Blogging @ 10

I heard on NPR that today was the 10th anniversary of the blog. Turns out that this nozell.com/blog just over half that old -- 5 years, 9 months, 12 days. Born on date: March 5th, 2002.

And I still have Jorn's blog in my RSS aggregator: Robot Wisdom and the more frequently updated Robot Wisdom auxiliary

Claiming a bloglines feed

...done...

Akismet works great

In the last week there has been a dramatic spike in the number of comment spam messages I've been getting. Yesterday I installed akismet, got a wordpress.com API key and in 24 hours it has stopped 300+ junk comments and let the one real one through -- incredibly simple and painless to install and start using.

Updated to Wordpress 2.0

As with previous Wordpress upgrades this one was also painless.  My 'Yet Another Daily Delicious' and 'Yet Another Weekly Delicious' continue to work also.
I've not yet restored the style sheet header (this one) or added back some of the other doodads.

How Much Is My Blog Worth?

Wow!

I was reading rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed about how much technorati.com values his blog. According to this applet...

My blog is worth $15,242.58.
How much is your blog worth?

Nice to see that someone values this lil' blog.

comment spammers topical news articles

I got two comment spam using text from one of the AP news feeds. Looks like they are trying to game google's blog search engine by hooking themselves to breaking news keywords.

Name: SPAM PRODUCT | E-mail: SPAMMER@yahoo.com | URI: http://SPAM PRODUCT.com/ | IP: 195.206.123.33


HOUSTON - Hurricane Rita roared toward the Texas and Louisiana coasts early Friday, a major Category 4 storm that spurred a traffic-snarled exodus toward higher ground and fears it could cripple the heart of the nation’s petrochemical industry.
SPAM PRODUCT href

Trying out Google SiteMap using WordPress plugin

A friend was asking today about how to improve her site's ranking in google and it got me thinking of adding Google's SiteMap and gave Arne Brachhold's WordPress plugin a try. It was amazingly simple to install and
use.

WordPress update, again

If you aren't running WordPress 1.5.2, get it.

ipodder (v2.1) on Ubuntu 'Hoary'

I'd upgraded to the latest iPodder (v2.1) on my Ubuntu ('Hoary') laptop today.

# tar jxvf iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

# cd iPodder-linux

# sudo ./install.sh

(take the defaults)

The only glitch is wx libraries aren't in the default PYTHONPATH, so set this environment variable either at the command line, or pop it in ~/.bashrc

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH


Now clean up a little bit...


$ cd ../

$ rm -rf iPodder-linux iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2


Now, you are all set to start iPodder!



$ (nohup iPodder&) # or add it to a menu bar button



Getting closer to not needing any special knowledge to get iPodder running on a GNU/Linux distro...

- - - - -

Just for searchers, this is the problem you see if you don't set the PYTHONPATH:


$ iPodder
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "iPodderGui.py", line 38, in ?
import iPodderWindows
File "/opt/iPodder/iPodderWindows.py", line 4, in ?
import listctrl as listmix
File "/opt/iPodder/listctrl.py", line 296, in ?
EVT_DOPOPUPMENU = wx.PyEventBinder(wxEVT_DOPOPUPMENU, 0)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'PyEventBinder'


Some myspace user is a jerk

Last week I noticed that someone on myspace.com had linked to one of my photos and was stealing my bandwidth. There were a tons of hits from

http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=10745512&Mytoken=20050326161711

Apparently like a picture of me in my pjs as a kid.

Today I looked at my weblog and found over 2200 hits from the AOL proxy server on 27 March from 4am through 6pm. Fortunately AOL aggressively caches, so they were all HEAD hits which doesn't pull down a new copy, just checks to see if it is the same version they already have.

Updated Yet Another Daily del.icio.us hack

I've updated my Yet Another Daily del.icio.us (yadd.php) so it can be called once a week. I suppose it should be called Yet Another Weekly del.icio.us... (yawd-1.0.php).

Found through my ping-backs that zman has a patch to yadd.php so it doesn't create empty entries on days where there are no new bookmarks.

Enjoy.

Sigh, trackback spam is starting...

Two random string trackbacks from http://uunviuvwx.com/ this morning.

And I was so happy with the little WP hack that stopped all the comment spam.

comment spam

The daily comment spam is getting worse and worse -- easily 100+ per day. It never makes it to the website because WordPress is setup so I need to approve all postings, but it is a PITA to weed
through the spam to find the occasionally real comments.

I've seen on Jeremy Zawodny's blog that in order to post, you need to type *his* first name in one of the forms. Not rocket science if a human is making the posting, but perhaps just difficult enough for the spammer's script to fail. The other nice thing is you can always change the question to something equally as trival. Say, "what the the color of the sky?" or "3141592 is my favorite number, what is my favorite number?"

Jeff Barr posted an entry on exactly how to do that in Wordpress. The only thing that was a little tricky was the change to wp-comments-post.php was on line 22 in my copy of the file. The difference because the file is a DOS format and emacs displayed it with ^M^M at the end of each line (essentially halving the
number of line Jeff saw.

The changes work for me...

Claiming my feedster profile...

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Yet Another DailyDelicious hack for WordPress

I wanted a nice simple way to mirror my daily bookmarks that I've added to [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us) into [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org)

Stephen Eyre's [dailydelicious](http://www.dot-totally.co.uk/dailydelicious.txt) was close, but
not exactly they way I wanted it. He used the RSS feed, but that doesn't give a good daily cutoff.

