I've gone and drunk the Twitter Kool-Aid, so those of you who can't get enough of me and want to know what sort of thing I consider too trivial to blog about, there you have it. It's oddly addictive, and more useful than I'd have thought. Ginger has some good thoughts on what makes Twitter worthwhile.
Anyway, the URL is http://twitter.com/kuff if you want to follow me. I'll probably put one of their widgets on the sidebar at some point, and I'm open to suggestions as to what else might be useful - maybe even this, if I get motivated. Let me know what you think.
I've used the kuff - at - offthekuff - dot - com address for as long as I've had the offthekuff.com domain. I still use it today, though I've had it forwarded to Gmail for some months now. Unfortunately, it looks like my webhost is having some issues with forwarding email to Gmail:
Update: (11/29/2007 3:00 PST) We've moved all outgoing gmail forwards to their own server so that they'll have dedicated processing time without affecting the rest of outgoing mail. The outgoing mail queue is still pretty full, but it's steadily decreasing. We're in contact with a Google support representative to get this resolved permanently. Mail to Gmail forwards are being delayed, but they are going through. A temporary workaround is to point your email forwards to a non-Gmail address or local DreamHost mailbox, as those are not affected by the delay. We're sorry for the problems this causes you, and we're doing all that we can to resolve this.
Back in June, I wondered why a Google blog search for links to my site was suddenly returning so many fewer results than a Technorati search was. Recently, in the course of doing some background research for a post, Vince asked himself the same question, and came up with a possible answer: Blog searches are done in Safe mode by default. He disabled filtering, and wound up getting a bunch more results. I tried it myself, and it did seem to generate more results, though still not quite as many as I'd expect based on what Technorati does. Good to know, though. Thanks, Vince!
Kuff is the second person I know with pneumonia. Maybe not an epidemic, but definitely not good. I was all set to be a guest blogger when he goes out of town soon and now I find myself brought up from the farm team a bit early.
I'm going to cross post some stuff from my own blog, musings, this morning.
Well, it looks like the vile enemy pneumonia has sidetracked this blog's namesake. He'll be on injured reserve for a few days. Guest bloggers have been given the bat signal, so blogging will resume in however much of an OnTheKuff type of form during that time.
I'm told that, due to a power struggle at home, Kuff will not have a laptop with him. Otherwise, I'm sure he'd be blogging up a storm. But if there's any well-wishers that want to leave some kind words, a couple of printouts might be smuggled into his hospital room.
I've known for awhile that my average daily Sitemeter traffic fluctuates mainly with search engine referrals. The variation can be as much as a few hundred hits a day. There are other factors, of course - the end of the legislative session and approaching elections always drive numbers up - but this is one that comes and goes unpredictably.
Last week, I noticed that a Google blog search for my URL suddenly started only returning stale links - compare to a Technorati search and you'll see what I mean. Coincidentally or not, my Sitemeter stats took a dive at the same time.
I'm not alarmed by this, and I don't depend on ad revenues so it's not like this hurts me, but I am curious. What causes this to happen, and what if anything can I do about it? I presume that at some point it'll fix itself, but it's always nice to be able to be proactive. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
My site has been basically inaccessible to me all day - I don't know what was going on with my webhost, but I was last able to use Movable Type around 9 AM this morning. I think they must have rebooted the server I'm on, because I was getting a 403 error trying to connect to anything a few minutes ago. It's back now, and I've lost a days' time plus a post on this Metro story (executive summary: this sounds like a bad idea to me, with a high potential for abuse). As my parents are scheduled to land at the airport in the next 30 minutes or so, I likely won't have too much time at the keyboard this weekend - I have one or two things in the queue, but won't be staying on top of the news much. So, look for a light posting schedule till Monday, and enjoy the weekend.
Today marks my fifth anniversary of blogging. Given that I got into this more or less on a lark, as an outlet to do some regular writing for the first time since college, that really amazes me. According to Movable Type, I've cranked out over 8500 entries. A few of those are drafts that I've never published, and a few were done by guest bloggers, but even taking that into account, that means I've averaged nearly five posts a day, every day, for those five years. That sure sounds like a lot, but it doesn't quite feel like it. It's still a lot more fun than it is work, which makes all the difference.
I tried some new things last year, with the recorded interviews. I'm proud of what I did with that, and I hope you found them useful. I plan to continue doing them, and perhaps broaden the focus a bit. I'd still love some feedback on this, so please let me know what you think about them.
This will be another interesting year, for me personally in particular. With the imminent arrival of daughter #2, I expect there will be a period of lessened activity on the blog, but how much and for how long I can't say. I'm contemplating bringing aboard some new guest writers to help me during that time. If you might be interested in that, please drop me a note.
Beyond that, I look forward to another fun year, and for many more to come. Happy New Year!
I had some kind of problem with comments starting last night. I'm not sure what it was, and it seems to have magically cleared itself up today, but when I first discovered it, one of the things I did to troubleshoot was try to leave a comment myself. That comment never made it into the blog, which means it's possible that other people's comments got lost in a similar manner. Thus, if you commented here last night and don't see that comment now, it's because I never saw it. Please leave it again, and my apologies for the inconvenience.
Well, not exactly, because I don't fish. But I do take a break now and then, and now is the time. We've got a bunch of extended-family activities going on over the next week and a half, so I'll be mostly away from the keyboard between now and next Saturday. I've got one or two things of my own drafted for publication during this time, and the usual cast of guest stars is in the wings to do a little standing in for me as their schedules permit. This time, I've also solicited some guest input from a number of local elected officials and candidates, and I will publish their efforts while I'm slacking off as well. Each of these will have a title that begins with "Guest Post", so you'll know who wrote them even though my name will still appear in the permalink at the bottom. This is because it was easier to ask them to send me a document than it was to create a bunch of new author accounts and show them how to use Movable Type.
