“John” is Back
After a bit of a hiatus while he is getting settled into Austin, “John” is back in the saddle and posting again. It sounds like his therapy is similar to mine – when you aren't sure who to talk to, tell the world – through your blog.
Here's to your new start and many happy postings.
Is there a Santa Claus?? Let's ask FedEx
Would make it out of Michigan? Would it make it all the way? Who would sign for it if I requested a delivery signature? Inquiring minds want to know! [ Story by David McCreery ]
To read the whole story, click here.
Heh. Now Here's A Way to Fight Back Against Spammers.
Try installing SugarPlum, a spam “honey pot” which gives Spammers tons and tons of bad addresses to send to.
Sugarplum — spam poison
What is Sugarplum?
Does this answer your question?
Sugarplum is an automated spam-poisoner. Its purpose is to feed realistic and enticing, but totally useless or hazardous data to wandering address harvesters such as EmailSiphon, Cherry Picker, etc. The idea is to so contaminate spammers' databases as to require that they be discarded, or at least that all data retrieved from your site (including actual email addresses) be removed.
Sugarplum employs a combination of Apache's mod_rewrite URL rewriting rules and perl code. It combines several anti-spambot tactics, includling fictitious (but RFC822-compliant) email address poisoning, injection with the addresses of known spammers (let them all spam each other), deterministic output, and “teergrube” spamtrap addressing.
Sugarplum tries to be very difficult to detect automatically, leaving no signature characteristics in its output, and may be grafted in at any point in a webserver's document tree, even passing itself off as a static HTML file. It can optionally operate deterministically, producing the same output on many requests of the same URL, making it difficult to detect by comparison of multiple HTTP requests.
Sugarplum is free software, distributed under terms of the GPL. [_Go_]
I just found this, phpMailer, which seems quite good. One of those fortuitious discoveries where you download something else, look at the code and you just see it and it works. I'm starting to integrate it into a project right now. [_Go_]
Moving Movable Type to Drupal.
Moving Movable Type to Drupal
Well anyone who's into blogging and more than a bit geeky would probably like this one. It's a description of how one user moved from Movable Type to Drupal, step by step. Nicely done !
Why migrate
I migrated my MT blog to Drupal. It wasn't easy to make this decision, because I became used to the ease of use that came with MT in terms of setting up, administering, and blogging. I simply found that MT was lacking in some of the features and scalability I need, particularly with regard to classification and news feed aggregation. Since I've been using Drupal for the past year and extolling its features, I decided to eat my own dog food and use Drupal for my personal site. This way I can contribute to its development because I'll be looking at it more from the back side.
Migrating was not exactly for the PHP/MySQL novice — which I consider myself — so I wanted to document my experience for others who might consider the same move. I encourage anyone who decides to go with Drupal to please consider becoming part of the development list and get involved with helping evolve the application. Drupal is a very programmer-centric application at the movement, catered to technical people, but if non-technical people or people who demmand ease of use and usbility begin to add their voice to the development list, perhaps the administration experience will improve. I hope to throw some time into making these types of contributions in the future.
So here's how I migrated (this is being updated presently): [_Go_]
It's definitely worth reading. And I've added his blog to my favorites so I make sure to follow it. His comments about moving to Drupal for the news aggregator are on point (here's a tutorial on it I wrote). Beyond the news aggregator, an additional useful tool is that the blogroll is dynamic and shows you how recently the blog was updated. That's often more than enough to tell you to read it.
His points about Drupal becoming more usable are definitely on point — but they are a very big concern of the project and we're pushing to get them addressed. This brings up a very good point about open source: we tend to like to make people happy. Just like anyone else and the “squeaky wheel gets the grease”. If people start complaining about something (usability) then it tends to get addressed — particularly if the project is user driven as is Drupal. Our user base to this point has been more technical and that's affected what we work on. Now its getting more end userish and that will be reflected. I've talked with the one of the project leaders on this and he definitely gets it.
Merry Christmas to me!!
I just ran down to our local Time Warner Cable office to pick up my Christmas present. (early, I know) I talked the wife into splurging on TWC's new digital video recorder model cable box. I have been wanting a Tivo/Replay for a few years now, but I'm too cheap to buy one. TWC is offering a joint digital cable box / divital video recorder for $10 a month. Yes, I realize that after a couple of years, I could have bought two of them, but hey, life is short, and the Simpsons moved up too early in the day to catch it.
I've spent the last couple of hours playing around and setting a few shows to record while we go play “Here, Take My Paycheck” at the mall tonight. That's ok though – I now know what Scoble was talking about. I'll just start watching my 8 o'clock shows tonight around midnight. Now I won't have to miss Sunday's viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
ok, enough fun — now back to work. I can watch tv anytime.
Slow day in Blog Land
It must be a slow day in the weblogging world. I actually made it into the Daily Top 100 for today. Will wonders never cease…?
PHP & Radio Userland – Can they Co-Exist?
OK, I've been searching for quite a bit on this one, and I can't find the answer, so I'm going to post it here and hope that somebody can shed some light on this topic.
Question: I want to be able to render my Radio weblog in PHP so I can embed PHP code into my Radio templates. A. Can this be done? B. How? “letme”
Thanks in Advance!!
Good Morning from Rainy Austin
I'm off to a good start today. Lots to do, but feeling good. iTunes is blaring in the background and the the checkmarks on “the list” are flowing. My car is borrowed out today so I'm stranded. Nothing to do but get things done. It's raining outside so no “Harley” distractions.
Today is going to be a good day. I won't settle for anything less.