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  • OpenID, again

    A new beta of the OpenID plugin for Movable Type came out recently, so I thought I’d see if it would work better than the version I had been trying. After one try it was working just dandy. Even had someone else try commenting with it to make sure it worked (thanks again!).

    For those of you who haven’t heard of OpenID, it is something that was come up by the LJ folks at Six Apart. It lets people who have accounts on systems with OpenID post to remote blogs. I’d actually like to see the plugin I use have a list of trusted remote systems, since it really isn’t an authentication system. I hope to post a bit more on this in the near future.

    So just follow the instructions if you want to post here and not sign up for TypeKey. As usual, if it is abused, I’ll just turn it off.

  • Ads on Flickr

    AdRants has an post about people being upset about ads on Flickr. People seem to be blaming Yahoo! for this practice.

    With Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr, it didn’t take too long for Yahoo text ads to begin appearing next to Flickr member’s pictures. Unlike Google AdWords, Yahoo text ads, at least on Flickr, appear on personal Flickr pages whether or not the member wants them. Granted, Flickr provides the service for free which negates a non-paying Flickr member’s ability to completely control what appears on their photo pages but one Flickr user, tanais, doesn’t like the practice, commenting on an ad placement next to an image of, we assume, his dog, “I do not like my pictures being used to advertise a specific breeder (they may be excellent they may be terrible – that’s not the point)… so I shall sit down and think about how best to AdBust this.” [AdRants]

    IMHO the people complaining are idiots. I’ve been a user for ages, and Flickr has always had ads for free accounts. It’s been one of the big selling points for their Pro accounts. I’m not a fan of advertising, but you can’t expect to get something for nothing.

    Flickr is one of the few web sites that I think does get it right. And my Pro account has been a very good deal. If it’s that much of a big deal pay for the service.

  • Blog Stuff

    People have been pestering me to get crossposting working again so that my blog posts show up over on LJ. I finally got it working this morning after quite a bit of fiddling. I’m using the ljcrosspost plugin for Movable Type. It works fairly well, but took some fiddling to get it to work right. I should email the author and let him know the issues I was having.

    Next step is to get OpenID working so that people over on LJ can log into my blog for comments using their LJ info.

    One big gripe I have about MT plugins these days is that not enough of them work with dynamic pages. I’ve got 4000+ entries and rebuilding it all just for a new plugin really sucks (and takes forever).

  • Growing

    From #!/usr/bin/girl, more flash game fun. Remember Grow? Remember Grow RPG? Well now it is an all new Grow, this time it’s a cube!

    Flash Fun: GrowCube
    Here’s a little fun for your Monday: GrowCube. I like to have something to distract me from the beginning of the week. [via #!/usr/bin/girl]

    I’ve almost got it figured out!

    Picture 1

  • Wiki Madness

    Last night, in a fit of boredom, I deleted my wiki. Of course as soon as I had done it I wanted to find some new wiki software to run. I’ve played with tikiwiki and Moin Moin. Both were decent (and I’m leaning towards Moin Moin) but I figured I’d do the lazyweb thing and see if anyone out there had any recommendations. I think I’m looking for small and lightweight with access control, that has a fairly simple interface.

    On another note, I was trying to edit something over on Wikipedia the other day and discovered that some control key commands were intercepted by the site. Kinda cool, but when editing a text field in Safari you can use emacs controls for moving around and editing. Works great till you do ^e and suddenly find yourself moved to another page because it’s some wiki command. So the question is this. Anyone know how to turn it off? I tried searching around the Wikipedia site, but nothing jumped out at me.

  • More on Feedster (and why I love the web)

    The other day I posted about issues with spam in the search results I was getting at Feedster. Within hours there was not only a post on Scott Johnson’s blog, but I got a nice message from him about how to remove blogspot results from my NetNewsWire searches there. I love to see companies being this on the ball. Especially a place like Feedster. I wasn’t really looking for a solution right that second. I more was commenting how spammers seem to be doing their best to devalue a lot of the usefulness of the web.