Anyway. I'll be back to my regular schedule a week from Monday. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy what all the fine guest contributors have to offer.
Looks like my mail problem has been resolved. I still can't say for certain that stuff is arriving in a timely manner, but it all does appear to be arriving. So, please go back to using the offthekuff.com address as usual. I do check my Gmail account, but not nearly as often, so it's for backup purposes only. Thanks!
My webhost is apparently having some having some problems that appear to be affecting my mail delivery. I say this because I haven't seen any new mail since 6 PM last night, and I've verified that I don't get a bounce message when sending to my offthekuff.com address. So, until further notice, if you have an urgent need to reach me by email, please send it to my alternate address, cakuffner - at - gmail - dot - com. Thanks!
UPDATE: I've just verified that I can send. It's just that there's nothing coming in. I've reported my problem and will hopefully get it fixed soon.
UPDATE: Some mail has now arrived. Looks like everything's delayed, and not necessarily arriving in any kind of order. But at least I'm getting stuff.
I'll be tied up with family business through the weekend, and will have limited time for any blog-related program activities. Fortunately, I have activated the Emergency Guest Blogger network, so there should be some new stuff here whether or not I can contribute on a given day. I'm sure as soon as I step away from the keyboard something big is going to happen (aren't we due for a SCOTUS ruling on the Texas redistricting lawsuit this week?), but c'est la vie. I'll be back at my usual pace on Monday. If I don't see you before then, have a good weekend.
FYI, my webhost is experiencing email delivery issues. The last email I received was at 11:20 AM. If you've been trying to reach me since then, I haven't gotten it yet. You can try my alternate address, cakuffner - at - gmail - dot - com, or wait it out. I'll post an update when this is resolved. Thanks!
UPDATE: I've gotten some email since I posted this, but there's not an update from Dreamhost saying it's been resolved yet. So, if you are still having problems with my offthekuff email address, try the gmail one. Thanks!
With a big ol' hat tip to Greg Wythe, whose mojo with the phpAdmin tool for MySQL is clearly greater than mine, comments are once again working on this site. Feel free to use this as an open thread to vent whatever you couldn't get off your chest while the mt_comment table in my database was on the mat. Thanks, Greg!
Well, I woke up this morning to find that all of the comments seem to have disappeared from the blog. Further, an attempt on my part to leave a comment in a post gave no indication that it was accepted. You can still see a (correct) counter on the index page telling you how many comments a post had, and you may even be able to see those comments for now. The post that I tried to leave a new comment on now does not display any of the previous comments, though the counter is still set at 2, which is what it was before.
Right now, I have no idea what's going on. I've got a ticket open with Movable Type support to troubleshoot. I'm going to leave this post at the top of the page until this issue is resolved one way or another. My apologies for any confusion. In the meantime, if you need to give me feedback on something, send an email to kuff - at - offthekuff - dot - com. Thanks very much.
UPDATE: This may be a problem with my Main Index template. The only way I could get this post to save and display was to remove the code between the MTEntryIfAllowComments tags (including the tags) in my Main Index template. As such, you no longer see the "Comments" link on the posts. I have a feeling this is going to be messy to resolve.
UPDATE: Man, do I miss having comments right about now. The problem seems to be that the mt_comment table in my MySQL database has gotten zapped. I attempted to restore it from a backup yesterday, but that failed. According to Dreamhost, my only option now is to restore the entire MySQL database from backup. As you might imagine, that prospect has me a bit squeamish. I'm going to check on a few more things, then time permitting (between DeLay updates and Real Life), I'll give this a go. Wish me luck.
UPDATE: They're fixed! Woo hoo!
And we're all back from California, where the travel was made much more bearable by the fact that my daughter is a mutant alien from the Planet of Unnaturally Agreeable Toddlers. How people with more normal children handle flying is a mystery to me. Thanks to all my super guest stars and the fine job they did in my absence this week. A big round of applause, please, for Julia, Ellen, Elizabeth, and especially Jim, who is now the second-most prolific author on this site and who got one of his posts linked on the Chron opinion page.
It's primary day today and the results are trickling in. BOR has all the threads for following that you could want. I'll weigh in on the finals as they become known. In case you're curious, our home voice mail had six political robocalls between Wednesday and Sunday - two from Bob Gammage, one from Wes Clark on Gammage's behalf, one from Chris Bell, one an anonymous attack on Bell, and somewhat oddly one from "First Lady" Anita Perry on behalf od Railroad Commish Elizabeth Ames Jones. How many calls did you get?
I'm leaving in a few minutes for a trip to California for a week, so I'll be turning over the blog to my fine collection of guest hosts. If I have the opportunity to pop in and say something I will, but otherwise things will be in their hands. I'll be back on March 7. See you later!
Thanks to some excellent support from Movable Type, I believe I've gotten TypeKey authentication working. That means that as of now, if you sign in with a TypeKey ID, your comment will appear right away, with no wait for approval. If not, your comment will appear after I approve it as before. No one has to use TypeKey, but if you do you'll see your comments faster. Let me know if you run into any problems. Thanks!
I've had moderated comments for several months now - it was originally a defense against an obnoxious troll, but it's also the default setting that I inherited when I upgraded to version 3.2 of Movable Type. I think it works pretty well, but it means I've got to approve comments all the time, and that's a bit of a concern, especially when I'm on the road. I've always wanted to get to a point where comments by people who are known quantities can pass through without my intervention, and I've had some inquiries about it as well.
