In My Experience: Weblogs and Blogging

TrackBack spamming.

2005-02-01T09:06:36-05:00

I just removed all trackback links and removed the trackback cgi because some jackass has been pinging each and every blog entry on my site (and that sends me an email, and I hate email, especially hundreds of them).

When this site comes back into some more regular development, all that comment and trackback stuff will be off due to spammers like today's gambling advertiser (who's a an idiot because they could have just pinged the Communiblog and gotten their one set of links on all pages in one single ping).

I hope rel="nofollow" puts you people out of business.

Back to basics.

2004-09-07T11:43:10-05:00

Over the last couple of months I have not been blogging (obviously) and have instead been spending time with my family, playing video games, and working. To bo honest, I haven't missed it at all, and perhaps it's because I have gotten bored with the whole thing, or my core interests have simply migrated. I'm not exactly sure what the deal is, but I do know that this site will continue on.

There are a couple of posts on this site that still prove to be useful to people (mostly the ones with javascript code ready to be stolen) and those will remain available, as will the entire archive. Hopefully I'll get back to adding to this site again, but it's likely going to be stuff more directly targeted to me (and probably more boring for you).

For a while, I was blogging items that I thought would be interesting to my (one or two) readers, and that really isn't what blogging should be about (imho). I named this site "In My Experience" for a reason, and that's the simply write about my experiences with things. I plan on getting back to that, but I really have no idea when.

Also, I'm disabling comments for the time being due to the constant comment spamming that has been going on.

Transition.

2004-05-07T14:22:04-05:00

Much time and effort on this over the last couple of years has migrated from working and video gaming to working, parenting, and video gaming. For now, this leaves no time for blogging, but I have plans to keep posting items that I want to remember for more than a day or two and other plans to build the site up as a résumé platform.

I don't think I'm going to lose my job soon (but who knows) and really just want to assemble most bits of work and related materials into one cohesive unit. In the near term my plans are to...

migrate to Movable Type 3.0 (comment icons will be broken for a while)
get the blog off the home page
maintain the archives and comments as is
retire the Communiblog
redesign the main interface

and to not post very much for a while.

I have some usability of web forms interactions questions I want to post and some javascript that's worth posting. But that will wait until I have time, and with a first birthday coming up for my daughter, that's not the time.

Many thanks to the regular comment posters, and fuck you very much to the comment spammers.

See you soon/later.

Comment Spam.

2003-11-05T09:26:37-05:00

I was comment spammed last night by someone promoting Adipex which is part of the heart valve killer drug combo better known as Phen-fen. I tried to look up some "real" info on Adipex and only found places to buy it. The spamers are succeeding, but not with my help.

Testing AOL Journals.

2003-07-17T09:37:53-05:00

Internal beta testing of AOL Journals opened up yesterday, and I have dutifully started an AOL Journals blog and posted my suggestions and comments to the appropriate forums. It's no secret that AOL is doing this, but I didn't know any real details until yesterday. Also, I re-read the note about not leaking details, so this post is pretty restrained.

Here's a few tidbits that I think are not embargoed, but aren't really that juicy...

The set up was stupid easy. I mean, my daughter could do it, and she's 9 weeks old.
NetNewsWire can read my Journal's RSS file.
The instant messaging conduit works pretty well, and I think IM blogging is a good thing.
There's one thing about commenting that I like and hate at the same time. I'll rant and rave about this when the product goes public.

It's a good start, and it's not a "premium" service (as in, I don't have to pay extra dollars to have an AOL Journal) so I'm pretty hopeful that this thing will take off. The basics are there and it's pretty solid.

[Disclaimer: I do not work on the Journals product. It should be assumed that any product still under development will change, so don't expect anything I say here to be true when this thing goes live. Be sure to read around for a lot more info that I can provide.]

You've got blog.

2003-07-07T10:22:45-05:00

Apparently, AOL is doing a weblog product, and I'm guessing NDAs have been violated(?) I have only heard the rumors and know nothing more than what I read out there on the net. However, if any sort of internal beta testing is made available, you can bet I will check it out. In the meantime, some people already seem to have opinions...

Jeff Jarvis: AOL Blogs: Yesterday, I was one of a privileged council of blogging elders -- Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, Clay Shirky -- invited to see AOL's new blogging tools, which will be released later this year. They've done a good job.

