I was hit by trackback spam today. That’s a first. But I am not the only one, see for example GlennLog.
Guess it was just a matter of time before that would come. Trackback is, by design, “wide open” and prune for attacks. It’s sad, sad that it has to be like this.
There are a few reports in the MT support forum, but maybe we should all call upon the Lazyweb to wake up. Please!
Update: Several more reports. We are sitting ducks, Jay Allen says in his MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse.
UPDATE: My service moved.
A while ago, I had a meeting with Andreas Johannsen and someone else from Synkron, a Danish CMS provider. They asked me how they could “use” the Reference Profile. One of the issues that came up was about RSS, which is acknowledged in the reference profile.
The other day, Andreas told me that one of their clients, Ribe County, now has a RSS-feed. Excellent news! We are going to list this as a good example in the extended info pages of the profile, we are working on. Know any good examples of RSS in government around the world? Let me know.
Here in my blog, I used to use my OPML-blogroll to present my blogrolls and news from my linkroll. For a variety of reasons, I currently use my new Cut n’ Paste JavaScript RSS Feed service, which is a handy tool for showing RSS-feeds on static webpages using a few lines of javascript (hmm, how much damage does this method do these days? A few years ago it was not good, but hasn’t things improved?)).
The service is an out-of-the-box install of Feed2JS, which is based on Magpie, a great XML parser in php. See it in action with Ribe Amt’s feed using the simple client that comes with Magpie. Magpie not only supports all RSS flavours, but also supports Atom feeds. Magpie and Feed2JS are GPL-products.
You are welcome to use the service on my server, but please let me know if you do so. Someone in Ribe (or Synkron?) might want to offer some similar services?
It is a bit ironic that an upgrade of one blog (this) from MT 2.661 to MT 3.0D was more troublesome than migrating another to WordPress.
I am not sure what causes the problems, I have had, but the upgrade seems to cause a number of problems with this blog, probably caused by one of the many small modifications I have made to MT over the years.
I decided to start all over with a clean MT-install and there import my blog, resulting in a new “clone”, found at slashdemocracy.org slash mt (not for indexing), which has now taken over the blog. I use one of the new default templates and style sheets for MT 3.0D. It’s actually not a bad style, but I want to use a three column layout, and kind of like my current design, and I decided to play with it (mainly colours) and now use it here. I think the blog has become more readable. Also, I need to play have played around with some rewrite rules to make URLs direct to the new, more friendly URLs, that is, /archives/2004/05/mt_vs_wp.html rather than /archives/000934.html. Let me know of any links that have gone bad.
Comment spam has been a strong motivation to do this upgrade. If the new comment mechanism in MT3.0 works right, comments are now to be moderated before being posted, unless a TypeKey is used. Feel free to test the comment system out.
Update: I got the first spam comment today. Since I have moderation on, it wasn’t posted. The real comments that came were also queued up, as they should. Had Dave or Patrik used TypeKey, their comments would have been posted directly. Hmmm. I can live with this system, just don’t hope I get flooded with a lot of spam, which is still tedious to delete, although much easier now than in old MT.
This blog now runs on the new Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition. My multi-author blog, Bredgade 40, has been migrated to WordPress.
A while ago, Dave Winer asked: What’s next in writing tools for weblogs? I was tempted to comment on this myself, but never got around to it, and got lost in the debates. Today, Phil Windley points to Lisa Williams who has published a great summary of the debate in her Weblog Wishlist Manifesto.
Phil writes:
My personal wish is to be more easily create entries on my blog. I’ve cobbled together some bookmarklets and whatnot to help create content (like the quote just above) but I still spend far too much time cutting and pasting URLs, etc. and typing HTML.
Amen to that.
One of the areas I have been looking into for a while is TTW WYSIWYG editors, that is, editors that work ‘through the web’. For a long time, there were problems with cross-browser/platform support, but it seems things are changing. Microsoft Internet Explorer’s designMode feature has been embraced by Mozilla. See the Midas spec, examples and demos.
