Comments
December 4, 2006 | Site Maintenance
Since I'm under deadline, I'm messing around with my weblog configuration.
Weblog commenting is totally broken. I just deleted 5,835 junk comments, all spammed since Thanksgiving. Then I went into the approved comments and find that there are 3,300 of them, when in fact only between 300 and 800 are valid. So I'll have to manually delete those over the next few weeks, in small batches so I don't become a serial killer.
I should probably do what Chris and Ashley recommended two years ago, which is to use Haloscan for comments. Or I should at least upgrade to Moveable Type 3.33 – but since they don't appear to address any of the comment management problems, who cares what other new features there are? I don't have 15 minutes a day to delete this crap from clueless people who think they're going to get rich vandalizing websites.
For now, I've turned on TypeKey authentication, which probably won't solve the problem but may reduce it dramatically. That means you have to register with them in order to comment here. Sigh. Not many people comment anyway, especially since the summer when I ran out of energy to engage commentators and keep the conversation alive.
It seems to me like keeping Moveable Type crippled like this is a good way to drive "upgrades" to TypePad, the paid hosted service that Six Apart offers. That's very annoying, and there's no solid evidence, save for the snail's pace of MT improvements over the past three years. They are ignoring the biggest hassle of running a weblog today.
It wasn't like this in 1998, I tell 'ya.
Update: Great, now TypeKey says I haven't signed up for this (free) feature. But the weblog key matches they key they display on my configuration profile. Oh well, maybe I've broken comments completely. Which is possibly better than deleting the vandalism every day.....
Update 2: CRAZY! In the TypeKey setup, you have to have a trailing slash after the URL. Even I can friggin' write Perl to add one if it's not present!! How un-friendly is that??
Update 3: Okay, once I have "trusted" a commenter it appears to work. Wish us luck!
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And Good Ones Too
July 31, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance
Doug is back from vacation and has commented on many posts. Always appreciated.
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Narrative Selection Bias™
June 29, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society | Site Maintenance
Doug and I had an interesting exchange in the comments that's worth bringing to the front page.
I pulled a quote from a blog post and out of context the quote had a different meaning. A reader could get the wrong idea. So this is a formal disclosure statement that Notio is extremely biased. I am citing material that is interesting to me, possibly for reasons unknown, possibly unknown even to me. It's an interpretation, not an "objective" perspective. Essentially, you can't trust anything you read here.
Just thought I'd mention it.
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Best Comment Spam Ever
May 23, 2006 | Site Maintenance
Love this: "There seems to be a problem adding comments. I tried three times."
Yes, Trevor, when you're commenting on posts that are two years old, the spam filter shuts you out for moderation. When I go to the moderation page and I see that you're posting a lot of crap to a lot of old posts I delete the comments, which brings me joy.
Now, I could be mistaken. Perhaps you have an actual comment on an older post – the best thing to do there is find something relevant to say on a current post so that you become trusted, and then take a shot at the older posts.
Notio is at 50 to 100 junk comments a day, which I can manage in one or two short (2-3 minutes) sessions. It would be interesting to trendline the comment spam topics – it seems to come in waves. Oh, here are fifty hotel spams, oh look, now we've got the drug offers, wait, wait, here come the organ enhancement products, lookey there, some useless newbie test posts as they figure out the spaming software, oh this is rich, the compliments arrive ("There is much knowledge here") linking to junk sites.
Oh I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused
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N-Dimensional Web 2.0
April 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Site Maintenance | Software | Technology | Travel
Many people are trying to define "Web 2.0" – what it is, what it means, how to build Web 2.0 apps, what makes a company a Web 2.0 company, etc. All of those efforts fall short, because Web 2.0 is n-dimensional. Web 2.0 is "reflecting more complex multivariable situations.1"
Today I learned of a new dimension to Web 2.0. Chris2 invited me to join a beta of CollectiveX, a new Web 2.0-ish social widget. To invite someone you have to set a temporary password, and when they log in they change it to whatever they want. Chris set my password to "ratdoggy." Ha! Now that's a good one. This made me laugh out loud, and when I told Meg3 she lost it too. What's so funny?
