website

Any posts more directly connected to the upkeep, maintenance, and backend fiddling around of my website/blog and whatever platforms it’s running on at any particular moment.

rel=“nofollow” : Massive weblog anti-spam initiative

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Wow. Straight from Jay Allen:

Six Apart has announced in co-operation with Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and other blog vendors a massive joint anti-spam initiative based on the HTML link type rel="nofollow".

The initiative is based upon the idea of taking away the value of user-submitted links in determining search rankings. By placing rel="nofollow" into the hyperlink tags of user-submitted feedback, search engines will ignore those links for the purposes of ranking (e.g. PageRank) and will not follow them when spidering a site.

[…]

It is important to note that while the links will no longer count for PageRank (and other search engines’ algorithms), the content of user-submitted data will still be indexed along with the rest of the contents of the page. Forget all of those silly ideas of hiding your comments from the GoogleBot. Heck, the comments in most blogs are more interesting that the posts themselves. Why would you want to do that to the web?

Now, the astute will point out that because links in comments/TrackBacks are ignored by the search bots, the PageRank of bloggers all around the blooog-o-sphere will suffer because hundreds of thousands of comments linking back to their own sites will no longer count in the rankings. And that is most likely true. But that inflated PageRank, which was a problem created by the search engines themselves, is the rotting flesh that the maggots sought out in the first place. If you ask me, I say fair trade.

In the end, of course, this isn’t the end of weblog spam. But because it completely takes away the incentive for the type of spamming we’re seeing today in the weblog world, you will probably see steady decline as many spammers find greener pastures elsewhere. That decline combined with better tools should help to make this a non-issue in the future. Every little step counts, some count more than others, and history will be the judge of all.

Very cool. Also very similar to a technique I was using a couple years back, though that was geared to blocking off areas of the site to ignore rather than affecting individual links. Either way, though, it’s a big step forward. I’m especially heartened to see the list of competing companies and weblogging systems that are participating in this.

Technorati Tags

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Change of plans as far as my keywords/tags project goes.

This past week, Technorati introduced a tag search to their weblog-centric search engine. Searching for a particular tag on Technorati returns a result page that aggregates recent weblog posts, Flickr photos, and del.icio.us links from across the web that use the same tag. Very nice.

This works well for me. One of the potential downsides I’d been running into with my prior plan — integrating ishbadiddle’s local keyword search — was simply that I’d gotten very used to the Flickr/del.icio.us method of separating tags with spaces, while the local keyword search required that the tags be separated with commas. As I was starting to work my way through cleaning up the keywords for my entries here, then, I’d been using spaces within keywords on the weblog (for instance, a tag of my name would be “michaelhanscom” or “michael.hanscom” on Flickr or del.icio.us, but be “Michael Hanscom” here on my weblog). I’m anal enough, though, that this bugged me — I’d rather have one consistent tagging methodology across all the systems.

As Technorati also uses the space separated tag format, and expects multiple words to be ‘smooshed’ together (just as Flickr and del.icio.us do), I’ve decided to use that system for all my tagging, foregoing ishbadiddle’s system (sorry, M E-L! — but if your system can be tweaked to read space-delimited lists rather than comma-delimited, I can look back into it again…).

Thanks to George’s TechoratiTags plugin for MovableType, I’m now listing tags in the metadata for each post, just underneath the title. The tags are drawn from the (space-separated) keywords for each entry, and clicking on any one of them will take you to that tag’s Technorati search page.

Just another way the web is getting more and more classified. Pretty cool, in my world.

iTunes “James Brown Is Dead (Wide Awake)” by L.A. Style from the album James Brown Is Dead (1991, 5:25).

Moving to del.icio.us

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As I’ve been more and more interested in using tag-based taxonomies to categorize and track things, I’ve been looking more and more often at using del.icio.us as a bookmark manager and potential replacement for my linklog.

Admittedly, when I first looked at del.icio.us a while back, I didn’t really understand what the deal was, or why it was so special. After spending time bouncing around Flickr and finding all sorts of interesting photographic work by exploring the tags people had used to categorize their photos, though, it finally clicked — del.icio.us was using the same concept to classify virtually the entire web. Oh! Now I get it!

So the old linklog has been removed from my sidebar (though the archives still exist), and has been replaced with a list of the most recent fifteen items added to my del.icio.us page. There’s an RSS feed available too, though as I’ll be using FeedBurner‘s link splicing ability to add my del.icio.us links to my main RSS feeds (just as I do for my Flickr photos), subscribing to that is definitely optional.

It may be a day or so before the links get spliced in, though — for some reason, FeedBurner keeps telling me that ‘djwudi’ isn’t a valid del.icio.us ID. Funny, del.icio.us thinks it is…I’m going to have to work on that.

Update: FeedBurner tracked down the issue they were having with connecting to del.icio.us, and I’ve updated my feeds. Both the ‘full posts’ and ‘full posts with comments’ feeds have the links spliced in, and the The ‘eclinkticism’ feed has been switched over to my del.icio.us links (if you were subscribed to either of my full post feeds and the linklog feed, you’ll be able to delete the linklog feed now). The ‘excerpts only’ feed has been left as-is (it doesn’t include my flickr photos, either).