I have recently integrated HTMLArea Version 3.0 (beta) which works in IE 5.5+ (Windows) and Mozilla 1.3 (all OS) into a CMS I run. It works best in Firefox. I am tempted to use it in MovableType now. That is, if I don’t decide to leave MT, but that’s another story …
Bookmarklets, yes. They are not optimal, but can be great. It’s a pity about the lack of cross-browser support. I’m still struggling with porting my old MSIE bookmarklets to my new favorite browser (FireFox).
Hmmm. This post is written in Zempt, a Windows-client. It’s a nice little tool, but not wysiwyg. Rather than building tools in the browser, it might be better to build stand-alone clients, and interface with the blogging tools by web services or open apis.
Another item on my wish list is about semantics. I ought to use more semantic markup in my posts, and would like tool that would make it easier to add. Bookmarklets or popup menus/windows, maybe even context-sensitive menus we know from HTML-editors and development tools. In this genre, readers of my blog on the web might have noticed a new feature, with a new special markup of abbreviations and acronyms like HTML and XML. Another cool MT-plugin. The database is unfortunately a flatfile thingy, but I guess I should look at automating it, maybe interoperative with our Reference Profile.
To mark Ars Electronica�s 25th anniversary, the Prix Ars Electronica 2004 – the foremost international competition for computer-based art – is being expanded to include a Digital Communities category in which two Golden Nicas will be awarded to exemplary initiatives that are furthering the development of an open Information Society.
Among the projects, phenomena and fields of activity subsumed under the heading Digital Communities are:
Deadline for submissions is March 12, 2004.
Dave Winer in today’s Scripting News:
Alexander Svensson writes: “The German Constitutional Court now syndicates its decisions and press releases using RSS 2.0.”
On Friday we noted that the Danish government is also standardizing on RSS. It seems that Mr Safe has made his decision.
Last summer, Mr Safe, the character Dave refers to, also “talked” to Tim Bray, Jon Udell, Joshua Allen and then Chad Dickerson whose Mr Safe checked in with Gartner (very funny).
Lo and behold, tonight Mr Safe called me. I recorded our conversation:
Mr Safe: I am now convinced that I must offer some XML-feeds to our clients. I looked in the Danish Reference Profile and found that I can choose between RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 for my syndication purposes. Which format should I choose?
Me: If you want to be safe, you should publish your data in both formats. Sure, they serve the same purpose, but consider it like having both Dollars and Euros in your wallet. A bit annoying, but bearable, and sometimes useful.
Mr Safe: What? RSS is money?
Me: Ehh, yes, you can say that RSS 1.0 is your Dollars and RSS 2.0 your Euros, I guess.
Mr Safe: I see. But can’t I just stick to one format? Doesn’t everone accept Dollars these days?
Me: Look. You also publish your press announcements through various channels, don’t you? You still send those old faxes around, don’t you? And emails. And on your website. And as a PDF-file. And …
Mr Safe: OK, I got your point.
Me: And besides, to return to the syndication issue, you better prepare to embrace the emerging format called Atom too, but since that hasn’t even made it into the Reference Profile (yet), you can consider yourself perfectly safe when publishing only RSS. But keep your CMS flexible and prepared for new formats.
Mr Safe: What? Atom? Last time you talked about Echo.
Me: Yes. They changed the name.
Mr Safe: So, you want me to publish two RSS-feeds and an Atom-feed? That’s a lot!
Me: I’d say that Atom is optional. Focus on RSS and learn how it works. Try and use your own feeds in your own applications. Put your press announcements on your intranet via a feed parser or something, if you can find more innovative uses.
Mr Safe: Now that makes sense. Where do I start?
Me: I would recommend starting with RSS 2.0. That is the simplest of them all. But do take a look at the others too, so you get a fuller picture of the variety of options and possibilities.