Dave Winer: On AOL's entry into weblogs: Now their strategy is coming out, and there are some surprises. Today I'm going to discuss, briefly, just one, the Instant Messaging connection with weblog tools, and how it leads into the quagmire that the weblog world is caught up in (and a plea to swallow our respective prides and compromise now).

Kevin Lawver: Super Secret Agent Revealed!: The top secret meeting is now something I can talk about. I went to New York with the AOL Journals team to talk about the new AOL Journals product with some influential folks in the blogging world.

Purdy.

2003-06-27T09:46:20-05:00

This is easily one of the best looking blogs I have ever seen. What a great balance of simplicity and interest, and I just love the color scheme. Readers of IMX will likely enjoy the content at mezzoblue.

Corporate Blogging.

2003-06-19T09:57:08-05:00

I finally read this piece about what MSFT is doing about their employees doing the blog thing. One comment in particular is pretty chilling...

Noted Microsoft employee Scoble in his blog recently : "I think executives who weblog (particularly at Microsoft) are between a rock and a hard place. If they say anything interesting, they'll immediately get picked up in the press and their comments will probably be taken out of context.

"If they give away strategy or product plans, they will help out competitors. If they talk about competitors, they'll be welcoming lawsuits. If they give people insights into what the business is doing, they could be hit with shareholder lawsuits, or other governmental actions," Scoble acknowledges.

I tend to comment on my employer from time to time and have quoted email that are sent to employees (and the Washington Post always gets the email somehow, so do I even matteR?). The point above makes me think twice (especially when I have a baby to feed).

While I was changing diapers...

2003-05-19T14:22:09-05:00

While I was away on new baby duty (doody?) I noticed a few things about the traffic at this site, it didn't drop off dramatically. Instead, a slow decline in daily visits occurred with a somewhat steady pace of RSS feed hits (indicating subscriptions that people don't update frequently). That's a good thing I suppose, because I will be continuing to post various bits of dorky minutia.

Also, while I was in my diaper changing training seminars, I received email from Mr. Kalsey asking...

Do you want pings to the communiblog only for categories that are at least peripherally related to your blog? To which I replied... To tell you the truth, I've waffled back and forth on that, and I think that if there were a ton of pings coming in all the time, I'd say that keeping things on topic would be a good idea. But the pings are slowly coming in, and randomness and serendipity need to be embraced. I say feel free to hit it with everything you've got.

You see, the about Communiblog page sees about 8 to 20 hits a day, and that hasn't dropped off or increased over the past two weeks, so there's some interest in it somewhere. I invite everyone to feel free to ping the Communiblog as much as they want, and can keep it on or off topic. I'll just trash anything that I think isn't quite right (ie, offensive to me, boring, or otherwise useless).

Oh shucks, no more feed for me.

2003-04-03T14:49:45-05:00

Today, I opened NetNewsWire for the first time in several days (due to the Spamomoter firedrill) and got this one-and-only news item from the slashdot feed...

Why Do I Not Get the Latest Stories in RSS?

Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Please see the FAQ for more information, or email banned@slashdot.org.

Isn't it a bit ironic and perhaps hypocritical for slashdot to put this in their feed. Sure, slashdot itself doesn't abuse other sites, but a mere link from that will cause something, that in slashdot's terms in quote above, constitutes abuse. They know that happens, and implies complicity (I know, I'm getting a little smarmy here).

Now, "my" RSS reader is abusing the server? No, it isn't, it's fetching a file once, and then I read thru it with my reader, and then move on to other things (ie, I quit the app and thus it doesn't fetch the feed anymore). That's not abuse, but who really cares? There are plenty of other sources of dorky info that aren't so redundantly published (ie, same article posted multiple times within days). Cya slashdot.

Radio coverage of blogging.

2003-04-01T14:10:08-05:00

NPR (thru affiliate WAMU) covered blogs, warblogging, and the democratization of journalism today on the Kojo Nnamdi show. It was a good segment and you can listen to it here.

BBedit shovelware please.

2003-03-30T20:32:11-05:00

Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire (NNW) gets the once over by one of our favorite Mac oriented webloggers (ie, Daring Fireball). when asked if Net News Wire was always intended to be a commercial app, Simmons says...

Yes. It was the intention from the beginning, and that the main difference between the full and Lite versions would be that Lite is read only, while the full version is also a writing tool.

I definitely use NNW as a read only application, thus NNW Lite is good enough for me. The editing piece of the Pro version isn't bad at all, but I'm really a BBedit kind of guy and have gotten to the point where I need (rely upon) BBedit to be better at blog post creation.