Towards that end, I've enabled TypeKey authentication for comments. What that means is that if you have a TypeKey ID and you sign in with it when you go into comments, the comment you leave will appear right away. If you don't have a TypeKey ID or you choose not to use it, everything will be the same as before - your comment will appear as soon as I approve it. Nobody has to get a TypeKey ID in order to comment, and that will never change. This is only a change for those of you who do have a TypeKey ID and want to use it.
To make sure this works, if you do have a TypeKey ID, please log in and leave a comment here. If you run into any problems, please let me know. I've still got an open ticket with SixApart tech support for help with the setup for this, so if something is broken I should be able to get it fixed shortly. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks very much.
UPDATE: TypeKey authentication is not working yet. I've updated my trouble ticket with SixApart. Hopefully we'll get this resolved quickly. Thanks to all for the feedback.
I'm off to Portland for the weekend for my niece's baptism. I've activated the Emergency Guest Blogger Network, so don't be surprised to see a different byline or two this weekend. Be nice to them, they're doing me a big favor, and I think they do a great job. See you Sunday night!
Figured out what the sidebar-display problem was about: my use of a fixed-width font in this post. I could swear that it displayed correctly on Wednesday when I posted it, but I just realized today that it was the cause of the main body being too wide - it needed the space. I've shortened the offending text, and things seem to look better now. Refresh your broswer and see if that's true for you, too.
The funny thing is that this post was about to scroll off the bottom of the page. I'd have come back in tomorrow, hit Refresh, and everything would have been magically restored, had I not come to my senses and figured this out. No wonder tech support people chug Maalox every day.
As for the weird appearance of the Euro symbol where bullet points should have been, Michael left a suggestion for a template tweak that will hopefully work. I'll know for sure the next time I do a copy and paste from an external source into a post. Thanks, Michael!
If there are any lingering problems, let me know. I appreciate the feedback.
I installed Movable Type 3.2 over the weekend. When I came back to the office on Tuesday, I noticed that my main page displays incorrectly on my PC here. Though my stylesheet did not change, it appears that the main body of the blog is wider now, which means there's not enough room for the sidebar. As such, all the sidebar contents, such as the archive and blogroll links, show up at the bottom of the page instead. This doesn't happen at home on my XP machine, where I've tried it in both Firefox and IE. It's only here on my Win2K box with IE6 that it looks this way.
So, I'd like to know: Does this page look any different to you today than it did last week? If so, please leave a comment or drop me an email, and tell me what OS and browser you're using. Thanks!
I have just completed the long-overdue upgrade of my system to Movable Type version 3.2. Far as I can tell, everything is working, but on the not-completely-unlikely chance that you run into an odd error commenting or sending a Trackback, please drop me a note to kuff - at - offthekuff - dot - com and let me know. Including the full text of any errors you get would be most helpful. Thanks very much.
In case you're wondering why this site was unavailable earlier, it's because my webhost was affected by this.
A power failure in Los Angeles, the second-largest U.S. city, darkened downtown and several nearby cities, trapping people in elevators, disrupting refineries and snarling traffic.The blackout started around 12:35 p.m. local time, and almost all who lost power had it restored by 2 p.m., said Kim Hughes, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation's largest municipal utility.
Power was lost in an area with about 2 million people after a worker with the utility accidentally overloaded a transmission line, tripping circuit protectors, Hughes said. Overloading the line caused an automatic shutdown of other lines to prevent damage to equipment.
"We wanted to put too many cars on the wrong freeway," Hughes said. "The system put the brakes on."
Now that I've got my legs back under me, let me extend a warm and hearty thanks to all of my guest bloggers from this past week. I think they did a great job, and it helped me to enjoy my time off more knowing that the site was in such capable hands. This was an experiment for me, and it's one that I'm filing under "Success". I expect to do this again in the future when travel plans do not allow for regular time online.
I'm very interested to know what you thought of this. Should I do it again? Would fewer guest hosts be better, or did this format work for you? Should I solicit nominations for future guest hosts? Please leave a comment or drop me a note (kuff - at - offthekuff - dot - com) and let me know. Thanks very much.
Well, since Chucky has fled the Lone Star State to prevent a quorum of revellers for the I-day celebration, it looks like he's made the grand mistake of entrusting me as part of his cadre of pinch-hitters. So, by way of introduction, I'm Greg of GregsOpinion.com. A fellow Texas progressive, I tend to blog on a wider range of issues than our Charles. I'll try to keep my comments here somewhat limited to the Texas and Houston-centric stuff, but since I've got a few days to do some damage, I'm sure I'll work in a William Proxmire reference here and there (outside of this post), as well as end up in a spiffy little catfight over something relatively meaningless. It's all good. Stay tuned. Fun will follow.
I'm going to be taking a few days off to spend with my family. We'll be taking off later today to fly to Portland to spend the week with my parents and various other members of the Kuffner clan. Since the last time we did this I got in some trouble for spending a bit too much of that time on my parents' computer, I'm going to do something I've never done before in 3.5 years of running this blog - I'm going to hand things over to guest posters for the duration.
I've assembled a diverse and interesting crew to guest star for me for the week. They are:
Plus friends and semi-regular commenters Matt Cohen and Elizabeth Benedetto.
Now I know what you're thinking: "Geez, Kuff, nine guest bloggers?" All I can say is that if I can wail and gnash my teeth about picking ten favorite blogs to read, I can't be expected to name one or two guest hosts and quit there. They'll be posting on their schedule and as their interests compel them, and overall I figure there'll be about the usual amount of stuff here.