Update 2: Well, it seemed like a good idea. However, that was a bit too much all in one feed. Links have been taken back out of the full-post and full-post-with-comments feeds, in favor of leaving them in their own separate feed. I’m also wondering if I should pull my Flickr photos out of the main streams, in favor of making everything mix-and-match. Seems better to let people pick and choose what they want to pay attention to rather than forcing everything on them all at once….

The part I’m happiest about was figuring out a very easy way to integrate my del.icio.us links into my site without having to deal with extra Movable Type plugins, installing extra software, or the like. del.icio.us provides an HTML feed of recent links, so I just set up a simple shell script, then use cron to run it every hour on the hour. Here’s the script in question:

#!/bin/sh

curl -s -f -d rssbutton=no -d tags=no -d extended=body http://del.icio.us/html/djwudi -o /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.tmp

mv -f /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.tmp /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.inc

echo “del.icio.us linklog sucessfully updated!”

The curl command retrieves the HTML feed of my links and saves it to a file, which mv then renames (this ensures that there won’t be an issue if the file is being updated at the same time that my webserver is expecting to be able to read from it), and echo returns a short message letting me know that the operation concluded successfully (cron e-mails me the confirmation message each time it runs…and I may turn that off soon now that I know everything’s working). Then, anytime someone loads my site, a simple PHP include loads the delicious.inc file into the page. Quick and simple.

Oh, and the name of the shell script?

deli.sh

iTunes “867-5309 Jenny (Hot Tracks)” by Tutone, Tommy from the album Edge, The Level 2 (1995, 5:31).

6 year old webserver

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While talking with Prairie about how Macs generally tend to have long lifespans, I looked up the original introduction date for the 350Mhz Blue and White G3 that acts as the webserver for my site, and found out that it was originally introduced on January 5th, 1995 1999.

That’s just a few days over ten six years that this machine has been around, and it’s been running pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the four years that I’ve owned it (I bought it used in February of ’01). It’s still going strong, too, chugging right along day after day.

Not bad…not bad at all.

_Wow_, I’m a dork. I really don’t know how I managed to confuse ’99 and ’95 when I was looking up the date, but apparently I did. Thanks to Dan for pointing that out.

Six years still isn’t bad, though…

iTunes “Walking on the Sun (Geek In Highwaters)” by Smashmouth from the album DJ Goodies (1995, 6:12).

Progress: Related Entries

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Progress is being made on the keyword index — in fact, I did a full install and added the code to my templates, and verified that it works just as it should. Unfortunately, I also discovered while testing that as it requires the keywords to have been entered into my entries in a specific way, I need to do a lot of work on fine-tuning the keywords before it will be a useable option. So, with somewhere over three thousand entries to tweak, it’ll be a while before I can actually get that up and running. Still, it was encouraging to see it working, even if it was a little borked.

In the meantime, as well as I had to go back to static rendering for my website, I implemented a feature that I had in the past, but had disappeared some time ago. Thanks to some MySQL wizardry from Adam Kalsey, I now have ‘related entries’ listed in the sidebar for each individual entry (this does mean that the linklog now longer appears on the individual entries, but I didn’t want to make the sidebar stretch on too far). The code already does a fairly good job of picking out similar entries to whichever one is currently being displayed, but the accuracy should improve as I go through and fix the keywords for all the entries on my site.

Just another fun way to go bouncing around and exploring through the years of babbling I’ve amassed here.

iTunes “Voodoo People (Edit)” by Prodigy, The from the album Voodoo People (1995, 4:07).

My Netflix

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I’ve just added a new page to the site (and linked it in the header navigation of every page): my Netflix queues.

Thanks to the plugin goodness of the Netflix Suite, it lists the movies I currently have checked out, the last 90 days (?) of movies I’ve watched and returned along with what I’ve rated them, and my entire Netflix queue (sitting pretty at 441 as of this moment).

New Styles

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I’ve done very little posting or reading over the weekend, and I’m up way too late tonight (tomorrow morning is really going to suck), but it’s all for a good cause — well, okay, depending on how you define that — as there are now two new stylesheets available in the switcher over to the right.

Simple Green style screenshot

The first is “Simple Green”. There’s really not a whole lot to look at, as I was mainly using it to play with a couple ideas that I had but wasn’t sure if I could quite get them to work correctly or not. Green monotype text on a black background, very little styling aside from that. In all honesty, while it’s kind of fun for a few moments, I wouldn’t want to read my site this way on a regular basis. Who knows, though, maybe someone will decide that it makes me look more ‘l33t’ and Matrix-y.

Blue Distressed style screenshot

The second is “Blue Distressed” and is the reason I’m up so late. I’m really, really happy with the way this one turned out. Cool blues and greys, distressed edges, and a lot more visually interesting than any design that I’ve come up with so far. Many thanks must go out to Keith Bowman, whose Photoshop brushes and color palletes made this design possible.

