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How I shut down comment spam on this site
In the past, I’ve only allowed comments on recent blog posts, not older ones. Because I didn’t blog for the longest time, I had no recent blogs posts, which meant I got no comments (or comment spam). When I re-launched JeffCroft.com recently and started writing again, I actually started getting comments again (thanks, guys!). Of course, I also started getting comment spam again. Like, a ton of it. On average, I was getting about 10 comment spam posts per hour.
Frustrated, I went to my standby from the good ‘ol days, Akismet. I quickly found that it wasn’t working for me. It was letting through most of the spam and also preventing a lot of ham from being posted. After a tweet on the matter, Mike Davidson pointed me down a path that has worked beautifully for two weeks now — not a single comment spam post.
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Kohi Vinh: Rambling Thoughts on Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous, Pinterest and Blogging
Khoi talks about the state of blogging in 2012 and the distinction between the “writing kind of blogging” and the more “curating links and photos and things” kind of blogging.
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End of a snarky era: Gawker shuts down Valleywag
I never read Valleywag regularly, but I’m kind of sad to see it go. Clearly over the top and ridiculous, it definitely made me laugh once in a while.
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Creating Social Networks Few Want
Moveable Type and Wordpress are both touting new “social networking” features for future releases. The question is: does anyone care? Do people really want to start their own social networking sites around their blog? From what I can tell, these are attempts to add features that will generate media buzz, not features that will get users excited about the product. I could certainly be wrong, though. What do you think?
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Fifty Most Influential Female Bloggers
A solid, well-rounded list that includes a ton of great bloggers and a handful of good friends. Via Rex, who is just a bit uptight about people not giving him credit for the links they steal from his site — even though he no doubt stole them from somewhere else. (Just teasing, buddy.)
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Zeldman: The vanishing personal site
Zledman talks about the changing personal site, which is more and more being “offloaded” to third-party services (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.). I like to think I’ve got the best of both worlds, here at jeffcroft.com. I definitely do miss the old school personal site, though — I talked about this with Paul Boag on a forthcoming episode of Boagword.
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Twitter in your blog, blog posts in your Twitter. Ping ping ping!
Sarah gripes about people that pipe their blog posts into twitter or their tweets into their blog feeds. I couldn’t agree more. It’s incredibly annoying.
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James Bennett: Where is Django’s blog application?
People ask me this question all the time. The answer, in general, is, “there’s really not one.” Building a monolithic blogging application for Django kind of goes against the grain of most of the best practices for Django development — and James explains this in detail. It’s a good read if you’re curious about the design of Django apps.
What’s more, most of the Django blogging applications that do exist were generally built by a single person for their own personal site, and tend to be customized to that person’s needs, making them less likely to be suitable for your needs.
And, quite frankly, writing a simple blogging app in Django is so damn easy that it just doesn’t feel worth it.
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Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine.
Speaking form personal experience, I can say that I fully agree with this piece. Blogs engines are great learning tools: everyone understands what one is and how it typically works, everyone has their own ideas of “custom” things they want from their blog engine, and the basic logic involved is not particularly complicated.
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What A Comment Stream Would Look Like In A Meeting
Definitely funny — at least if you’ve ever tried to read Digg.com comments.
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Adactio: Reflection
Jeremy has some great thoughts here on the nature of online conversation. Based in part on a back-and-forth he and I had over the weekend, I was feeling similarly depressed about the ability for people to communicate as civil human beings for the past couple of days. Besides that exchange, I managed to (seemingly) offend Eric Meyer and Christian Montoya, and I had to read this incredibly depressing post and its subsequent comment thread. I was quite down for a while there— so much so that Michelle noticed and I ended up venting to her about it.
While I generally don’t agree with Jeremy’s belief that comments on blogs are a bad idea, over the weekend I knew exactly what he was talking about. I think the best piece I’ve ever read on on this topic is Wilson’s Shouts and Echos.
I don’t have much positive to say on the matter — I just hope it stops, at some point.
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YATP: Typogrify for Textpattern
I’m so excited to see Christian’s Typogrify being ported to all these popular publishing platform. The web is getting prettier every day!