Well, it creates a strong but secret connection between the title of a recent post I wrote – wherein "maybe too much information" was offered4 – and an unrelated client task. Chris' password was an acknowledgment that he read the post. Maybe even he liked it. And he certainly knew it would make me think of that post in the middle of the workday. But in any case "ratdoggy" is not in frequent usage (Google: "Did you mean: ratdog?") and his reference expanded its sphere of influence.
Which is like a link, just not a web hyperlink. It was a link from one mind to another, from one blog post to a work moment, from a concert review to a social software login, from my original post written on a couch in the lobby of a cinderblock hotel in Charlestown to my colleague's laughter at the password in an office building in Hanover, from all that to this post which you are reading now. Links, links, links, everywhere you look. Which makes me smile.
And that seems to be the common element of a Web 2.0 app – that it makes you smile, somehow, in some way that maybe you never have before.
1) An Introduction to Chemometrics. A report given as Session F of Educational Symposium No. 17, The Use of Statistical Methods in Formulating and Testing of Rubber at the 130th Meeting of the ACS Rubber Division by Brian A. Rock, Ph.D. in October, 1985.
2) Blog updated according to a complex precision timing schedule involving the highway, the moon, the clouds, and the stars.
3) I did not invoice for this minute of laughter, nor did the client utilize any official company time or resources in reaction to the laughter event.
4) Plausible Story, personal communication.
Now, how many new links can you find in the above footnotes?
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From The Mailbag
March 16, 2006 | People & Society | Site Maintenance
Another classic:
Dear notio.com,
My name is Chris, and I manage a web site about "Stretch mark" at: [URL removed].
[Holy crap. You wouldn't believe how many ads come up if you Google that!]
I recently found your site http://www.notio.com by searching Google for "Stretch mark treatments". I think our websites have a similar theme, so I am very interested in swap links.
What do you think dear readers? I passed on the gambling ads, should I go for the stretch mark treatments instead? ;)
Who are these people? And do they actually make enough money to keep doing this, or is it constant churn of new rubes coming into the game? If they are making lots of money, doesn't that make you depressed? If it's constantly new people, what does that tell us about the nature of hope?
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Mail Bombed
March 12, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Site Maintenance | Technology
Notio is getting emailed bombed, or something. In the last couple of hours I've received over a thousand emails like this:
From: Philomena Astle
(Every return address is different.)
Subject: Re: POtharamacy news
(Lots of variations on this.)
Hi,
Do you want to j O l V f E d R r P k A c Y for your u M k e j d o i e a r c x t b i b o j n n s?
Nothing like you need it, l S f a r v v e over g 5 d 0 r % with http://wiqo31.selterrote.com
They come in batches of 200 or 300. WTF? They pass through the server spam filter and get pulled down via POP3, where they pass the local spam filters and I have to wade through them trying not to miss a real email.
Thanks guys. And the point is?? Do you think you're going to get rich or something? Sheesh.
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Notio on Technorati
February 17, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance
I haven't visited the blog search engine Technorati in a dog's age. They had some serious scaling issues a year or two ago, and it was just useless. I don't know why I went to visit yesterday, but the results surprised me.
First of all, they hired a designer, thank god. Second, it was essentially fast enough. I had a couple of searches time out, but it was basically an okay experience. What really got me though, was finding out who is linking to Notio. I was quite surprised. The links are listed by recency, so they may change by the time you visit there, but here's a sampling.
No surprise on Wealth Bondage. The Tutor and I had a really fun blogging weekend a couple years back, and I have been reading his site since 2003. And he was the genesis for the Giving Conference. So, blog buddy, here's to ya!
Up A Creek Without A Patl was a surprise, because I didn't know Pat had a blog. And a great name for a blog it is! She's a local tech buddy, who I don't know well, but I hear through the grapevine that she's really good at what she does. I sort of expect to work together on a project at some point, but I don't know why I think that, nor is there any evidence that this is a possibility. But, another subscription for the newsreader!