I'll leave it to each of them to say a word about themselves as they see fit. I may pop up from time to time during the week, but in any event I'll be back on Friday the 8th. Have a safe and happy Fourth of July, and be nice to the people who'll be caring for this place in my absence.
I saw a blurb about a new service called MyBlogLog on the SixApart blog, and it looked interesting enough to give it a try. This is a service that will capture stats on outbound clicks from your blog - in other words, if you put up a link to someotherblog.com, it will tell you how many people follow that link. I have no idea if this will be useful to me or not, but the basic service is free and they provide a seven-day free trial of their paid service for signing up, so what the heck. If I like it, I'll include these stats in my monthly traffic reports.
Since Bloglines is my tool of choice for blogreading, I don't update my blogroll as frequently as I should. I finally did so today, adding some sites that were long overdue for the sidebar. When I get in a frenzy like that, I tend to overlook things, so if you think you belong there but you're not, please let me know. Thanks.
My comments have been infested by a particularly obnoxious troll over the past couple of days, someone who seems to think that because I allow feedback, he's free to leave offensive and racist remarks and that I am somehow obligated to let him. Normally, I'd ban such a person, something I've only had to do three previous times in the three years I've run this site, but since he posts from multiple IP addresses, that wasn't a workable option. Given no other choice, I've decided to take the drastic and unfortunate step of closing comments for the time being. I'm not happy about this, but with a sick kid at home, I've got neither the time nor the inclination to clean up after this joker. Until further notice, please send feedback to the email address listed above. My sincere apologies to you all.
UPDATE: After soliciting some feedback from friends, I've decided to reenable comments going forward, but with moderation in place. That means I'll have to approve comments before they're visible on the site, something that is done normally for older posts by the MT Blacklist plugin. You should see a message of some kind saying that your comment will appear after it has been approved. Still not as good a solution as having the obnoxious troll go away and bother someone else, but better than throwing out the baby with the bath water. Again, my apologies for the inconvenience.
Movable Type 3.14 has been released to address the problem of excessive server load when one is under attack from a comment spammer. From the Movable Type blog:
Because these attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity, we strongly recommend that all Movable Type users install this update. This is particularly important for any installation that is visible to the public on the web.
SixApart says the following about comment spam:
We're in the process of identifying all the separate issues involved, coming up with some concise and effective recommendations, and then outlining our plan going forward. We're also going to be reaching out to the weblog community as a whole with information we've learned from both our experience with Movable Type and our background in running the TypePad service. There are a variety of ways to deal with spam, ranging from technical to legal to social methods, and we'll discuss them all.
I actually thought things had been easing up around here, as I've only had to de-spam a handful of onesy-twosie comments this week. Then I logged into my domain host to check my status and found the following general announcement:
Posted: Dec 15th, 2004 - 04:06:31 PM PST (3 hours 6 mins ago)We have seen a significant increase in weblog comment spam lately. Movable Type installations seem to be the worst hit, but Greymatter is also affected. The increase in comment spam has been causing a lot of server instability. We have begun blocking connections from the IP addresses we have found to be the origins of most of the spam, but that will most likely only work temporarily. We request that everyone with a weblog application installed please do what you can to reduce the likelihood of your site being a target. Install any applicable anti-spam plugins or disable comments on your weblog altogether. Let us know if you have any questions.
Comment spams blocked: 50977
Comment spams moderated: 6274
(BTW, if you're a Nucleus user, comment spam has invaded your turf now, too. Kevin has some help for you.)
UPDATE: Via Michael, we have an important update on the situation from Jay Allen, who is the new Product Manager for Movable Type (congrats!) at SixApart. I'll be looking for their patch soon.
UPDATE: And more from Jay.
OK, I got a response to my support ticket, which seems to have resolved the problem of all comments needing to be approved before they appeared. I needed to delete the following old MT Blacklist files:
extlib/jayallen/*.* (three .pm files)
plugins/Blacklist.pl
Note that the second file is in the plugins directory, not the Blacklist subdirectory from there, which you create when you install the MTB plugin. Hope this helps anyone else who may be experiencing this problem.
I'm liking the new version of Movable Type so far, and other than the sheer drudgery of FTPing all the new files to my webhost it was pretty darned easy to do. One problem I have noticed, and I've got both a support forum question and a support ticket open for it, is that all comments have required my approval, even though I do not have "Enable Unregistered Comment Moderation" selected. Bottom line is that until I get this cleared up, you won't see your comments here until I see and approve them. Needless to say, I want to get this fixed soon. I'll post something when it is. Thanks for your patience.
Had a little time to myself this afternoon, and upgraded to MT 3.121, apparently without any problems. I was a bit macho about it, in that I didn't make a backup of my existing installation first, but I figured if something screwed up I could always blow it all away and install the full version. There may not be time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over, after all. In this case, the karmic arrogance did not bite me on the ass, and everything installed correctly.
Now I need to read the documentation to see what if any fancy-schmancy new features I want to install, and I need to figure out the new MT Blacklist. The link to MTB documentation is broken - anyone know (before I post a question in the support forum) if it exists somewhere else? Oh, and are any other of the plugins that came with the Plugin Pack worth my time? Thanks.
Last night I finally got around to downloading the latest version of Movable Type. I'm hoping to do the upgrade in the next few days, Copious Spare Time permitting. I've got a couple of questions for those of you who have already taken the plunge:
1. Any gotchas I need to worry about?
2. Is the new dynamic page rebuilding thing worth it?
3. Besides the new MT Blacklist, which (if any) of the plugins are you using?
4. Anything else I should be aware of?
Thanks.