So, I present Yet Another Daily Delicious php script: [yadd.php](http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/yadd-1.0.TXT).

It asks for just today's bookmarks using the published api, parses the XML, generates nicely formatted HTML and creates a WordPress entry.

Here is the writeup from the code:
- - -


This is yadd.php V1.0 by Marc Nozell (marc@nozell.com) based on
Stephen Eyre's dailydelicious
(http://www.dot-totally.co.uk/dailydelicious.txt)

See http://www.nozell.com/blog/ for the latest version of
'yet another daily delicious' (yadd.php)

USAGE:

1) Edit the section below. At the very least use your del.icio.us
username and password ($del_user/$del_password)

2) Put there file somewhere on the server where you run WordPress.

3) Arrange for this page to be hit once a day, say 11:30ish your
local time. del.icio.us seems to track UTC so depending on which
timezone you live in, some bookmarks from your yesterday may show
up. Consider using a simple cronjob that looks like this:

30 23 * * * $HOME/bin/yadd.sh

where yadd.sh looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
curl http://www.yoursite.com/yadd.php

4) In the morning edit the entry if you wish. I've tried to generate
pretty HTML so it will be simple to edit the entry.

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

Anyone that hits the URL for this script will cause your current
bookmarks to be dumped into WordPress. Clearly this is not
desirable.

You have some options. The easiest is to keep this URL 'secret'.
Name it something unusual and put it in a non-obvious place.
Remember that if you display your web hit stats, the url will be
exposed. A better solution to use .htaccess to limit access. If
you do that remember to update the url wget uses to include the
username/password, something like this:
curl http://someuser:somepassword@www.yoursite.com/yadd.php

Enjoy,

-marc


HOWTO migrate from blosxom to wordpress

For my piece of mind, please backup your wordpress database before proceeding. I don't want my instructions to cause you to lose data.

• Grab my mt blosxom flavor files and add to your $datadir. Right-click to save these files:
  content_type.mt date.mt, foot.mt , head.mt, story.mt


• Edit story.mt and change the line "AUTHOR: marc" to whatever
  username you will be using.


• If you are using the blosxom clicktrack plugin (00clicktrack),
  disable it.


• Visit your blosxom site using the mt flavor:
  http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt and save it into a
  file named import in your wp-admin directory. You may want to try
  this: lynx -dump http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt >
  wp-admin/import.txt


• Take a look at the import.txt file you just created. There are some
  things you may want to fix now rather than after the import.
  
  • Lines are wrapped at 79 characters, so long URLs or entry titles may be broken.
  
  
  • If you have a habit of using a bunch of dashes to separate text, the importer
    may get confused and think it is the beginning of a new entry. Consider replacing
    - with =
  
  
  • All the categories will be something like /nh (based on the pathname). You may want
    to remove the leading slash. You can fix this after import and well as build up
    a category hierarchy, so it isn't a big deal.
  
  
  
  



• Follow the standard WordPress instructions for import-mt.php.



• If you don't like your categories named with a leading slash (eg:
  /nh), then edit your new WordPress categories.



• Start going through your posts and clean up any messes...

I'm migrating from blosxom to wordpress

My webhoster just setup MySQL access for my site so tonight I'm migrating.

Rael has done a great job with Blosxom, but I wanted blogging engine was web-based (del.icio.us shows how nice such interface can be) and that had a large active development community.

The fact that my webhoster doesn't charge extra for MySQL is a plus too.

Once I've migrated I'll post the blosxom flavor I wrote to help the migration. It basically generates a Movable Type export format that WordPress can import using import-mt.php.

Take a look and then bookmark this new location: http://www.nozell.com/blog

Bill Moyers talks about blogs

Last night I caught the very end of NPR's FreshAir which was an interview with Bill Moyers. In response to a question about what sort of tv/print/web media he reads/listens to he said blogs 'is the closest we have come to, in a long time, to the history of the American media in the beginning' and then talks about the parallels of blogs and the early American press of the 1700s.

Skip ahead to about 36 minutes into the show and hear for yourself.

I'm quoted in the paper today, but the interesting bit is how they found me

The day after the NH primary I got an email from a local reporter looking for a
quote to flesh out the article he was working on about undeclared voters. He knew from reading my blog entry(!) that I was an undeclared voter who was briefly a Democrat (long enough to vote) and then immediately returned to undeclared status.

I asked him know he came to my blog and he said he has been using geourl.com to see what people in the area are writing about. Cool.

BTW, here is the article.

Working on more complete 'share your opml' perl example

I've been hacking on a perl script that will 1) get the list of shared
opmls from feeds.scripting 2) put it in a table using a sqlite
database 3) iterate over all of them and grab the users blogroll and
also put them in an sql table.

Unfortunately when I turn it loose on all 600+ users, it dies on the 20th one o
r so with a strange message about trying to modify a read
only variable. The line is in an XML::Parser callback and looks
pretty innocuous:

        my ($j1, $feedname, $j2, $type, $j3, $xmlurl) = @_;

I then tried iterating from the 'bottom' of the list of users (SELECT
userid, person, url FROM users ORDER BY userid DESC) and that cranks
through a few hundred users and then dies deep in the guts of
XML::Parser complaining about invalid string or other.

Bah.

I'll do some more thinking out loud later.