DigitalHobbit

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been blogging much lately. I am hoping to change this and start posting more regularly again. In the mean time, I have adopted Twitter, so please feel free to follow my Twitter stream.

I decided to take my recent comment / trackback spam issues as an opportunity to upgrade Wordpress from 1.5 to the latest version (2.02) and try the new Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin that is included in the release.

Comments are re-enabled for now. Let’s see how this goes… Either way, the upgrade was worth it. The WordPress 2.02 admin interface looks a lot more modern and polished, and I look forward to exploring some of the new themes and plugins.

Update: So far so good. Akismet already caught over 200 spam comments / trackbacks in the 11 hours since I installed it…

The Typo Theme Contest ended on 11/28, and the final results were posted two days ago. I didn’t win anything, but my humble contribution “opyT” admittedly pales in light of the many awesome themes that were submitted by others.

Most importantly, over 120 Typo themes resulted from this competition! The themes are very diverse, and everybody who is interested in hosting a Typo blog should be able to find at least a couple themes to their liking.

I am still happily running on Wordpress and not in a rush to abandon it, although I am definitely intrigued by Typo. It has come a long way and is now a very capable blog engine. If you are in the market for a new blog engine and have a Rails capable webhost, I strongly encourage you to check it out.

I should also mention that Geoffrey Grosenbach (who also hosts the official Ruby on Rails Podcast), is going to continue maintaining the Typo Theme Contest blog. Although now that there are 120 themes spread across 14 pages of the blog, I hope that somebody writes a Typo theme switcher plugin, or at least a webpage that lists all known plugins on a single page and links to a live preview of the theme, similar to what Alex King did for the Wordpress Theme Competition earlier this year.

The Rails based Typo blog engine has been gaining a lot of traction lately, and I’m seriously considering switching from WordPress. Don’t get me wrong – I love WordPress. It is a very solid and full featured blog engine that has never let me down. But I can’t deny that there’s a certain attraction to running a Rails based blog. I might even want to fiddle with the blog engine itself as an opportunity to get more up to speed on Rails.

Anyway, I decided to take the Typo Theme Contest that is currently in progress as an opportunity to play a bit with Typo and check out its theming capabilities. I’m impressed with the quality of the themes that have been submitted so far. If you are interested in a simple but colorful theme that gets by without using any images at all, you may want to check out my own submission to the contest: opyT.

It is based on the Scribbish theme, which has a very clean layout and has the CSS broken into several files. This makes it a lot easier to find the rules that are relevant for the aspect of the theme you are currently modifying. If you are planning on building your own Typo theme, I recommend you base this on Scribbish rather than the default Azure theme.

Google has just launched another beta service: Google Blog Search. It looks pretty good already, and for example searching for relevant phrases brought up the expected postings from my blog. There is no way to explicitly submit a blog to Google, and the key to getting your blog listed is to submit it to relevant blog lists, which is most easily done by pinging a service such as Ping-o-Matic. If you’re using a nice blogging tool like WordPress, it should automatically take care of this for you.

Somebody has written up a nice comparison between Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse, Technorati, and Ice Rocket. While Google still appears to be playing catch up in a few minor areas, they already do what they do best: provide lightning fast access to relevant search results.

Google Adsense seems to be very sensitive to certain content. I have only posted two entries about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (this one and this one), and currently the main page displays these two posts among various others about topics such as iPod, podcasting, Ruby, Java, Cafepress, Spreadshirt, Xbox, etc. Still, as of the time of this writing the Google banner exclusively contains ads for websites on religion or spaghetti recipes.

I shudder to think that I might actually be inadvertently promoting religion via the ads displayed on my blog. Those spaghetti recipes might come in handy, though.

Weblog Tools Collection is organizing a WordPress Plugin and Mod Competition. The competion will start on April 15 and run for two months.

If the participation is anything like the recent WordPress Themes Competition, we can be sure to see some excellent plugins coming our way.

I moved the blog from the “/blog” context to the webroot (http://www.digitalhobbit.com). Old links should still work. Please leave me a comment in case you run into any issues.

I just upgraded my blog from WordPress 1.2 to 1.5. As expected, the actual upgrade was very smooth, and it really didn’t take longer than a few minutes.

