www.intertwingly.net

Blogger Arithmetic

script + template = weblog

What OS are you?

I normally don't play these games, but this one really struck my fancy:

Aggregator Affinity

Dmitry Jemerov: Come back in a month or two, and you won't be disappointed. :-)

You mean I should stop using Syndirella until then? <grin> I actually have been a loyal user of Syndirella for the last several weeks. The only reason that you are not on my blogroll is that I can't figure out any way to automatically extract this information.

Actually, the above statement about loyalty is a lie. I'm fickle. If I find a decent aggregator that allows me to sort and filer blog entries, I'll likely switch. Unless I go a completely different route and go with something like HEP instead.

Trackback policy

Phil Ringnalda: I don't think the semantics of TrackBack really require that the pinger link to the pingee

True, but this provides an interesting example of how I approach problems and protocols. Wen you look it it, even though the end results apears to be much different, the fundamentals we both are applying are basically the same.

Phil identified this trackback as looking like spam. He reserves the right to retroactively delete any such entries on his weblog. I simply reserve the right to be more proactive.

When I look at the Trackback spec, I don't look for guidance on how I should display the results. I have never displayed trackbacks in the "traditional" way, though I notice that more and more people are coming to the same conclusion as I did as to how trackbacks "ought" to be displayed.

Nor to I particularly focus on the methods - I simply look at the data in and the data out. More on this subject in Neurotransmiters. What actions I chose to take based on receiving a particular sequence of data is up to me.

Cheetah

Input:

 from rssparser import parse
 from Cheetah.Template import Template
 
 rss = parse('http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/index.rss2')
 print Template('title: $channel.title', [rss])

Output:

 title: Sam Ruby

Spam Updates

OK, now that I have verified that spamAssasin is working correctly on my mail to blog interface, I'm adding one line:

 if title.find('*****SPAM*****')==0: return

Also, as Phil has already pointed out, I'm also getting getting TrackBack spam. My inclination there is to do the same as I do on pingbacks and referrers, namely verify that the webpage does contain the link it proports to.

However, that part will have to wait as I'm in the midst of evaluating a wholesale upgrade of the software running my weblog, and in the process evaluating Blosxom 1.2, Blojsom, PyBlosxom, and Vellum.

Midas has landed

Dave Johnson: Blogzilla points out that Midas, a WYSIWYG HTML text edit control, is available in current Mozilla nightly builds.

Sweet!

YA3PDNA

Bill Kearney: Have you tried Wildgrape yet?

Looks like we have Yet Another Three Paned .Net Aggregator.

This aggregator does allow you to have multiple collections of feeds, sorts, searches, and filters your subscriptions by date and content. Sweet. I would personally prefer that this be done over the content than the name of the blog, but what is provided is still quite useful.

I was also intrigued by the way it handled invalid feeds. It colored the icon in red, provided information on what was wrong with the feed, and provided a link to the RSS validator. Way cool!

One feed that it did not like was Mark Baker's, which fails to validate as it is not well formed XML. Another feed it didn't like was Aaron Swartz's, which I will assert is valid RSS. I attribute this difference of opinion to the validator being around longer as I very much recall when the validator choked on the foaf info in the dc:creator element.

Shipping the Prototype

Jon Udell: In a world of distributed services in constant flux, when does exploration stop?

Spambayes

Gordon Weakliem: I've just installed Mark Hammond's Bayesian Spam Filter plugin for Outlook, part of the Python spambayes project.

Now that looks exciting and versatile! It looks like it can be used with procmail, so I can use it too, not just with my e-mail but also with my weblog.

It is interesting to note that I have received zero comment spam since I installed SpamAssassin. It wasn't filtered out - it never came.

Radio vs Syndirella

Reasons I like Radio's News Aggregator better than Syndirella:

• I can access my subscriptions from outside of the program.  This lets me lazily manage my blogroll.  The ability to script Syndirella, or introduce a plugin would be sufficient for my needs (C# is not an issue).
• With Mozilla, I can control-click on links and visit the tabs later.  This minimizes context switches for me.
• The author of a given blog entry is more visually apparent in the way Radio presents the information (immediately above the blog entry).
• My subscriptions are displayed in alphabetical order.
• I can go back later and review today's items.  Syndirella requires me to remember who the author was and then find the weblog.  If I ever saw it in the first place, if can remember, and then if I can find it.
• Initial impressions on both sucks: you get every news item.  But Syndirella requires an additional step of marking every blog entry read in each weblog.  Or for one to lean on the space bar for a while.