Currently, I type everything up in BBedit and switch back and forth between NNW and Safari to assemble up the pieces of these posts. Perhaps I'm lazy, but all that switching back and forth sucks, and makes it harder to create the linkfests that each of these postings is supposed to be. And then I have to connect to my site, and log into MovableType, etc, etc. Doing all that junk is a hassle.

Umm Qasr is their Tijuana.

2003-03-27T22:07:44-05:00

CNN is running a war blogging story that points to a blog by "L.T. SMASH" which is, of course, a Simpsons reference. It's interesting how CNN doesn't make that point though (likely because that would seem like a trivialization).

Aggregation site roundup.

2003-03-23T15:56:17-05:00

There are more and more blog aggregation sites every month (and I'll miss many of them in this post). Rootblog seems to be the newest, and weblogs.com seems to be the most useless (to me anyway). Here's a list of these sites and a brief explanation of what they are trying to do...

Like I mentioned, weblogs.com seems to be completely useless due to the fact that it only tells you who recently updated. As a consumer of blog media, I do indeed care about who recently updated, but a list of hundreds of blogs placed in order of their update timestamp is not helpful.
NewsIsFree is pretty cool because it lets you know who updated recently, what kind of blog it is, and where their RSS feed is. The Directory of blogs and news sites, etc is good for discovering more of the types of blogs and sites you want to find. Also, if no RSS feed exists for a given site, NewsIsFree goes thru the trouble of scraping one together.
Syndic8 is pretty much the same deal as NewsIsFree, but has an XML-RPC interface for extracting information in more sophisticated ways. That's pretty cool, even though I won't be using it (for now anyway).
Rootblog takes the tact of reading RSS feeds and listing who has updated recently, and listing the recent posts with their short descriptions. This is more useful to me than weblogs.com, but I think there is more Rootblog can do. I'd like to see some sort of info architecture that lets me know what sort of content is at the recently updated site. Maybe that means everyone should be using Dublin Core metadata and pings should carry that information.
BlogTree isn't really an aggregator, but it does contain more semantically rich organizations of blogs by allowing authors to associate their site with others. You can say "this blog over here inspired my blog" and that gets leveraged by showing which blogs are children blogs, siblings, and parents. Very cool, but it's not much better than randomness for finding engaging blog content that you are interested in.
blo.gs let's you know who recently updated, and if known, shows you a link to the RSS feed for that blog. That's certainly more useful than weblogs.com, and better yet, you can set blogs to be watched, and there's a listing of the most watch blogs. Popularity as an index can be useful in terms of finding quality. There's a mechanism for finding blogs that are related, but that is "determined by who other people who have added it to their list of favorites." That's anecdotal relationship building that can be useful.
Technorati is kind of cool, but kind of promotes a High School popularity contest mentality, and is a manifestation of the blog power curve. Outside of that, I like the features of the site that allow you to see who is linking to a given blog, and consume that as HTML or as RSS. I read my server logs every day, and carefully look thru the referrers and follow them back to see who is linking to me site. Very often I find good sites that way, and I like that Technorati makes that useful information to anyone.
Blogrolling.com "is a web service designed to take the hassle out of updating lists of links on your website or weblog. By using simple "bookmarklets" with one click you can add links immediately on your website. No pesky HTML to edit everytime you want to add someone new." I don't use it, but I see referrer links coming from it every day now, so someone likes the idea of avoiding "pesky HTML."
AmphetaDesk "is a free, cross platform, open-sourced, syndicated news aggregator - it obediently sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news that interests you, and displays them in a quick and easy to use (and customizable!) webpage. With thousands of channels available, AmphetaDesk can shave hours off your day." It's important to note that you run an application and select blogs to aggregate and then view that aggregation thru a browser, so it's still sort of a website, but kind of an application. I use it.

Knowing that someone recently updated their site is good to know, but it is not the nexus of what compels me to go read that blog. I want assistance in finding new blog content that is interesting to me.

Stop the referrer spamming.

2003-03-21T10:28:43-05:00

In the last week I have seen several referrer URLs show up in my server logs pointing to people's résumés. My advice? Knock it off, because anyone who thinks this is a useful way of finding work is delirious. I don't need anymore delirious co-workers.

Perhaps the bitter irony for some of these folks is that my group might be looking for someone with some mad skills, but referrer spamming is not the way to do it. Spamming, in any format, is dishonest.