More Reunions

One of the more popular way to combat comment spam these days is to have your weblog software automatically turn comments off for posts more than a few days old. I’ve played with this ability in the past, but there’s one big reason why I’ve never stuck with it for very long: the comments that pop up on old posts can lead to some fun coincidences.

Late last year, I mentioned one such situation, where a bunch of people from Anchorage’s old punk community started stumbling across an old post of mine, started chatting in the comments, and ended up setting up their own website to keep in contact.

Over the past few months, I’ve been watching a very similar situation develop. Back in 2003 I posted about the annual “Goth Day/Bats Day” at Disneyland, when as many goths as possible spend a day flitting about the Magic Kingdom. A year later, a chance comment on that post mentioned a UK Disney Channel show called “Bus Life” that ran in 2004.

Apparently, that was enough for Google to push that post to the top of the rankings for people searching for “disney bus life” or “daniel bickerdike“, one of the actors on the show. Since then, that post has become a meeting point for both fans of the show and cast members, giving them a chance to reconnect after having all gone on to other projects for the last couple years.

I love watching stuff like this go on — and I’m very willing to put up with the occasional bout of comment spam in return for being able to watch old friends reconnect thanks to Google and some random piece of babble on my site.

iTunesPrelude” by Mauve Sideshow from the album Meet Me in the Wasteland (1993, 2:20).

schrodingerscat

I was just looking over the list of tags used on my site in the past month as displayed on my archives page, when one tag in particular suddenly gave me the giggles. A simple mis-parsing, and I ended up with two competing definitions for the same tag.

schrodingerscat can categorize entries related to:

  1. The famous quantum mechanics thought experiment involving a cat in a box proposed by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (“schrodingers cat”);
  2. The fecal matter produced by said Austrian physicist (“schrodinger scat”).

This was far, far too funny for a few minutes.

Help: .htaccess redirects

Never having quite gotten the hang of .htaccess redirect requests, I’m hoping someone out there might be able to give me a hand with this.

I would like this…

https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/tags/pickatag

…to map to this (though not wrapped onto multiple lines, obviously)…

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tags.cgi?
blog_id=1&tags=pickatag

Similarly, for multiple tags, this…

https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/tags/pickatag+anytag

…should map to this (and so on, as more tags are added)…

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tags.cgi?
blog_id=1&tags=pickatag+anytag

Any ideas? Thanks much in advance!

iTunesMexican Women” by Throwing Muses from the album Just Say Yo (1988, 2:49).

Tag Intersections

A little bit more work on improving the tags.app implementation here.

By default, tags.app’s results page from performing a tag search is very sparse — simply a bulleted list of post titles, presented ten at a time. One of the first things I did when tweaking my install was to enhance the page a bit by adding post excerpts, author, and time/datestamps to each entry. I also added a list of ‘related tags’ in the sidebar of the results page.

While tinkering around with adding the tag search field tonight, I realized that it shouldn’t be hard at all for me to add easy tag intersection searches to the tag results page. A few tweaks later, and it’s done: when a search on a tag is performed, the list of related tags now includes a small ‘[+]‘ symbol before each tag. Clicking on the tag itself will start a new search for that tag alone — but clicking on the [+] will add that tag to the search (and narrow down the ‘related tags’ list dramatically). I’ve been playing with this, and it’s making it very easy to drill down through the thousands of entries on the site very quickly.

Code snippets follow.

Read more

This is a test…

…this is only a test.

Update: And it’s a test that worked — my favorite kind!

Last month, I added tag support to the site, courtesy of tags.app. While it’s been working quite well, I’d occasionally want to look for a tag that wasn’t displayed as a clickable link on whatever page I was on. I’d been getting around this by clicking on any tag to perform a search and then editing the URL in the browser’s address bar to get to the search I really wanted. Obviously, not a very user-friendly solution.

With a little simple form editing, things are much simpler now. In the sidebar there are now two search fields available. The first is the standard full-text search that comes standard with every Movable Type installation. The second (or the one at the top of this post, for that matter) ties into tags.app’s search capability, so you can now search for arbitrary tags. You can even search for tag intersections by entering multiple tags separated by spaces.

Quick, simple, and easy to use. Some days you’d almost think I knew what I was doing around here.

For the record, here’s the code I inserted just below the div that the standard search field lives in:

<div>
 <form method="get">mt-tags.cgi"&gt;
  " /&gt;
  <label for="tagsearch">Tag Search:<br />
   (Separate multiple tags with spaces)</label><br />


 </form>
</div>

iTunesShe’s Hot” by Sheep on Drugs from the album One for the Money (1997, 3:50).

TypeKey broken?

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to do this, but while disabling the OpenID Comment plugin (which was apparently causing issues with submitting comments, and wasn’t really being used anyway), I’ve managed to break the ability to log in via TypeKey for authentication. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going wrong — all of my code looks like it should be doing what it’s supposed to — but for whatever reason, the link to log in to TypeKey isn’t showing up.

So no TypeKey until I figure out what I broke. Meh.

iTunesSweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson from the album Smells Like Children (1995, 4:53).