Kn@ppster was a total surprise. I've never heard of this site, but he picked up my This Is What's Wrong With The Democrats post on the same day I wrote it. He comments: "Yeah, there's a blogosphere "A-List" (see above), but what the "C-List" is saying may be more important: Notio - 'This is what's wrong with the Democrats,'" and goes on to list a few more sites. Hey, I'll take a C-List blogger ranking any day - thanks!
There are a bunch of posts on various sites regarding Rails training by Rails core member Marcel Molina, Jr., linking to my post on the Big Nerd Ranch class I attended. Here's an example.
R Perl's weblog links to my post on Alain de Vulpian and the Process of Civilization. I'm glad that got picked up somewhere - it deserves a wide reading, and I may tackle a longer post on it sometime. InfoDesign and Nicholas Paredes also picked up this post; both are interesting sites.
Then there are a bunch of spam blogs, that have meaningless sentences strung together, linking to other sites on the 'net. These guys suck, and I'm not linking to them. What a waste of energy. Dudes, go friggin' make something instead of sucking wind out of every one else.
Of course, I knew that Plausible Story linked here, because Hannah is a local friend and I helped set up her blog. Her site is worth subscribing to, IMHO, for an ambitious attempt at integrating life, fiction, and literary imagination. I wonder if she would agree with this description....
Chris Corrigan is a friend from the Giving Conference. He was excited that I blogged the Society for Organizational Learning conference in Vienna, Austria. Chris is an excellent role model for how to be in the world, and I hope to visit him on Bowen Island at some point.
abstractplain I hadn't heard of, but there's some Rails stuff there, as well as other interesting material. (S)he picked up on my science and technology category, which I haven't actually updated in a while.
Ted Ernst is another Giving Conference buddy. He's a frequent commenter here at Notio, which is amazing since there's a bug in my comment form making people enter their info every time, and blocking even the most frequent contributors until I approve each comment, time after time.
Michael Herman coordinated the Giving Conference with The Happy Tutor, and works frequently with Chris Corrigan. Another good role model, and it's amazing how influential that conference was in my future.
That epic Zappa post I wrote a while back got picked up on Kill Ugly Radio, so that's cool. For some reason, duh, I had no idea that there was a whole network of Zappa fan sites.
All in all, it's pretty interesting who's linking here. Thanks for your support!
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Advertising on Notio
February 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Site Maintenance
Well, I have to make a decision:
Hi Michael,
Thank you for your prompt reply.
I represent the CPays.com affiliate program. We promote 16 online gambling brands.
I would like to advertise at least one of our gambling brands on your website - either with a text link or banner.
We can sort out a CPA commission plan (one time payment for player) or we can work on a revenue share basis (commission from the players' net loss)
What do you say?
James
I have investigated putting AdSense ads on Notio, but I haven't gotten around to it. Focused blogs can pay the bills this way - I know someone who has a blog focused on TiVo and the like, and he makes about $1,000 a month from Google AdSense. But Notio is hardly focused, in case you haven't noticed. I could probably make a dollar a month or something. Maybe ten. Gambling ads have got to be more lucrative than that.
Let's see, do I care about gambling morally? I have no idea; I've never thought about it. The one time I was in Las Vegas it was weird and disorienting. We didn't play anything the whole four days. Certainly the worst of the gambling downsides are bad - and seeing a thin, pastey, leathery-skinned grandmotherly woman with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, one hand holding a beach bucket full of quarters and the other a Bud Light, playing slots at 5:30 AM first thing off the elevators is pretty gnarly - but is it bad in the main? Probably not, but maybe, though it's not my cup of loose-leaf green tea. Who was that guy a couple of years ago railing against gambling until he got caught bankrupt from it? Some extreme right-wing hypocrite intellectual (I know that doesn't narrow it down much). He thought it was bad, except he lost his shirt doing it. I'm not nearly that conflicted. I hardly have a horse in this race, yet.
