WombatNation

Yesterday afternoon I went to check my RSS and Atom feeds at Bloglines, but it was no feeds for me. Just checked again and my list of feeds was still empty. But, that was in Firefox 3. All the feeds are showing in Safari. I disabled almost all my add-ons, but still no feed love.

Switching from the classic Bloglines UI to the beta of the new UI fixed the problem in Firefox. I should have switched over sooner. The new look is really nice.

I hadn’t exported my feed listing in ages. I just took care of that. Cloud computing is great, but OS X’s Time Machine won’t back up that stuff for me automatically. I need to create some cron jobs to connect to my various hosted services and export data like this. Hopefully, most of them have APIs to get at this stuff so I can more easily automate the logins.

I just read about a new site called Utterz that goes far beyond what I did with PhoneBlogger a little over four years ago. A couple of other voice blogging by phone sites have cropped up in the intervening years, but their feature sets were generally the same or only slightly better than what I had built into PhoneBlogger. Their main advantage was hosting the service for you, albeit at a cost to you. I wasn’t surprised when I read about most of them closing up shop.

At Utterz, however, voice blogging by phone is just one of the services they offer. They even offer dial-in numbers outside the US. And even better, it’s free.

One thing I’m concerned about from reading the FAQ is that it looks like they just use caller ID to determine who you are when you call in. Caller ID is easy to spoof, so it would be simple for me to post a voice recording to someone else’s Utter page. If they had configured connections to their blog, my post would even show up there.

Another downside is that it appears that the voice app is just a DTMF app. That really limits what they can do. For example, one of the features I keep planning to add to PhoneBlogger is to let you tag or categorize the voice post. With a speech app that would be very easy to do. Some of the blogging APIs let you retrieve a list of all the existing categories. It’s trivial to those into a grammar and prompt the caller to say one of them. Good luck specifying a category with a DTMF app (press 1 for LOLcats, press 2 for flying spaghetti monster, …, press 19 for fishsticks are go, …). Actually, you could do better by having the caller enter the first two digits from the phone keypad that map to the first two letters of the desired category. Unless the caller has a lot of popular categories starting with the same letter, the app would then have to present at worst a short disambiguation list. Still, a speech app would be much better, especially if you want to support adding multiple tags to a post.

broadcast user that they automatically friended to all existing user accounts. The broadcast user currently has “154830 fans”. Of course, some people may have already unfriended this account and, like with any free service, many users may have abandoned their accounts. Still, it is at least a pretty good estimate of total user accounts.

As of January 10, Twitter Facts estimated 750,000 public users, 850,000 total users, and 300,000 active users. I couldn’t find similar estimates for Jaiku. At least none with any data to back them up. I did keep finding links to a post on Ars Technica suggesting that many Jaiku users are moving to Twitter due to Google’s neglect of the service after buying it.

I’m puzzled by why Google keeps buying companies like Dodgeball and Jaiku, only to quickly neglect upkeep and enhancements on the services and watch users leave in droves. Maybe they just wanted the engineers for other projects and found buying the company to be the easiest way to get an entire engineering team? Even if that were true, they apparently aren’t doing well enough on retention, as I’ve read about many of the lead engineers at the acquired companies leaving soon after the acquisition. I’m sure they don’t enjoy seeing something they worked on long hours every day for many months dumped on the side of the road.

I haven’t posted about PhoneBlogger in quite a while, but I’m thinking about updating and enhancing some of the code. A lot has happened in the audio/phone blogging world since I announced PhoneBlogger January 9, 2003, and posted the PhoneBlogger source code on SourceForge.

One new buzzword is mobcasting. The Wikipedia page on mobcasting quotes Andy Carvin as writing:

A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists caught in the mêlée, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible.

This is quite similar to the scenario I was thinking of nearly three years ago when I announced PhoneBlogger:

A journalist could use it from a payphone (good luck finding one, though) or with a basic cellphone to immediately publish to the web from the scene of an unexpected event in progress. It’s moblogging for the people, man.