If you're a MT-Blacklist user (and you should be), there's a new maintenance release, version 1.65, available. If you've got version 1.64, it's a minor change to one line of code in Blacklist.pm. That change was added because some spammers have gotten clever and started using URLs with the ASCII code for a period (%2E) instead of the period; as a result, you'd get http://www.spamsite%2Ecom in your comments, which would make it through even if spamsite.com was blocked. It's a quick and easy update - just upload the new files and you're done.
Looks like the new MT 3.1 compatible version will be out in another two weeks or so. I need to think about when I want to upgrade. If only babies came with a fully configurable nap module...
Apparently, I had a repeat of the webhost problem which gave "permission denied" errors when commenting, and which also prevented me from posting before now. I saved a few things in draft and have now published them. Dreamhost has assured me that they fixed the underlying cause, so I trust this will be the last of this particular problem. Thanks!
Looks like I've been suffering from the same Dreamhost permission problems that Byron, Orange Politics, and several folks in this MT support forum thread have been having problems. The fact that I can now save this post and see it on my main index means they've fixed it, even if I haven't gotten an official resonse from their tech support yet. This is all a longwinded way of saying that my absence this morning was unplanned. I did save a few draft posts, so at least I'm not totally behind the eight ball.
On a side note, I had a variation of this problem twice, and I finally fixed it once and for all here. Note that it's only an issue for BerkeleyDB users; I've switched to MySQL, so I knew that this time it wasn't my fault.
I just deleted 10 comment spams from a weight loss site. If you're using MT Blacklist, save yourself some grief and add the following regexp to your ban list:
weigh[\w\d\-_]*less[\w\d\-_]*rx[\w\d\-_]*\.[a -z]{2,}
Take out everything between the brackets and put a ".com" at the end if you want to kill the specific site instead of variations on it.
I just checked my activity log, and I'm seeing hundreds upon hundreds of comment spam attempts for "listbanx.com" and "leadbanx.com", all coming from the same IP address (65.91.30.30) and all in the last two days or so. Do yourself a favor and make sure your Comment Spam Master Blacklist is up to date (both those domains are in there), or at least ban that IP address and save yourself some grief.
Just finished upgrading to version 2.661 of Movable Type. I'm hoping this will fix the Atom bugs that people have reported. I'll see what the Feed Validator says after I rebuild all my index files. Let me know if you're still seeing a problem with your RSS aggregator. Thanks.
UPDATE: The Feed Validator gives it a passing grade. Hallelujah!
ObCanOfWorms: Anyone think I need an RSS 2.0 feed?
All right, it appears that my Atom feed fails to validate (thanks to Danil for pointing me to the Feed Validator). I'm not really sure how to fix it, but I have verified that the current version of MovableType does indeed have Atom support built in, so what I'm going to do is to upgrade to that version over the weekend and hope this does the trick. I'm guessing I'll have to remove my existing Atom.xml file first, but we'll see - I'll probably ask the question on the Support Forum before I proceed. In any event, I'll post an update when I believe my Atom feed is all better. Thanks for the feedback!
Well, it appears that I now have a full-post Atom feed, which should be located at this address: http://www.offthekuff.com/mt/atom.xml. I've subscribed to it myself in Bloglines so I'll know when it's working or not. You can see it for yourself if you click on the My Bloglines subscriptions link. Actually, I subbed to both my XML feeds - the Atom feed is the top one.
I could swear that I saw a post about newly-added Atom support on the SixLog earlier today, but either I hallucinated it or it's been deleted/moved. Not that I apparently need it - I found a basic template for Atom here, and though the link I'd created didn't seem to work right away, it's working now. So subscribe away, and drop me a note if you feel the need to add something similar to your MT blog.
So now I'm curious. I see that I have four subscribers besides myself to my standard feed. How do you read this site? Bookmark, blogroll, other RSS aggregator, no set method, other? I'd be interested to know.
UPDATE: I've gotten some feedback that my Atom feed is generating invalid XML - in particular, that there's a MovableType closing tag which is visible. I don't see that when I view my Atom feed in Bloglines, so is anyone else seeing something like this? I'm going to poke around the template that I've created to see if I can figure this out, but any other info I can get would help. Thanks.
I suppose I should've subscribed to my own blog's feeds from the get-go, but after reading David's post about Atom, I learned that I don't have a full-post feed of my own. I've created an Atom template, and once I'm sure it's working I'll provide a link for it on the sidebar.
Is anyone else having a problem seeing my blogroll? It just won't display on my work PCs in IE, but I can see it fine at home in Mozilla. I'm rather stumped at this point, so any suggestions are appreciated.
I've noticed a string of referrals today from what looks like web mail systems at pitzer.edu and willamette.edu - I'm guessing someone sent an email at those places which contained a link to one of my posts. I can't see what they're pointing to, so this has piqued my curiosity. Please drop me a note or leave a comment if you know what this was about.
Finally, one last plug for Bloglines. Notifying me when an infrequently-updated blog has new content is currently my favorite part of using an RSS aggregator. Try it, you'll like it.
First of all, Kriston Capps has moved Grammar Police off of Blogspot and onto its own MovableType-friendly domain. Among other things, this means he now has a working RSS feed. Update your blogrolls and aggregators accordingly.
I'm more or less at the point where every blog I've blogrolled and which has an RSS feed is now in my list of Bloglines subscriptions. As such, as this more accurately reflects my actual surfing habits now, I've decided to make my subscriptions public. You can find them at the following URL: http://www.bloglines.com/public/kuff. There are still maybe five or so non-RSS blogs out there that I read - basically, if you see it in my blogroll but not in my subs, it has no working RSS feed that I know of. (If you're one of those bloggers, please drop me a note!) There's a couple of people I still need to pester about this. Ultimately, I'd like to retire my Blogrolling account so that there's one less thing for me to keep track of. I may eventually use Bloglines' code to display my subs; we'll see. I may also eventually expand this list, now that I'm feeling like I've finally got it organized in an optimal way.
