CogBlogged from ‘October, 2003’

Now that MovableType bloggers can feel slightly more protected from weblogs comment spam thanks to Jay Allen’s MTBlacklist plugin, do not feel like this will drive the pesky spam-roaches away. Remember that their whole goal is to insert their viagra, porn, rip-off sales, etc web site addresses into your pages as it improves their Google Ranking. So know, a fellow posing as “Dave” claims to write a comment: Happened to stumble across your blog while googling. Great post! Wow, that feels good to get such a nice ego stroke, but when you translate the comment, it reads: I never read your crappy blog and could give a rat’s arse about you, but since it is listed in Google, I can exploit you. If I put my www.Viagra-Sex-Porn-Rip-Off.com URL in the URL field of this comment form, it will pump up my own Google rankings a notch. Ain’t I clever? All [...]

It’s been a full 2 days of intense action here at the NMC Pachyderm project meeting in San Francisco. This project was origiinally developed to create rich media web experiences based on exhibits at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)– Pachyderm 2.0 will evolve it to a tool that is able to do something I have been unable to really see anywhere else- to allow non-technical individuals to easily create interactive multimedia experiences from learning objects. The best part of this is the impressive collaboration of talent from at least 5 educational institutions and 5 other museums– and the energy of the group is contagious.

Ho hum. From the far seeing “FutureTech” at ABCNews.com, they reveal Web Tech to Keep Users Up-to-Date on News!!!! Maybe I ought to look at this RSS stuff ;-) Now it is easy to lambast a rather feather-weight overview of RSS, and frankly it is good to see more of this in the media, but c’mon. The author completely missed the vital role of weblogs in generating a large portion of the RSS content out there, and the value of personal publishing tools. Instead, we hear more of the gack about RSS killing email (hardly) or how one clever firm hired a programmer to get its full newsletter inside a feed. Hee hee, keep quiet Mr Barnum. Of course, over at ABCNews.com you can poke your way through all the ads, graphical banners, logis, a 1 page article spread over 3 bloated web pages and find nary a feed here. [...]

Now out to improve your MovableType blog sanity, is Jay Allen’s miraculous MT-Blacklist – A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin version 1.5. This is a large update and offers one click, de-spammiing of both comments and trackbacks, adding to blacklist file, and rebuilding of offended files. It is like magic. I had one arrive today with 4 links not even on tyhe blacklist, and killed it cold, dead in seconds. I love the satisfaction, even if it is still reactionary (they spam, I spray). It is more fun that squashing cockroaches, and very parallel, except cockroaches have more more nobility and integrity than spammers. Please, somebody with some deep pockets of extra cash, reward Jay Allen for heroic coding.

If you were unable to attend the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Online Conference on Learning Objects iin October, you missed out on some great sessions and exchange of ideas, as well as a brand new platform for online conferences. All presentations were created with Marcomedia Breeze (in essence streaming audio narrated content delivered as Flash), and the presentation I did with fellow conspirators Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman, I have downloaded and put on our web server: Connecting Learning Objects with RSS, Trackback, and Weblogs: Customized Collections of learning objects from multiple repositories can be achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This presentation will demonstrate the approach via a scenerio of two faculty members who create RSS views into the collections from different organizations. Their blogs are connected to the RSS feeds and provide a component of object [...]

The following is based on actual experiences. Names have been change.. nahhh, no names are used. But I was there.

I’ve took a little twist on RSS to deploy it in another fashion here at CDB. This was partly to response to a post by James Farmer as he tried to find an alternative approach to blogrolling. Maybe not understanding Radio as much as I should, I commented that it might be feasible to create his own RSS feed his blog could subscribe to. Not being able to clearly explain it in text, I decided to code an example on my blog. Here is what I did- on my right side “links” i have a section called “Best of Show” where L list the title and link to my recent presentations. Until now, what I did was to edit my template every time there was a new one (and there were four this month). I thought I could just create my own RSS feed for this content, display say the [...]

Here is an interesting use of RSS– Pheed.com or Syndicated Photography Feeds aims to promote the use of RSS to describe collections of photos. Pheed.com is a database of information about photographs available on the web. We present the work of photographers who have made information about their images available as an RSS feed. RSS is a simple document format based on XML that is used to syndicate web-based content. A pheed is simply an rss feed that has been extended to include information about photographs; a photo feed. The Pheed RSs extension adds to the RSS 2.0 spec two custom elements: photo:thumbnail and photo:imgsrc for the URLs of a thumnail image (max dimension 120 pixels) and the image itself. Along with it are Dublin Core extensions for attributes of creator, rights, photo location, format, and subject keywords. The Pheed.com site aims to provide a search interface to “Pheed” Feeds, [...]

Following up on my nostalgia for ten years on the web, I also reflected on what was likely the first educational software I ever created, back in 1987. As a Geology grad student at Arizona State University with a few programming courses as an undergrad, I was handed the opportunity to run a computer lab (14 Apple Mac Plus-es, no hard drive, one 300 kps modem, and a LaserWriter printer). Upon request of a geophysics professor, I wrote a little application, Gravity Simulation (Talwani Method) designed to help students understand how a surface measured gravity profile (measuring variations in the earth’s gravity over a linear traverse) could help identify subsurface (anamolies, e.g. ore bodies, buried volcanic lavas, etc). Exciting, eh? There is more…

I have been testing an alpha version of the next update to Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin. The changes coming are impressive and make it easier to filter and easily de-spam weblog crud. You can check and protect both comments and/or trackbacks, and it makes it a one clikc operation. Lots of new options coming in v1.5. It might be interesting to see what happens with publicly available blacklist files, maybe some sort of P2P sharing of spammers (the blacklist is a list of nearly 400 filters to trap spam) that can be done behind the scenes. I got two this morning that had 12 new URLs, and snapped it off 2 comments in my blog in one click. There are two main bugs in MT-Blacklist affecting about 25 people of the 750 who have installed the plugin. One causes slow rebuilds, timeouts or a 500 server error. The other is [...]