Now, neither of these stylesheets have been tested in anything other than Safari yet, so they may very well look like ass in other browsers (especially IE, and even more so with Blue Distressed, as it uses transparent .png images that I don’t believe are supported with IE). Caveat emptor and all that jazz.

For me, though, Blue Distressed is the way I’m viewing my site from now on.

And now — bedtime. I’m so going to hate my alarm in the morning.

Update: After a little tweaking, I’ve deemed the appearance under IE 5 “good enough” to make Blue Distressed the default stylesheet for the site. If you haven’t already used the stylesheet switcher to pick a style or if you’re a brand-new visitor, you should be getting the fancy-shmancy new design now.

I still don’t know how this looks under IE6, though. That’ll have to wait until I actually bother to turn on the PC in my apartment, something that tends to happen about as often as America elects a Democrat to the White House.

Or so.

It’s close.

iTunes “God is a DJ (Edit)” by Faithless from the album Sunday 8 PM (1999, 3:32).

Four Years

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The actual day isn’t until tomorrow, but as I’m not planning on doing much in the way of weblogging on Thanksgiving day, I figured I’d go ahead and toss this up ahead of time. While I’d been keeping hand-updated websites since ’95 or so, November 25th, 2000 marked my first foray into using a software engine to keep track of the random rambling I occasional put up on my website, starting me stumbling into the world of weblogging.

Four years it’s been since then.

Semi-randomly chosen highlights follow…

Read more

From the vaults

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I’ve been playing with HTML for quite a few years now. Every so often over the years, I’ve actually been bright enough to make a quick copy of my website and archive it. Tonight, in a mad burst of misplaced nostalgia, I pulled them all out of the digital dustbin and have put them back online. As an added bonus, this allowed me to put some really old entries into my archives, from the pre-“blogging” days when I was just hand-coding pages and updating them as I saw fit. My archives date back to 1995 now!

Curious enough to check out just how my design and web skills have evolved over the years? Feel free to wander through. Some links will work, some won’t — caveat emptor and all that.

  • February 27, 1996: Yup, you read that right — 1996. We’re talking seriously old-school here (“Netscape 2.0 Enhanced”, even). Looks best if you shrink the width of your browser window to just a bit wider than the graphics, as this was back when 640×480 was in wide useage. Check out that announcements page, too — reverse chronological order, date and time stamped…blogging before anyone knew what blogging was (eat your heart out, Dave Winer)!

  • February 14, 1997: One year later, and things have improved dramatically. This basic design would last through the next three archives, and while it’s a bit broken now, I still like the general idea. Featured one of the first incarnations of a Gigs Music Theatre site, though it’s just a single page here.

  • April 21, 1997: A few months later. A little less content, as I started to focus on expanding the Gig’s page. Design is the same (and is still slightly broken in modern browsers).

  • March 30, 1998: Another year goes by, and things are still pretty static. The design is the same (though by this point, it works in modern browsers). The Gig’s page has evolved into a full-fledged site by this point, though.

  • August 5, 2002: Whoops! Four years went by with no archiving. I’ve been kicking myself for this of late, as I was doing some hand-coded “blogging” back then that I don’t have copies of anymore. Still, at least I have this. By this point, the design has changed majorly, and I was using MovableType to handle my weblogging.

My lord I’ve been doing this for a long time.

iTunes “Kat-A-Mandu” by Poems for Laila from the album Katamandu (1992, 5:11).

IQ redux

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Almost a month ago, I signed up for the free StatCounter statistics tracking service, and I’ve been checking in every few days to see what kind of traffic I’m getting on my site.

From the 11th to the 31st of October, I’d been averaging around 1,333 page loads per day, with 1,090 unique visitors, 1,022 first-time visitors, and 68 returning visitors (keep in mind, those are all averages). Not anywhere near the top of the ‘net, but not terribly shabby, either.

Then, over the past few days, I’ve suddenly been watching my traffic start to spike, topping out (so far) yesterday at 2,757 page loads…

Graph Daily Summary

A little curious about what was causing the spike, I checked out my referrers and search terms. Turns out that the majority of the spike is caused by people searching for information on how states voted combined with the state’s average IQ, which first started going around the ‘net back in May regarding the 2000 elections. The table that was flying around the ‘net was later declared a hoax, but apparently the meme is still fairly popular, and a lot of people have been landing on my post because of that.

Turns out that someone has actually updated the table for the 2004 election — though they’re using the same data for the IQ, so I’m sure the table is just as faulty for this election as it was for the 2000 election. As it still seems to be amusing people, though, I added a quick update to my original post noting the new table (and calling attention to the fact that it’s a hoax, though most people probably won’t care about that), and in the meantime, I’ll just enjoy the upswing in traffic.

iTunes “Tripnotized Vol. 1 (Part 1) (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Tripnotized Vol. 1 (full mix) (1995, 1:11:25).