Steve Bates was kind enough to send along his recipe for do-it-yourself RSS creation for those who don't use an all-in-one blogging package - it's underneath the More link for the curious. The less adventursome can also check out RSSify, but if so please do try to keep it up to date.
Next up on my list of things to try with Bloglines: moving a few email subscriptions over, especially those from my mostly-a-spamtrap Yahoo mailbox.
* Using your browser, visit the RSS feed of just about anyone who uses RSS 0.91 or 0.92 (note: 1.00 will not do; it's not really RSS at all... long story... and 2.00 is rather hard to maintain manually). You may also use a HaloScan comments feed as a starting point; that's what I did.
Recommendation: use my feed as a template.
* View the source. Save it to a file with an .xml extension. If you maintain a local copy of your blog, you might as well save it in that directory, the one you FTP from. For example, the local copy of my feed is c:\webs\stephenbates\yellowdoggereldemocrat\doggerel_feed.xml .
* Modify the obvious things in the header of the .xml file to reflect your own blog.
* Delete all but one of the item entries. In that one entry, replace its elements with those of your own most recent blog post. It is not necessary to use a CDATA enclosures, but if you do so, you may insert HTML tags, including links, in your item entry description, title etc.
* Save the file. Place a page-relative link to it in your main page or template. E.g., mine is something like
There's a free XML button available if you prefer that; it's free, and a lot of people use it. If not, call the link "Syndicate" or "XML" or "RSS" or something that a feed reader will recognize.
* Upload the XML file and the main page with its new link, using FTP or whatever you usually use.
* When you create a new blog post, in your XML feed file, copy-paste an item entry at the top, and modify its title, link and description to whatever you want shown for your new post. If your XML file contains more than about 10 items, delete one off the bottom; there's no point in keeping all the old entries. Then upload your blog page and your XML feed file.
That's about it. As I said, it takes me about a minute to add a new item entry to my RSS feed after I write a new blog post. But if you don't want to mess with even that, you can use RSSify. Its only problem is that, on some Blogger blogs, it incorrectly recognizes the first link in a post (NYT article or whatever) as the permalink for the post itself. The Farmer of corrente is working on trying to find a workaround for that.
It's probably unnecessary, but after the Kos/Kerry kerfuffle, I've decided to update my Blog Policies page to cover the (in my mind unlikely) possibility that someone will attempt to make another party responsible for my words or the words of a commenter here. Feel free to borrow the idea, or to mock me for my hubris.
Apparently, my webhost is having some mySQL problems today. Slow response and an involuntary morning hiatus are the symptoms, but it appears they are finding a cure. Obviously, since here I am. Right, then.
If you've sent me email since last night, I'm not ignoring you. My web host is experiencing some technical difficulties, and one of them is affecting webmail. I haven't been able to log in all day. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
I've had a free Sitemeter counter for nearly two years now, and though it has its wonky moments it's always worked. For some bizarre reason, yesterday the counter at the bottom of this blog became inaccessible to me - if you click on it, you get a message that says "Access to this account is currently blocked. Contact the system administrator." I've no idea what this means. View access to my stats is unrestricted, but the account name and password I used to set this up still seem to work, though I can't see anything when I do log in.
I've sent a message to the Sitemeter webmaster and am awaiting a reply. I know you get what you pay for, but this is still annoying. Most likely, in another day or so I'll just create a new counter and start it out at approximately the total I think I was at before this happened. Since the counter code is on each archive page, that means a complete rebuild. Sigh.
I'm contemplating adding a different counter for comparison and backup purposes. Anyone have experience with Extreme Tracking? Are there any other decent choices? Thanks.
There's a new version of Movable Type, version 2.66, which is apparently a stopgap to help deal with comment spam until Version 3.0 is released. It will allow you to require that a certain amount of time pass between the posting of comments from a single IP address. It also uses redirects to link to URLs in comments, as this will not boost Google page ranks, which is what comment spammers are looking for. Unfotunately, this new version currently does not play well with MT Blacklist, but Blacklist author Jay Allen says he'll have a fix soon.
I may or may not install that, since I'm pretty happy with things as they are now. I do strongly suggest that any Blacklist users reading this consider adding the following regexp to their master lists, which will block all .biz URLs (just copy and paste it in as is):
[\w\-_.]*\.biz
I say this because within the past hour or so, I've blocked about 50 comments containing such URLs, according to my activity log. I'm sure if this particular bot came after me, it'll come after you next. Even if you don't want to do this, or you don't have MT Blacklist installed (install it! really!), the IP address that this particular scuzzball used is 63.202.139.82, so do yourself a favor and block that.
UPDATE: Jay Allen himself suggests a more comprehensive regexp than the one above:
([\w\-_.]+)\.(ru|ro|biz|ag|ws|tk)
I don't think I've had any spams from those other domains, but that doesn't mean I won't. I'll make an update soon. Thanks, Jay!
UPDATE: Well, in testing Jay's bigger regexp, I discovered it wants to kill comments from Rob Booth, and anyone else whose personal URL starts with www.ro-something. That won't do, so I've added a word-boundary tag on the end. The regexp is now:
([\w\-_.]+)\.(ru|ro|biz|ag|ws|tk)\b
This properly ignores Rob's www.robbooth.net URL. Use it at your own risk. I suggest you try running a big de-spam after adding something like this to see what else you might catch. Among other things, I realized that my .biz prohibition would kill any link to a Yahoo! business story. I can live with that, but you may not like it. So caveat emptor, and drop me a note if you have any questions.