I'm looking forward to crossing items off of this list.  ;-)

Pedantic Web

Stefano Mazzocchi: I'm more and more heading myself into the concept of 'data emergence' where you don't go around bothering people to markup their data as *you* like it, but *you* make an effort to collect their data and make a sense out of it. I'm starting to call it ' pedantic web' myself :)

Good idea. Bad name. ;-)

RTP Bloggers Club

Mark Pilgrim: almost exactly a year ago, I met Joe for lunch after seeing his signature in an discussion board, which mentioned Apex, NC. Turned out he lives on my jogging route. The next month, Sam joined us, and we jokingly referred to our newly founded group as the “RTP Bloggers Club”.

Fast forward to present day: we have a wiki, a mailing list, and an unknown number of members (of which 13 were at our lunch last month). And reporters sitting in on the whole thing, taking notes, recording it all on tape, and asking us to deconstruct why we do what we do every day.

Pretty soon we’ll have a privacy policy and a mission statement, and it’s all downhill from there.

This weblog protected by SpamAssassin

The one weblog entry that had a mailto link from my front page has now received five spam messages. I figured the first one or two were simply probes to test out the system, but the rest are clearly automated scum.

In my quest to find the simplest solutions to every problem, I elected to add SpamAssassin to the loop. For now, I'm only having it mark spam. If that works out, I'll route all such spam to the bitbucket

PHP and Mono

Sterling Hughes: I've written a wrapper for php5, you can download it here.

<?php
 $Console = new Mono('System.Console');
 $Console->WriteLine('Hello World');
?>

A few years back, I was able to do similar things with .NET using COM interop.

Mailblog implementation

Now that the code has settled down, I've linked to mailblog from my /code directory. To make it work, adjust the paths and add the following to your .procmailrc file:

 :0:
 * ^TO_blog
 | /home/rubys/bin/mailblog

"Interesting" things encountered along the way:

• Email without subject lines
• Not all e-mail clients will automatically quote special characters
• Mail addresses may be in <> characters
• Everything needs to be XML Escaped, particularly quotes in attributes.
• HTML email and attachments

Idolatry

Gordon Weakliem: I'm not prepared to say that XSD is God's own type system. But if He had a type system, I'll bet it looks more like XSD than Java.

Amen

Secure Blogging by Email

Ben Hammersley: Being able to prove ownership, or at least definitive origination, would be an excellent ability to have. And once again, it's the blogging world who are getting up and actually doing it, small piece by small piece.

I actually think the sweet spot is in comments. How I chose to update my weblog is of an academic interest to most, but the ability to author new content is of a much wider interest. At the moment, the best I can say is that a given comment is purported to be by Ben or Mark or Shelley or whoever.

But I would prefer to start this much more incrementally. The most basic thing comments by email provide is the ability to download various RSS feeds, hit the road, and respond while disconnected. If you want to try this, you can do it on this blog entry.

The next thing people will want is the ability to specify a URL of their homepage to be displayed instead of their e-mail address. Much discussion will ensue as to whether this should be a MIME header or in the body. If defacto standards emerge in this area, I will simply support both.

Signing is the next step, particularly given that e-mail clients already tend to have built in support for this. Ultimately, when the spam starts arriving, only signed e-mails will be accepted.

Services are the next step. If I can validate a signature against some data located via a link from your home page, I would be comfortable with providing Jabber messages whenever additional comments are made to a blog entry that you have commented on. Or on processing signed requests to update or delete weblog entries that you originated.

Update: I've changed the address to be blog-1172 instead of blog:1172 so that email clients need not quote the address per RFC 822

Gentoo (and gump)

Costin Manolache: Being able to build a program gives you the sentiment that it is easy to contribute and make changes and fix things. That's the main reason I like gump - I can make quick changes to various projects - and then get things compiled without the usual headaches. It just works. Many years ago - I used to build everything. Then I started to get lazy and use binaries - and only now I realize how much I missed it.

Columbia

Glenn Reynolds: "At least they got to go into space," observes my daughter. Well, yeah. It still sucks, though.