Mr Safe: When will things settle a bit more?
Me: When pigs fly. Enjoy the politics of difference.
Ross Mayfield wrote about the Disney Enterprise Weblogs and Wikis, and had some interesting conclusions about RSS:
I agree on all points. Not sure about Outlook though.
Dave Fletcher adds that “the State of Utah is using weblogs for a variety of purpose, including content management, customer contact management, news services, etc. and has even more on the drawing board. It provides a VERY cost effective solution for many business needs.”
In Denmark, RSS is now an officially recognised standard for e-government, since it has been included in the Reference Profile, which itself is available in RSS. If anyone has problems with feeds like this, please let me know. I want to do things right. I’m not sure my extensions are OK (they do validate OK though). While the content feeds are in RSS 2.0 only, we have been pragmatic and recognised both RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 in the reference profile. I wonder whether we should add Atom? It should at least be there as “Emerging”, I suppose. Atom still has a long way to go, and I think a complete “migration” to an Atom-exclusive service is premature and “ideological”. I’m going to promote RSS and support Atom, because it in theory has a great potential, partly for doing something else than RSS, but perhaps over time also to do what RSS does today. But I don’t see me leaving RSS anytime soon.
Now, which RSS is the best/safest then? Until I saw W3C’s announcement about RDF and OWL, which might give RDF, hence RSS 1.0, a revival, I would say that if I should choose only one RSS, it would be RSS 2.0. Now I am not sure. Fortunately, I don’t have to accept this as a Highlanderish “There can be only one” battle. There can be two, there can even be three, although it gets messy (or dynamic…).
Søren and I are getting ready for the EA-T8 class, which starts tomorrow. Teaching material, term schedule, lecture plan, reading list, and more. We have been looking at various e-learning/groupware systems. The university offers us a SiteScape platform, but we are not very impressed with it (it’s overkill) and are considering alternatives. Everyone who knows me shouldn’t be surprised when I say that I have suggested we use blogs. Søren is more fond of Usenet/NNTP. So, we now look at ways to use blogs and usenet together. Therein also lies some good architectural issues, which we can use in the learning process with the students.
Blogs and UseNet together then? Rather than being two overlapping channels of communication, they should be seen together as enabling one, integrated user experience. Ideally. But how?
1. Replacing blog comments with a link to the UseNet group.
2. Exposing UseNet postings in the blogs.
3. Posting blog postings in a UseNet group??
4. ??
Maybe step one and two are “good enough”? But how do you reference a UseNet posting? Does it have an URL? Or can it be referenced in other ways? Well, it can be made available in other ways than a UseNet-reader, which will be essential for step 2. On this Mihai Parparita, a CS student at Princeton, comes to the rescue:
I’m not a big Usenet person, and checking said newsgroups would involve me having to remember to go out of my way and fire up Pine. However, since (timely) announcements are often posted in newsgroups, reading them regularly is necessary. One thing that I check often (perhaps too often) is my RSS newsreader, so the obvious thing to do would be to bring newsgroups to it.
So, Mihai created a bridge between NNTP and RSS (NNTP2RSS). A simple Perl script is all that is needed. I installed it, and it works great. Thanks Mihai!
RSS2NNTP (step 3) would mainly be an offer to those who want everything in a UseNet newsreader. Open sourced nntp//rss does exactly that, by making RSS-feeds available in dedicated NNTP groups. I haven’t tried installing it (it’s some java-stuff, urgh, help!).
Challenge: Threading vs linerity! NNTP uses/allows infinite threading. Blogs/RSS don’t. Does Atom??
A while ago, Dave Winer gave 10 reasons why RSS Rules. Dylan Greene now offers 10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time.
10 reasons why RSS is important to me:
This could easily become a 100 reasons or more, if need be.
Not that RSS is perfect. The One-click RSS subscriptions and other usability issues are not trivial. And then there’s the business model. What is stuff like rssads.com going to bring?