    So here’s a quick thanks for the help!

  • Blogger + Feedster + Spammers = Useless

    I use NetNewsWire for reading RSS feeds. One of the great features up till recently has been the ability to have it search places like Feedster and have the results show up as a feed. In the recent past my regular search for anything to do with Pulmonary Fibrosis has achieved nothing more than hugely long posts of spam (click and see). Since the 15th there have been around 27 hits on that search, only ONE of them being an actual post by someone. And all the offending posts have been at blogger.

    I think Blogger needs to do something about this. Have a better way of detecting automated blog signups or something. Currently it has drastically reduced the usefulness of things like Feedster for me. At least Feedster does have the ability to filter out responses from some urls. I just need to see if I can get NNW to support doing that.

  • Lazy Spammers

    Phil Ringnalda does some tests to see if spammers are smart enough to grab email addresses that have been escaped as numeric character references. I was surprised to find that spammers weren’t going this little extra mile.

    Spammers are lazy<

    Last July, wanting to prove that simplistic protection of email links by just escaping them as numeric character references (&#097;&#064;&#098;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109; to produce a@b.com) was a lousy idea — and how could it not be? even without any economic incentive, it wouldn’t take me long to write the code needed to harvest them just fine — I put an encoded SpamMotel address in my sidebar, along with a fresh address in the unprotected part of my accessibly spamproofed address. I figured it wouldn’t take long before the encoded address was getting just as spammed as the other.

    This morning, when I got my third actual email through the encoded one (I guess the “Harvester Test” headline wasn’t quite clear enough), I finally remembered to turn it off and take it out. The final tally, for the encoded address: 46 spams, 3 actual emails; for the unencoded address: 2632 spams. Apparently, if you don’t have time to really harden an address, it’s worth taking the time to at least convert it to NCRs. Lazy spammers. [via phil ringnalda dot com]

    I’ve argued for ages that just escaping email addresses like this was an example of security through obscurity. Of course I’m sure spammers everywhere will now be looking to change this.

  • Why Popcap.com Sucks Now

    The other day #!/usr/bin/girl posted about Bejeweled 2 over at Popcap.com. Having liked the original I hopped on over and tried to play. I click on the ‘Click to Play’ link and the familiar Popcap game window pops up with the instructions and no game. I hit reload a few times with the same result. I closed out the window and clicked on Bookworm, then original Bejeweled to see if they worked. Both played just fine (and wasted a good bit of my time).

    So I fired off an email to their customer support asking for help. This morning I got back the following response.

    Which Internet Browser are you using? Zuma, Insanaquarium, Bejeweled 2, and Astropop will only work in Internet Explorer on a Windows machine because they use Active X. ActiveX is a code that defines MicrosoftÂ’s interaction between web servers, clients, add-ins and Microsoft Office applications. ActiveX is MicrosoftÂ’s answer to Java technology from Sun Microsystems.

    So, if you’re a Popcap fan, forget running any new games from them for the moment. They seem to have ditched any support for other browsers/oses. The thing I find more annoying is that Insanaquarium used to run just fine on OS X, so I’m not quite sure when they made the switch. Bastards.

    And yes, I know IE is still the most popular browser out there (Though it sounds like those numbers are being slowly chipped away at by things like Firefox). But the other thing that irks me is that I think these games are written in Java, at least that is what their web site indicates. Anyone know for sure? Oh yes, and Popcap support? ActiveX is not M$’s answer to Java. C# maybe, but not ActiveX.

  • Another Cool Flickr Thing

    Here’s another cool Flickr thing, a calendar showing when you’ve posted pictures in the last five weeks.:

    Flickr Calendar

    Each day is a link that brings you a page with pictures for that day. Nothing real fancy, but it does look pretty cool I think. You can also view calendars by month.