I seem to have avoided the recent comment spam outbreak that infested a number of folks' sites, such as Teresa. Just lucky this time, but I will say this: If you're using Movable Type and you allow comments, but you haven't installed MT Blacklist, you're pretty much naked and defenseless out there unless you really know what you're doing. Seriously, run, don't walk, over to Jay Allen's MT Blacklist page and install it already.
Now then. Shelley is absolutely correct to note that a tool like this can only do so much and will sooner or later be defeated by the spammers. It's still a good enough solution for me for now, and it's surely better than nothing. I'm very un-thrilled about using the comment registration feature that's going to be in MT 3.0, but a feature or plugin that would allow me to require comments to be previewed before they're posted, as discussed in Teresa's comment thread, would be great. In addition to repelling spammers and allowing for a cooling-off moment, it would also ensure that people could catch their own HTML errors (such as not closing a HREF tag) before publishing. I preview just about all of my posts before publishing because of that.
As for closing comments on old threads, I'd prefer not to. Among other things, I'd miss out on the chance to be called a dumbass by local TV newscasters and other egosurfers. And isn't that what blogging is all about?
I've configured my MT Blacklist to reject any comment that contains a .biz domain in it, since it seemed to me that the only comments I ever saw with that in it were spam. If this causes you any hardship, please drop me a line. I'm thisclose to also banning anything that contains "info@", since a lot of spams also contain that string as part of an email address, but I feel there's a slightly larger chance that a real commenter may want to include such an address (I found one example in my most recent full export), so I'm not there yet.
Seems like there's been an uptick in comment spams lately. I've had new comments to delete and new URLs to add to my spam blacklist most days over the last two weeks. I even had my first trackback spam in there. The blacklist has been successful at stopping about half of the spammers, but new URLs keep popping up.
I see that one of the features of Movable Type 3.0 will be comment registration. That's not a road I want to go down, as it seems more trouble than it's worth. I've got plenty of logons and passwords to remember, and I don't want to add to anyone else's burden on that. And all to deal with people who want to take advantage of sites like this for their own gain. Such an annoyance.
UPDATE: Naturally, in the time it took me to write this, another comment spam appeared. Grrr.
One of my readers just sent me a note saying he's been spammed by some outfit that referenced a blog post of mine in which he'd left a comment, of which his email address was a part. I hate spam, and I hate being even tangentially responsible for someone getting spammed, so I want to do what I can to prevent this from happening. My questions are:
1. Is there a way to prevent webcrawlers from scanning comments? I don't want to keep search engines out, but if blocking them from comments is the only way to achieve this, then that's what I'll do.
2. In the case of this particular spammer, is there anything I can do to prevent them from accessing my site?
3. Any other obvious things I should be doing but probably am not?
Thanks!
I finally got around to adding MT-Search, a nice consequence of upgrading to Movable Type version 2.64 and converting my database to MySQL. It's over there on the sidebar, between Archives and Categories. Seems to work nicely, but please do let me know if something funky happens when you try it.
I also added a couple of plugins to eliminate duplicate comments and trackback pings, both of which I found via Michael Croft. Each integrates directly into Jay Allen's MT Blacklist plugin, which is intuitive and neat. I tested the duplicate comment part and it seemed to work as advertised, but again, if you encounter any weirdness, please let me know.
Now I just need to ask Croft to share some of that MySQL Fu he mentioned so I can clean up my own existing comment/trackback dupes...
I've just noticed that someone has hacked my blogroll. I actually have two accounts at Blogrolling.com, and both of them - what you normally see on my index page, and what you see on my Full Blogroll page - have been entirely replaced by links to some other blog, one link for each entry in my blogroll. I'm not sure how or why this happened, but I'm taking both down until I can figure it out. Which is damned annoying and inconvenient to me, but there's not much I can do about it right now.
Has this happened to anyone else? Does anyone have any info about this? There was no news at the Blogrolling home page. Thanks.
UPDATE: Blogrolling's new page now has an update, which wasn't there when I first looked, that explains that they had been hacked. They've restored from a backup, so everything is fine now. Thanks to Mike and Pete for the info.
UPDATE: It wasn't a hack, it was a one in a million bug and some bad luck for a couple of innocent bloggers. Thanks to Kyle for the tip.
All righty, I have installed and enabled Jay Allen's MT Blacklist. It was easy to install and helped me find and kill an old piece of spam, so I'm a happy blogger. If for some reason you encounter any problems posting a comment now, please please please send me a note ASAP to kuff - at - offthekuff dot com and I will investigate it. Please if possible send me the text of the comment you tried to enter and the message you saw when you hit Submit. I'm adding this info to the Blog Policies page for future reference.
You MT bloggers out there, get yourself upgraded and give this thing a try. I know I spent way too much time and effort cleaning up after comment spammers. I have high hopes I'll never have to do it again.
The clearinghouse for stuff related to Jay Allen's comment spam disabler is here. Note that you can submit spams you've received for possible inclusion into the master list, something which will help others as well as yourself. If you're feeling a bit more militant about the whole thing, you can read The Comment Spam Manifesto and Cutting Comment Spammers Off At The Knees. Thanks to Linkmeister for the tip.
