Comments Fixed

Posted Sat Dec 9, 2006 in

A friend emailed me a couple of days ago with a comment on my weblog. He couldn’t get the comment to post. So, I tried posting one myself and found myself banned by the spam-blocker.

So, the spam-blocker is now turned off. Comments are working again. I’m not worried about spam because all comments are moderated and the spammers are simply deleted and their IP’s blocked.

Comments are now live again. Fire away!

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Hit Rate!

Posted Mon Mar 20, 2006 in

I logged into my weblog counter earlier this evening. I was very surprised, no shocked, to find that I am approaching 200 hits for the day.

I’ve never had 200 hits in one day—not ever!

Apparently my $2-bill posting found its way to a couple of bulletin boards and the hits stem from that piece.

I know it’s passe to write about blogging, but I couldn’t help myself. The situation simply amuses me.

I’m still amused…

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Off-Topic Comments

Posted Wed Jan 25, 2006 in

I really need to be off to the office, but I’m moving slowly today and have a few thoughts to record. The work will still be there when I arrive, although I know I’ll pay for my late start later in the week.

A conversation evolved over at Reid’s place. In a post about Iran, a commenter wrote about bin Laden, which was clearly off-topic. I watched as Reid gently and patiently explained why the comment was off-topic and how his policy (for his webspace) was that he expected comments to be on-topic.

The conversation devolved from there. In the end, Reid was called a chickenhawk, a derogatory term reserved by the left-wing (I found the definition on Michael Moore’s website—not linked intentionally) for conservatives who support the current war in Iraq (and, perhaps, other unpopular wars), but who have not served in the military.

It was interesting to watch the thread develop, as a dispassionate observer and in a sort of perverse way. (I really don’t enjoy watching bad things happen.) After the first exchange, I could tell the interchange was deteriorating. I don’t know the commenter, so I have no axe to grind. But there was an element of “this is my position and I’m going to stick to it, regardless of what happens” to the tone of the writing that led me to believe there would not be a positive outcome.

The appropriate response would have been something like “Oh! You’re right. I’m off-topic, I’m sorry about that.” The conversation could have moved on. It didn’t.

It interests me that some individuals, and I mean no disrespect to the commenter, will take a position like that, then stick to it when it’s clearly indefensible. It isn’t even that the comment was wrong—it was an opinion, fairly expressed, just in the wrong forum. I know I’ve taken a poor position, then held it, and I bear the scars for it. It’s not a wise thing to do. It’s much better to admit an erroneous position, retreat from it, and then move on. It’s especially important when someone is as gentle and encouraging as Reid was with this particular commenter.

The fact that the commenter ultimately fell to name-calling was particularly telling. Furthermore, he played the disabled vet card as well, when it clearly had no relation to the conversation whatsoever. I really don’t understand.

The entire interchange made me think about my own webspace and the policy I have. I also thought about my own comments on others’ personal sites. I guess it’s good to think about those things now and again.

While I don’t publish a policy, I have one that’s implicitly defined. I expect to be treated with common courtesy. I expect my correspondents to be civil to me and each other, and to make comments on-topic. Off-topic comments are better left to email. Furthermore, my comments are moderated to prevent comment-spam from getting through. If someone were to publish something offensive, I’d simply not let it be visible, delete the offending comment, and ban the IP address to reduce probability of a second offense.

In the spirit of one of my favorite authors, Robert Fulghum, I’ll say this—“Play nice with each other.”

Later: There’s an additional discussion at Digital War Fighter. Of course, the conversation has been developing over at Photodude’s as well. It’s a free-ranging discussion that encompasses not only the notion of off-topic comments, but why construct a weblog at all. It’s interesting and thought-provoking.

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Comment Spam

Posted Sat Jan 14, 2006 in

I’ve been dealing with a round of comment spam recently. There haven’t been a lot of spams, but I find the practice so hideous that I’m motivated to do something about it.

Textpattern does not (yet) have the tools to trap comment spam, like Movable Type, Wordpress, and others have. Txp just hasn’t matured in that area, yet. I’m sure it will.

What I can do, though, is turn on comment moderation. That means I have to approve a comment before it appears. The practice defeats the spammers motivation for spamming—raising Google page rank. So, comment moderation is now turned on. I keep pretty close tabs on my site, so your comments, the legitimate comments, will appear quickly.

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What Was Lost Is Found

Posted Sun Dec 18, 2005 in

I woke much too early this morning. After listening to music for an hour or two, I rose, made some coffee, and sat down at the computer. I found myself going through some images from my old gallery, so I put together a new album for my current gallery. In the process, I discovered an entry missing from my archives.

When I ported my writing from my old MT installation, a few of the entries would not import. Those were associated with pop-up images using the code common to MT. For some reason, TxP would not totally gag on those entries; the import routine just ignored them.

I’ve been through the archives once and thought I’d caught all the missing entries. Apparently I was wrong.

So, I have a listing of the entries that are in the archives and I’ve created a listing of entries that predate my move to TxP. I’m going to go through the archives entry by entry to ensure all of my archives are intact.

If you’re interested (who wouldn’t be curious?), the missing entry is my review of the George Thorogood concert. Joe Bonamassa opened that evening and was ten times the musician that Thorogood was.

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Plugged In

Posted Fri Dec 16, 2005 in

I’ve wanted a service that would post links to entries on today’s date from the archives for some time. It was a service I had when I used Movable Type a long time ago. (Or at least, it seems like a long time ago!)

I posted a note on the support fora and one of the other users, who knows something of PHP and TextPattern’s internals mentioned he had something in progress. I responded that I was interested.

This evening, he sent me some test code, which I installed and started playing around with. His plug-in did a lot more than I wanted and some less. So, I spent a little time hacking some PHP and rebuilt the plug-in. It now does about 90 percent of what I wanted.

If I knew a little more of the structure of the back-end for TextPattern, I could probably hack together the remaining ten percent. That’s a topic for a later date.

For now, if there was at least one entry on today’s date, n-years ago, a link will show up on the right navbar. When I get time, I’ll study the structure of the database and work out the code to extract links to all entries on today’s date, n-years ago.

That will be cool.

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100K

Posted Wed Sep 28, 2005 in

100,000Tonight, after a little over four years, Random Ruminations marked its 100,000th visitor and about 141,000 pages served. That seems like one of those watershed events to me, like when I passed the 1,000th and 2,000th entries.

It’s a long-term average of a little over 60 visitors per day. That doesn’t seem bad for an old civil engineer/college professor, although it’s far short of what the big dogs draw.

I’m pleased, though, that I’ve had that much traffic. I derive a sense of accomplishment from it.

Thanks, all, for dropping by to see what I’m doing. I appreciate it.

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