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MT4 and movabletype.org
It’s good to see Movable Type back with a new version. It’s been soooo long since the last major update. I’m no longer using it, but it was good for me while it lasted, and the additions of memcached and OpenID support are big boons. Congrats, Six Apart. Happy to have you back in the game.
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Textplates ‘07
Textplates is a TxxtPattern template design contest — and I’ll be helping with the judging this year. There are some great prizes, including a Mac mini, books from Friends of ED/Apress, and more. If you’re a designer and a TXP fan, definitely put your name in the hat!
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Why Journalism Matters
I actually had the exact same experience Scott describes here. I read several blog posts on the Kathy Sierra situation, unable to really make sense of exactly what had happened and who was responsible. It wasn’t until the San Francisco Chronicle (read “real journalism”) reported on the story a few days later that I was able to understand it all.
Bloggers wrote what they knew. They wrote what the understood, and what they believed. That’s great. That’s what blogging is. But it took an act of journalism to make sense of it all in one cohesive story. This is why blogging is not journalism, and never will be.
Can journalists blog? Of course. Can bloggers be journalists? Sure. But they’re two very different acts — both will be vitally important to our media landscape going forward.
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Scrapblog: Create a world for your pictures
A beautiful personal expression site based around the idea of scrapbooking, with a gorgeous Flash-based UI and set of wonderfully feminine default templates by the likes of Veerle Pieters and Cindy Li (and others, too). Includes spport for pulling your photos from Flickr, and several other services.
This is what happens when people take decidedly geeky things (blogs, open APIs, wizzy Flash UIs, and so forth) and mash them up with things real (as in non-geeky) people want. Congrats to everyone involved with this — it looks like a really, really impressive web application.
Sidenote: between this and Picnik, the Flash developers are kind of kicking our ass on the web app front. Where are the web standards-based apps that work this well?
Sidenote #2: Anyone know what backend technologies are used in Scrapblog?
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Jeremy Keith: Ghost in the Machine Tags
Jeremy picks up on Richard’s machine tag ideas (which I linked yesterday) and implements them on his blog. I should do this too — it would fit nicely with the other Flickr API stuff I’ve been doing.
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SERIOUS: WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, upgrade to 2.1.2
Please help the WordPress guys get the word out. This is really unfortunate. I feel bad for Matt and company.
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CROWDCTRL // Shaun of the dead horse
Jason Lynes is perturbed at Inman’s Mint 2 marketing machine. Which is, of course, amusing, since a bunch of people were perturbed about the same thing on upon Mint’s initial release. People will never believe it, I’m sure, but Shaun did the same thing anyone would do if they were releasing an app: he asked his friends to beta test it for him. There was nothing more to the agreement. Us beta testers were never promised a free anything, and were never asked to publicly rave, defend, or link to the product or its author. Some of us did so, because we like it, but certainly not because Shaun asked. Jason Lynes generally seems like a good guy and is a talented designer, but this post is nothing but a bunch of sour grapes (and, frankly, it’s not the first post of his that’s come off that way).
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24-Hour Newspaper People
The Times’ David Carr on blogging from the perspective of a traditional journalist. Good stuff.
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Five things you may not know about Jeremy Keith
Funny — I know all five of them.
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Pavatar: decentralized avatars for blogs and the like
I really like this idea. For the most part, the implementation seems sound. I think I’ll be whipping up some Django code to implement it here. So if you comment on this site, make yourself a Pavatar. :) Via Matt.
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Habari
I’ve noticed several bloggers recently jumped the WordPress ship to try out Habari, a new blogging platform built on PHP5 using more modern programming concepts (read: object-oriented) and giving you more flexibility in databases (read: PostgreSQL support). Good to hear this is out there, because frankly, most of the existing crop of blogging tools (MT, WordPress, etc.) are not “modern” in any sense of the word. Habari isn’t for me (I’m too hooked on Python now), but it may be worth looking into if you want a nice PHP-based blogging platform.
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How to turn your blog in to an OpenID
Simon has a great piece on how to turn your blog into an open ID. I definitely intend to do this. Thanks, Simon!
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Newspapers can learn from gossip website’s success
“But there are also the stories which can’t be told because they seem too trivial and therefore they don’t meet the rather rigid newspaper standard for what is news. The truth is those are the stories people are really interested in, so why shouldn’t those conversations be reflected in a publication?”
