swimming upstream just to get fucked and die.
Adminisphere
The “powers that be” above your immediate superior.
Blamestorming Session
The process of determining who in the adminisphere is at fault after a salmon day.

We also met Mike Layfield, who created a Hexagonal Chess game that looks quite interesting. While I’m no huge chess player — my skill level is limited to knowing how the pieces move — the variant looks to be a fun twist on the game, and there’s even a java-based version I can practice on until I pick up an actual play set.

At one point we were treated to Jacqueline’s stump speech — she’s working on running as the Libertarian Candidate for Washington Secretary of State, and is working on getting the funds for her filing fee to officially launch her campaign. While I’m no Libertarian, I have absolutely no problems with the party doing their best to keep our elections as open as possible and keep themselves on the ballot, so I went ahead and donated a little bit to her campaign. Besides, I hadn’t brought a birthday present or card, so I figured it could count for that, too. ;)

Jacqueline had covered one wall of her apartment in butcher paper and left a box of crayons on the floor so that people could decorate her wall if they felt like it. At some point during the night, some unknown person scrawled a complex mathematical formula on the paper, and wrote “Limerick:” above it. This wasn’t discovered until later in the evening, after they left, and soon after the discovery most of the guests were gathered in the hallway, doing their best to solve the equation and figure out the limerick.

Now, my math skills are not anywhere near the level of math that had been written on the wall, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to help with solving the equation. However, while visiting the restroom, I started thinking about it, and realized that solving the equation probably wouldn’t help, as it would merely result in either a number or an expression, and wouldn’t actually produce a limerick — what they needed to do was find out how best to read the equation out loud, following the A-A-B-B-A structure that limericks use.

Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the group, one of the other guests — a math teacher at Shoreline Community College — had realized the same thing, and they were well on their way to solving the puzzle, so I didn’t end up contributing at all. Still, it was fun to watch everyone work it out, and Jacqueline got a kick out of having such a geeky party. :) She’s promised to post a picture of the equation along with the final limerick at some point, and I’ll point to it when she does.

At that point, both Prairie and I were pretty tired — I’d had to work the opening shift at work, so I’d been up since five in the morning (an incredibly rare event for me) — so we made our goodbyes and headed back to my apartment to crash out.

iTunes: “Hold On” by McLachlan, Sarah from the album Nettwerk Decadence (1993, 4:12).

Reading protected LiveJournal entries via RSS

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Being able to subscribe to an RSS feed for any LiveJournal weblog by adding /rss to the end of the URL is all well and good, but I’ve been grumbling for a while that the downside to that is that it won’t let you read protected “friends only” entries, as by pulling the RSS feed you’re not actually logged into the LiveJournal system.

Well, many thanks to Phil for pointing out a trick he picked up from Brent Simmons — if you add /rss?auth=digest to the end of the URL, and include the standard HTTP authentication at the beginning of the URL (username:password@ between the protocol and the server address), then the RSS feed will include the protected entries.

In other words, using my LiveJournal as an example (even though it doesn’t have any protected entries, it’ll work for demonstrating the URL changes)…

  1. LiveJournal URL: http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/
  2. LiveJournal RSS feed: http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/rss (which actually maps to http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/data/rss)
  3. LiveJournal RSS feed with protected entries: http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/data/rss?auth=digest

Update: It appears that at some point over the past few months, ending the URL with ?auth=digest is no longer necessary. Simply using the string http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss (where the first ‘username’ and ‘password’ set are yours, and the second ‘username’ is that of the journal you’re reading) seems to work fine.

NOTE: This is not a technique for “hacking” LiveJournal to allow you to read protected entries that you would not otherwise have access to! All this does is allow you to ‘log in’ to LiveJournal via your RSS reader so that you can read your friends protected entries just as if you were logged in to the LiveJournal web interface. I do not know of a way to read protected entries that you have not been granted access to, and I’m not interested in trying to find one.

iTunes: “Getting Snippy With It” by Rollins, Henry from the album Talk is Cheap, Vol. 1 (2003, 6:48).

West Coast Bloggers

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Hellz yeah, biznatch — West Coast Bloggers, REPREZENT!

West Coast Bloggers

Or something like that.

Do we get our own gang signs now?

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes: “1/3 of a Nation” by Bytet from the album First Bite (1993, 5:13).

Demand Space

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Anyone in need of a hosting provider?

D just pointed me to Demand Space, just started by a friend of hers, and they’ve got a really good limited-time-only Grand Opening special (at least, it looks like it to me, though I haven’t looked into these things in a while):

  • Domains: 5
  • Disk Space: 1500 Mb
  • Bandwidth: 20 Gb
  • Email Addresses: Unlimited
  • Subdomains: Unlimited
  • MySQL Databases: Unlimited
  • Administrative Interface: cPanel
  • Monthly Price: \$10.00
  • Yearly Price: \$120.00

Might be worth looking at, at least.

iTunes: “Girls” by N-Son-X from the album Goa Rave (1994, 3:27).

Seattle Metroblogging

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Last month, I linked to the Metroblogging project: a series of city-specific weblogs. At the time, Seattle was in the “coming soon” list…well, folks, Seattle.Metroblogging is now live.

And what do you know — there’s a familiar name in the contributing authors list.

Mine, in fact.

So far I’ve just tossed one post up, but more will come in the future. Feel free to stop by and check in every so often!

iTunes: “Sit Down” by James from the album Alterno-Daze: 90’s Natural Selection (1995, 4:07).