If I say 'sure,' then do I want a one-time payment, or a cut of the player's loss? In gambling the house always wins, so there will certainly be a net loss most of the time. In both cases, you have to trust them to keep good records and pay you honestly. Hehehehehehehehehehehe.
Aesthetically, no, I don't want a banner ad above my beautiful photos. But it probably pays better than the text link, and it might have some irony value.
If I'm operating from my heart, then I'd have to say No. But what if the money is good? What does the heart say to that?
So let's think like a mercenary: How much per month would I have to earn to ignore any personal issues? What's my price? (I should run a survey, to see what y'all think my price is, that would be interesting!)
One incentive would be if they can get the spambots to stop filling my comments with online poker spam - then it would certainly be worth having an ad instead. Good business model for them - flood bloggers like me with comment spam, then offer to turn it off and get a cut of the proceeds. They'd call it a win-win.
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Recent Email
February 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Site Maintenance
We get letters:
Subject: Regarding your website (www.notio.com)
I would like to advertise at your website.
Please get back to me ASAP, I really want to close a deal today.
(Name, company, and email withheld, though it does appear to be from an advertising firm.)
My response:
Sure, anything's possible. What did you have in mind?
It will be interesting to see where this goes.... FWIW, Alexa ranks Notio as the 5,611,319th most popular site on the Internet. That's gotta count for somethin'.
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No Comments Yet?
February 9, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance
Whenever I post at Notio, (using MarsEdit, natch) I visit the website to verify that it's on the air. For some reason, every time, I say to myself, "No comments yet?"
Is that crazy or what? Talk about narcissism. The post has been alive for less than ten seconds and I'm wondering where the comments are? Last week, four people said to me, "Well, it's okay to be self-absorbed sometimes." I took this free ride on the cluetrain as a suggestion, ever so subtle, that I was being self-absorbed. Thank goodness for friends, who can both helpfully point out and willingly accept your flaws, at least for a time.
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Update on Blog Comments
February 3, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance
My aggressive approach to comment spam is having some short-term side effects. There have been a few comments this week that have been snagged by the filter, and I had to tell it to "trust this commenter" and to mark it as "not junk." Then the comments get posted. Hopefully if this happens to you it will only happen once. If I am not careful in scanning my junk folder (about 500 junk comments a day, thank you comment-spam scum) then it's possible I might delete a comment. If this happens to you, my apologies. We don't censor here at Notio, but we do make mistakes. Ask anyone we know!
Catching up on responses:
Chris: I do little food shopping outside the Coop, so virtually all cookie recommendations will be found on their shelves.
Hilllady: I almost took a swipe at the Enneagram, but it was late and I couldn't find my copy of the book. Plus, I didn't want to muddy the waters after working so hard to clarify the situation.
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Feeback to Notio
February 2, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance
Email from Chris:
Subject: Your post
Chris: Wow. You topped yourself. ;)
Notio: Uh, which one? I've been a little over the top in general....
Chris: The one that wasn't english. With all the abbreviations. That you edited today, perhaps for clarity, though I couldn't tell... ;)
Notio: Blame it on the cookies!
Chris: Seriously, you're going off the deep end. It's fantastic.
(I love my readers.)
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Webloging With MarsEdit
January 30, 2006 | Site Maintenance | Software
I mentioned this briefly back in October 2004, but if you are publishing a weblog and still using the browser for writing and editing, and you're on an OS X Mac, you should really check out MarsEdit. It's more like an email client, and provides lots of features - like a spell-checker, easy tagging, a Save button, etc. For $25, it's the way to go. Free 30-day demo. From the same people that make NetNewsWire.
It's a refreshing joy to use, especially if you spend some time on Windows for comparison.
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Comments Back On
January 29, 2006 | Site Maintenance
I just went through 4,349 weblog comments here at Notio World Headquarters, and approximately 4,100 of them were junk. Then, after I hit the delete button, the cgi process at pair.com timed-out, crashing half-way through. So there are 2,166 left to go through again. Joy.
So I've temporarily turned off comments until I can figure out how to gain finer control over them. I did this in a brute-force way, so it might have broken something along the way. We'll see. In any case, I hope to fix this soon.