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Comment posting guidelines | 456 Berea Street
Sort-of related to the discussion Jason Lynes is having about whether or not comments are useful and the “Django comment robots” on this site, Roger has a great list of comment posting guidelines. No doubt, if everyone followed these, the world would be a better place.
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Why blogging as we know it is over
John Allsop says: “I … think a different use pattern will emerge, one less focussed vertically on blogs and bloggers, but more horizontally on individual posts.” I think this is probably accurate. Good read.
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God doesn’t want you to blog
“Let me emphasize that no one — including adults— should have a blog or personal website. … Blogging has become a socially accepted practice — just as are dating seriously too young, underage drinking and general misbehaving. But just because someone else “jumps off the cliff” does not mean you should do the same.” That’s right, folks. blogging is just as evil as underage drinking! I had no idea — did you?
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Airbag - Boxes.
Greg isn’t so excited about “blaghs” anymore. I’m kind of with him. I enjoy the content of blogs and the commentary they provide — but I’m very sick of the cookie-cutter-ness of them, especially from a design perspective. I, too, miss the old days when hitting a new personal site meant a completely different experience than the last one.
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On personal content management
Working in the online news media industry, I got into a lot of conversations about content management. Turns out it’s a tricky problem to solve. There are a lot of factors involved, and they start as simple as trying to define what exactly content management is.
Seems to me when most people think of a content management system for the web, they think of data entry. Web forms that let one enter data, which will eventually be displayed on a web page — right? Right. But really, content management should be about more than that. The process of managing your content ought to include structuring, organizing, searching on, filtering, and easily modifying your content. It ought to include being able to quickly define new types of content. It ought to facilitate establishing meaningful relationships between disparate pieces of content. It ought to make your content more useful simply by virtue of the content being in the system.
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Django tips: Hacking FreeComment
James Bennett has a great entry about how to extend Django’s FreeComment functionality with this like comment moderation, auto-moderation after 30 days, and Askimet-based spam-checking. A must-read for any Django weblogger.
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YADPS: Wanderlogue.com
My friends Josh Works and Jessa Talamentez preview their new travel-blogging site, which will let you sign up and create “wanderlogues” of your travels — including Flickr photos, journal entries, geocoding information with maps, and more. It looks really great. Definitely check it out. Django-powered, of course!
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Ross Poulton: A Django Blog, Redux
Ross is a longtime member of the Django community and wrote a tutorial on how to put together a blog in Django way back when. Now, he’s updated his blog code for the latest version of Django and made it available for download. A great learning tool. Total lines of code for Ross’ Django blog? 63.
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LOVELINES : From Love to Hate, in Words and Pictures
Similar to the one I just linked, this blog-based mashup is an online art piece by Jonathan Harris exploring love, hate, and desire. Awesome.
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We Feel Fine
Damn this is cool. A visualization of feelings extracted from blogs, it’s as much an art piece as it is one kick ass mashup. Only downside is that it’s a Java applet, but damn is it ever worth the wait.
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Anil Dash: The Ultimate Commenting Experience
“We men need to inflict our comments on the web with wanton disregard for the context, content, and community in which we’re participating. Let’s get some Ajax on this motherfucker, stat!” Hah.
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Tom Coates: Why Content Publishers shouldn’t host weblogs…
This older post from the Tom gets at something we’ve been talking about for our site at work: media companies hosting blogs. I’m not as convinced that we “shouldn’t” do it, but I do think Tom does a nice job of pointing out the pitfalls we need to look ou
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Gruber leaves Joyent for…wait for it…Daring Fireball
Jon Gruber officialy becomes the first “full-time blogger” that I consider worthy of the title. Gruber’s stuff is original, funny, informative, provocative, and consistently written with a professional quality lacking on most blogs. Good luck, Jon.
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30 social bookmarks “add to” links for blogs
Useful. I’m not really a fan of the “I’ve got 20 favicons from bookmarking sites running along the bottom of my blog post” thing, but a few well-selected “add to” links makes some sense.
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Adactio: Journal - Comments on community
Should, as Jeremy says, comments be disabled 90% of the time on blogs? Is it possible fostering a community around your site is actually a bad thing? I don’t know, but it sure is an interesting article.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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