In the next few days, I’ll need to play with WordPress’s new theme mechanism to customize the design of my blog. I tried a bunch of themes (there are a lot of 1.5-compatible themes already, many of them very nice), but none of them were usable without at least a little bit of tweaking (for example to insert my logo at the right place, customize colors to match, etc.).

So for now, I’m sticking with the default design (which is quite elegant but looks like about 100,000 other blogs out there…).

While I’ve been pretty successful in suppressing comment spam, I still seem to have some trouble with trackback spam. I believe there are some decent WordPress solutions out there now, but I haven’t really had a chance to play with them.

In the mean time, I decided to start filtering out all comments that contain the word Texas, as I’ve been getting a lot of spam for Texas Poker and Texas Hold’em, and for some reason Wordpress (at least my version) seems to be unable to recognize the word hold’em as a spam word… If you’re from Texas or need to comment on Texas for one reason or another, I apologize in advance.

Lately I’ve been bombarded with comment spam (free online poker anyone?).

I have expanded the list of keywords that flag a comment as potential spam, thus requiring manual admin approval before it is posted. This is still annoying, though, as I have to disapprove the spam every time it is posted. Therefore, I have implemented a simple but hopefully effective automatic anti-comment-spam solution based on Elliott Back’s Spam Stopgap Extreme. The only downside is that it requires Javascript to be enabled in order to post comments. If for some reason you are unable to post a comment, please email me at digitalhobbit AT digitalhobbit DOT com.

JustBlogIt is a nice little Firefox extension (also works with Mozilla) that adds a right-click menu entry to easily add a blog entry for the current page. The unique thing about it is that it also supports many web based news aggregators, such as Bloglines. You simply have to right-click on the entry you wish to blog about, and JustBlogIt will automatically insert the correct title and link in the blog form. This works surprisingly well. Nice!

Here is a very nice collection of weblog and RSS submission sites.

Mark just published a Wiki plugin for WordPress on his Weblog Tools Collection.

This is great news, and I can’t wait to install it on my blog. I am a big fan of Wiki servers as collaboration tools and for simple knowledge management tasks, and even though the collaboration aspect would not really apply in case of my own Wiki as I would probably be the only one posting to it, it should be a convenient mechanism for me to publish non-blog content.

Nice job!

Several blogs have reported that Amazon apparently added a new beta feature called Plog, which they define as a personal blog on their website. It sounds like a plog is mostly a different and slightly more up-to-date way of presenting recommendations to the user. On their website they list a few of the more popular blogs as examples, but to be honest I don’t see what their plog feature has to do with blogs. It seems to me like they are just trying to capitalize on the popularity of the blog scene.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the blog link on my Amazon front page. It seems like this is only displayed to a limited set of users. Too bad since I would have been curious about this, but then again it doesn’t sound like I’m missing too much.

As seen here, here, and here.

Argh… After getting back from a late night shopping trip to IKEA, I tried to hit Bloglines as usual in order to catch up on the blogs that I’m reading, only to find that the site is down for a few hours (undergoing plumbing, as they put it). This made me realize how much I already depend on this site (or at least got used to it), after only having used it for about 1-2 weeks.

I have to say that Bloglines really provides a great service. By using a server-side aggregator rather than a client-side one (such as one of the Mozilla plugins for this purpose), I can read my blogs both at home and at work without getting out of sync. Bloglines allows blogs to be categorized, which is another nice feature.

In theory, it can also be used to manage blogrolls, although I found this feature somewhat lacking. For example, there are a fair amount of blogs that I’m reading, but I don’t necessarily want to list all of these on my blog website. While it is possible to mark a blog as private, which prevents it from being shared through Bloglines own interface (assuming sharing is enabled for your account), it will still get exported to OPML, which means that you need to manually edit the OPML data before importing it into your blog. Also, there does not appear to be a way to dynamically retrieve the OPML data for your blogroll using a URL, so after updating your blog links in Blogroll you need to manually export these to OPML and import them into your blog software.

I’ll probably end up looking at some other services that I haven’t tried yet (such as Blogrolling.com) for this purpose, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll stick with Bloglines for reading blogs, since it really dows an awesome job at this.