Note the quaint reference to a payphone. My point was that you wouldn’t need a fancy phone. Of course, mobile phones have come a long way since I wrote that. Carvin’s example also includes the use of camera/videophones, rather then just audio.

My favorite part of the Wikipedia article, though, is near the end where it says:

Carvin is now exploring the creation of an open-source mobcasting tool that could be installed on a server to allow for community mobcasts via a local telephone call.

I’ve been thinking about the same thing, too. While it makes life simpler for me to host the application with a VoiceXML hosting provider like BeVocal, I do like the idea of having a more self-contained app. It’s going to be pretty complicated, though, to sort out everything I need with a free PBX like Asterisk or sipX, a free VoiceXML browser like OpenVXI, a free ASR engine like Sphinx, and a free TTS engine like Festival. Dealing with PSTN calls will also be a hassle. If I implemented this, I would probably just deal with SIP. That led me down the path of looking into building or finding a SIP softphone that could run on a mobile phone. There is a Java API, JAIN-SIP, for building a Java SIP user agent. The phone would ned only a J2ME runtime. What with all these acronyms and integration efforts, I think you can guess why I haven’t taken all of this on by myself, yet.

I’m glad to see that people like Andy are doing really interesting things with audio blogging. I built PhoneBlogger solely because I thought it would be fun to build. I never really ended up using it.

Sorry if anyone reading my blog through an RSS or Atom feed had problems with it during the last few weeks. I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1 a couple of weeks ago. Everything seemed fine, but then I noticed about a week ago that I was no longer seeing my own syndication feeds in Bloglines. The sole reason I susbscribe to my feeds in Bloglines was to detect exactly this kind of problem, so I guess I should at least be happy about that. I guess.

So I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.1 a few days ago and that seemed to solve the problem. One of the bugs that was allegedly fixed involved syndication feeds. Who know if that was the problem, but I’m just glad everything seems back to normal, even though it isn’t.

I just finished the basic part of the upgrade from WordPress 1.2.2 to 1.5. One new feature is themes. I may go through a couple different themes before I settle one, though I may also hack on Neuron, the theme I’m currently using, a bit. Overall, I like it, but there are a couple things missing from the old template I used to use. If I end up doing that, I’ll release all my code changes in accordance with the GPL, of course. Unfortunately, the old theme I was using, Silver is the New Black, doesn’t appear to have been ported from a template to a them, yet.

In the meantime, I need to port over all my anti-spam comment hacks, since they have worked so well for me. I’ve had no spam comments in the six months or so since I enabled them. Before that, I was getting about 100 spam comments a day.

As for WordPress 1.5, there’s a lot to like besides the new themes feature. The Dashboard tab is interesting, and the rest of the tabs are better organized. It looks like there is also a new feature for publishing standalone pages to your website, in addition to blog posts. That will make it easier for me to use WordPress to manage my entire site. More later when it’s not nearly 2 a.m.

Trustic, the maker of the fantastic Bloglines service, has been acquired by AskJeeves. [Official press release] After trying out several different syndication feed readers, I settled on Bloglines many months (a year or more, even?) ago. While Bloglines offers much more than just a feed reader, I highly recommend Bloglines even if just for that.

The Bloglines news reader is great for me, since I read my news feeds from several different computers. By keeping tracking of everything through an online service, I don’t have to manually synchronize what I have or haven’t read. They also offer a lot of great tools for developers and blog owners, such as a button generator to make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog feed. While there’s no magic here, it saved me a couple of minutes, and every minute counts. The button below will subscribe you to the Atom feed for my blog:

And the next button subscribes you to the RSS2 version of my blog feed. Pick your poison, or neither.

Sam Ruby has already posted a simple patch to MoinMoin that implements Google’s proposal for a new link type for the rel attribute for the HTML anchor tag. The HTML specification supports the definition of new link types, as long as the author implements a profile. Google has proposed a “nofollow” link type, which will instruct the googlebot website crawler not to follow links with that link type.