Update #1: Well, on the second try it crashed again, but now there are only 1,011 comments left. Once again, with feeling....
Update #2: I appear to have deleted the ~4,100 published spam comments. Then, I went to the "junk" comments, which are unpublished, and there are 5,438 of those! All this since November. Let's see how many tries this takes.... It's a bit easier since I'm not scanning these for valid comments, I'm just nuking them all.
Update #3: It took three tries. Comments are back on. I've set it to be very aggressive and automatically junk suspicious comments. For instance, junk it if there are more than three links in a comment, for starters. Let's see how it goes.
Update #4: While I was hacking, I switched from the file-based Berkeley DB to the modern MySQL database. That seems to have gone okay, but it's a major back-end change. Crossing fingers!
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Circular Cluelessness
January 25, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance
It must be time to go to sleep. I just surfed over to Notio, and wondered why it hadn't been updated today. Then I realized, duh, it's my blog, and I'm the only one who's going to post there. As they say in Maine, "Wicked." Maybe I'll post tomorrow.
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Photo Overload
September 21, 2005 | Life | Site Maintenance
Since I last posted any photos to Flickr, I have taken nearly 500 new shots, but I haven't had time to sort or select any for upload. Maybe on the train to Paris Friday morning. If not, I fear it will await the weekend when I return.
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A Note on the Photos
September 13, 2005 | Site Maintenance
Just FYI: The photos I'm posting to Flickr are essentially straight from the camera. I'm re-sizing them to 800px wide, but I'm not straightening perspective or anything else. Anything I print gets a deeper treatment, but the Flickr uploads are the snapshots.
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Liquid Layouts
August 28, 2005 | Site Maintenance | Software
So the new liquid layout for Notio may have some bugs yet to uncover, but the basics are working pretty well. My brother was visiting this weekend, and he has a Treo 650 smart phone. This thing has a web browser with maybe 240 pixels of width. Amazingly, he had a "three-bar" Cingular signal at our house in the woods (far better than the "one-bar" Verizon signal we get on our dumb phones), and so here you see the new Notio in miniature:
Pretty amazing, don't you think? That 1,000px header graphic of the fish just sizes right down, the two columns stay in place (until a content image is too wide) and it basically Just Works. That's pretty cool.
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Moveable Type 3.2
August 28, 2005 | Site Maintenance | Software
What the heck, I thought. I updated the weblog publishing software to version 3.2 this morning. The docs are much better than the last version, about which I complained. But the upgrade script hung on the MT::Entries table, and after an hour I ran it again. It skipped all that and seemed to complete okay.
It doesn't find any comments though, even though the summary page shows over 4,400 of them - all but about 200 are junk spam, so it's not like I care, but it doesn't seem correct, and may indicate lurking bugs. I'm hesitant to rebuild the site just yet, because I don't have time today to fix it if it breaks.
So this is something of a test post to see if we're still basically working. Wish me luck!
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Notio Redesigned, Again
August 27, 2005 | Site Maintenance | Software
That habit of mine struck again. Every time I get overloaded with work I add on an unrelated diversion, such as reading ten books, throwing a family party, buying a new camera, or redesigning my weblog. Sometimes, like this week, all of them all at once.
I had two goals for redesigning Notio. First, to bring my photography into the mix. I've always loved creating pictures, and everything about the process, from the chemicals in my grandfather's basement darkroom to the paradigm shift of my first digital camera.
Second, a more professional look, including a fresh visual design, structural HTML markup, fluid CSS layout, a better color palette, and a new start for the next level of improvement. Short version: It Was Time. I've tested the layout on Mac/Safari; Mac/Firefox; and IE6.x/Win. If you see anything odd, let me know. Wouldn't surprise me.
You can also visit or subscribe to my Flickr photo stream, if you want to skip the words and just watch the pictures.
Your feedback is welcome!
[Update: I just figured out that I've broken commenting. I won't be able to fix it today. Oh well. More fun to have later! Comments appear to be fixed – I had forgotten to put the comment code in the templates.]