With a big assist from Michael Croft, I finally got the Movable Type 2.64 upgrade installed, and as an extra added bonus got migrated from the BerkeleyDB to MySQL. I think I'm going to have fun playing with MySQL, which owes it to me after the (admittedly mostly self-induced) frustration that we had loading and configuring it. Here's a hint for future generations: If you can log into your MySQL database directly but MovableType keeps failing, be really sure that the mt-dbpass.cgi file you keep uploading is really called mt-dbpass.cgi and not something that looks like, but is actually not, mt-dbpass.cgi.
Somewhat amusingly, in our quest to figure out this mystery, we came across this support forum thread in which Michael was helping to troubleshoot someone else's MySQL problem. It pointed us to the MTWiki entry on MySQL, which is a good thing to have in your back pocket even if we didn't get the clue from it.
Anyway. Next up is the long-awaited MT Blacklist plugin for killing comment spams. And on we go.
Is it just me, or has Sitemeter been sucking rocks the past few days? The reports are often unavailable, and I lost about half a day's hits on Sunday. Not such a big deal, but my blog at least seems to be taking a long time to finish loading lately, and it's always because of the Sitemeter icon. Anyone else noticing a problem?
More comment spams, from a different jerk. The IPs to ban are:
64.191.20.166
216.228.168.110
206.163.168.8
I'm going to keep track of these in the original post for eacy reference. Look for a link on the sidebar.
Grrr. Last night I was hit by a comment spammer, who injected an ad for his scummy website all over my blog. His IP address is 65.77.116.28, and the IP address of his accursed website is 207.44.162.33, so all you MT users should take preventative action and ban those addresses now. Meanwhile, I'm slogging through my recent comments deleting each one, which is an annoying and tedious task.
I forget who pointed me to this, but A Small Victory has a recent post about a gaggle of comment spams she's received, and she's included a list of IPs that she banned as a result. Even better, one of her commenters has pointed to this method for banning comment spam based on content, which I will be investigating.
Meanwhile, back to deleting I go...
UPDATE: All gone. I'm lucky that the jerk only spammed me about 20 times, instead of several hundred times. On to more productive things.
UPDATE: Here's another IP to ban: 206.163.168.8. I think I'm gonna have to bookmark this post, for everyone's easy reference. And I need to get off my butt and implement that aformentioned general solution.
UPDATE: The complete list of comment-spammer IP addresses to ban:
216.228.168.110
206.163.168.8
64.191.20.166
65.77.116.28
207.44.162.33
66.75.80.169
65.77.116.28
63.155.192.3
24.184.91.227
212.179.192.76
216.145.86.238
65.64.78.72
80.14.97.44
216.145.86.238
68.211.236.172
68.153.65.193
61.181.5.155
208.147.1.4
80.50.242.152
166.180.133.53
68.160.245.170
204.251.10.215
148.233.3.242
81.23.232.93
81.218.227.11
209.210.176.21
209.210.176.22
61.181.5.69
66.154.47.203
213.222.2.35
81.23.232.93
24.64.223.205
65.125.231.178
216.98.141.250
24.108.209.164
213.206.5.5
63.209.26.172
209.210.176.21
209.210.176.33
209.210.176.20
209.210.176.22
68.160.248.55
82.80.6.80
62.219.182.250
210.220.73.5
81.23.232.93
64.72.132.17
66.154.47.199
This includes the address from which the comment was posted as well as the address of the website they're shilling for. I'll add more as I need to.
UPDATE: Added two more IP addresses. I also see that Jay Allen has released a new version of his comment de-spammer. Must download...
UPDATE: Ironically, as I came to this post to add three more IP addresses, I saw that it had been comment spammed, something I failed to notice the last time I updated this. Sheesh.
I've done a little blogroll maintenance, as you can see. I'd been unhappy with the state of my blogroll - its length made the sidebar less useful than it could have been as well as discouraging me from considering additions, and it just wasn't as convenient to me as I wanted it to be. So, I've created two blogrolls, a shorter one that you now see on the sidebar, plus a full blogroll linked just above it that has more or less everyone that I wanted to link to. I've also added a link to a page of bloggers I know from Real Life, and of course the Texas Political Bloggers page continues to grow. There are new and newly linked blogs on all of these pages, so please check them out.
It is entirely possible that in doing this housework that I have overlooked or accidentally dropped someone who belongs on one of these rolls. If that's you, I assure you it's not intentional. Please whack me upside the head via email or comment and I'll rectify the error along with my abject apologies.
The following is an enumeration of the philosophy and policies of this weblog. A link to it will be placed on the sidebar for easy reference in the future. I've avoided having one of these for a long time, but events last week have convinced me that I cannot avoid it any longer.
This blog is a personal statement, and I put a lot of time and energy into it. As much as I value my readers, I have always written for myself first, and almost always been surprised to discover that other people have enjoyed what I've written. Because it is a personal statement, I will always be the sole author. There are many fine multi-person blogs out there (I contribute to one of them), but this blog is my solo voice.
That said, this is my house. I'm paying for the domain name and the server space. This is not Usenet - I expect everyone to behave in a civil manner. Feedback and debate are only valuable if they are transmitted in a constructive fashion that attempts to engage rather than attack. I have been involved in too many mailing lists and too many comment threads on other blogs that have degenerated into continual flamewars. I will not allow that to happen here.
Therefore, I reserve the right to edit or delete comments if I believe that they are harmful to my readers, my content, or myself. I reserve the right to ban commenters who exhibit this behavior. I don't like to do this, and I don't want to be made to do this, but I will do what I must. I am not censoring you if I do this. Your right to speech does not include someone else's responsibility to provide the forum. Blogger and Blogspot are still free.
Comment spams, advertisements, and abusive behavior are all grounds for deleting and banning. I don't have a hard and fast rule for t