The reason for the new link type is that spammers are taking wanton advantage of weblogs, wikis, and other types of websites that allow anyone to post text that either includes embedded HTML or is converted to HTML. While there is obviously some value to the spammers in spreading their message via simple text form (otherwise, why would they send out all those emails), the primary value is in creating inbound links to their porn, pharmacy, whatever sites. Search engines crawl the links on the blogs and wikis back to the spammers’s sites. Since many search engines, and especially Google’s, use the number of inbound links to assign a rank to a web page in relation to certain keywords, the spammers views weblogs and wikis as fertile ground for boosting their search engine rankings. Most people don’t go past the first couple of pages of search results, so it can make a huge difference for a spammer if they can make it to near the top of the search results for commonly searched on keywords.

I’ve held off on linking from this blog to information on my Wiki out of fear that spammers will find my wiki and attack it. Though applying Sam’s patch to my wiki certainly won’t dissuade a spammer’s robot from attacking it, at least they will get less value out of it. And that has to count for something.

Sam Ruby: Adding rel=”nofollow” to MoinMoin

If it’s not one kind of spam, it’s another. A mouth breather recently figured out to spam WordPress-powered blogs via the trackback mechanism. The first spam trackback I got was a bunch of pseudo-random letters. The next ten or so were nasty porn spam. I had to temporarily rename the trackback script to stop the vermin.

If you don’t care about trackback, the easiest way to stop the spam is to delete wp-trackback.php or to rename it. Alternatively, you can moderate trackbacks using a hack posted at WordPress.org.

If I start getting a lot of moderation emails, though, I’m going to hack the scripts using the same technique that allows comments to work with a script file with a non-default name. So far, that technique has worked perfectly for me with respect to preventing spam comments.

Update: Perhaps I did something wrong, because trackbacks aren’t being moderated. So, I’ve reverted to disabling trackbacks all together. Of course, since I got 115 spam trackbacks in less than 24 hours, moderation wouldn’t have been a great solution, either.

WordPress 1.2.2 was released in mid-December and includes a couple of important PHP-related security fixes, so everyone should upgrade, especially with the santy worm going around.

I upgraded tonight, and it was a pretty easy process:

Download and Prep New Version

1. While connected to the root dir of the website via ssh, download the newest version $ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
2. Make a temp dir in the wombatnation.com directory $ mkdir t
3. Move tarball there $ mv latest.tar.gz t
4. Unzip it $ tar xzf t/latest.tar.gz
5. Move it back to root dir with different name than original install $ mv t/wordpress wpnew

Now, I have a pristine version of WordPress 1.2.2 in the wpnew directory.

Backups

1. Use standard instructions to backup database
2. Backup files. In root directory of website $ tar czf wordpress_backup_20050101.tgz wordpress
3. FTP the backup file to an off-site location
4. Make a copy of the wordpress directory, preserving file attributes $ cp -Rp wordpress wp2

Now, I have an exact copy of my current install. While I could always restore it from the backup file, diskspace is cheap and I like to have an easy-to-access copy while doing upgrades and migrations. Once the new version seems to be up and running, it’s easy enough to remove this directory.

Copy Customized Files

1. Copy .htaccess, wp-config.php, wp-layout.css from wordpress dir to wpnew
2. Copy comments related files $ cp wordpress/wp-comment* wpnew
3. The file wp-comments-post.php was changed for the WP 1.2.2 release. Since I had previously renamed this file in order to ward off spam comments, I had to redo that again. I’ve posted the details elsewhere.

I verified that the admin interface worked via accessing the files in the wpnew directory, and then switched in the new directory for the old one. This approach allowed me to keep my blog available for virtually the entire switchover.

1. $ mv wordpress wpold
2. $ mv wpnew wordpress

Obviously, the wpold and wp2 directories can now be deleted.