23 July 2008, terribly early in the morning
I’m getting much more comment spam on older posts recently. I’m trying out a new plugin that will flag posts as spam or for moderation based on keywords or the number of URLs in a post. Of course, blocking by keywords is kind of obnoxious, so I replaced the default keywords with strings of text that I could see showing up in the comment spam I’m getting, “[/link]” and “[/url]” for example. I’m pretty sure filtering out comments with those two keywords will actually get rid of all the spam I’ve been getting here recently. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes.
Update Aug 07: A couple weeks later and this strategy is working great.
Weblogs
6 February 2008, evening time
I’ve been posting photos to Flickr for the past little while. (Photos of note are this photograph of Carvill, T&T, and Shima at Spadina ) Despite saying i’m not happy with how Flickr presents things, I do have to admit it’s about a bajillion times easier to put a photo on Flickr than it is to make a post on We Must Abuse the Broadband. I have some ideas for what I want to do with the photoblog here, but they can wait. For now, Flickr wins.
[1] Weblogs | Photography
14 January 2008, lunch time
There are three things I really like about GoogleReader: all your unread entries appear on one page; when you scroll past an entry it is marked as read; your reading history — read vs. unread stories — is always up to date since the application is hosted online. Any feed reading application that doesn’t beat GoogleReader at these three things really isn’t worth using.
NetNewsWire is awesome. First off, it’s fast — oh so fast — and works incredibly well. It has the single page view that GoogleReader has, and it also can be set to mark stuff as read as you scroll past it. I have it set up so that clicking on links opens pages up background; pressing the right arrow will open the news item you are reading in the background as well. This way, when you are done reading your feeds you can switch to your web browser to look over the links you thought were most interesting. NetNewsWire is by far the best newsreader I’ve used. I like it a lot more than GoogleReader. Sadly, all is not well in the world. NetNewsWire’s biggest fault doesn’t lie with the program itself, but with the cruft it is forced to play with: Newsgator’s online service, and FeedDemon.
FeedDemon is a RSS newsreader for Windows. Like NetNewsWire it is owned by NewsGator, and the two programs can be kept in sync using Newsgator’s online service. As far as I can tell, FeedDemon is a pile of junk. It is slow — oh so damn slow. GoogleReader running inside Firefox works much better. Worse still, there seems to be no way to view all your unread feeds on one page — I’d even settle for an easy way to view each unread article one after another. Reading feeds in FeedDemon is a slow cumbersome process.
NewsGator’s online service is also incredibly lacking when compared to GoogleReader. In my opinion it works better then FeedDemon, but that isn’t saying much. You can view all your unread posts on a page, but unlike GoogleReader, it paginates them if there are too many unread items. (NetNewsWire also paginates your news items into multiple pages, but it will automatically switch to the next page when you get to the bottom of the current page.) NewsGator also doesn’t mark stories as read when you scroll past them: you can set it to mark everything as read when the news page loads up — this is how Bloglines used to work — or when you click a ‘mark all as read’ button. The site is slower than GoogleReader to boot.
NetNewsWire is so nice to use I’ve been putting up with FeedDemon and NewsGator for the past few days. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up.
Weblogs | Technology
7 January 2008, early morning
I’ve set up a simple page to post the photos I take with my iPhone while out and about. (These are the photos that I email off to Flickr.) To mix things up a bit I’m also pulling in the junk I write on Twitter, which I usually update via SMS. The page works by processing a feed I made using Yahoo pipes. Every half hour a ruby script grabs the feed and generates an HTML using Erubis, which looks to be a better implementation of ERB. This works well enough for now. The first thing I need to fix is having the script do nothing when there is nothing new in the feed. I would also only like to generate the delta between the old feed and the new feed, appending the new information to the old. Right now, old entries are going to disappear when they no longer appear in the feed, which is no good.
Weblogs
27 November 2007, early morning
I’m a week late for this site’s anniversary; November 20th 2003 is the day I consider to be the first day of funkaoshi.com. (I summed up the history of the site reasonably well the day it turned 1 year old.) This site has been online for 4 years and change now. That seems like a long time. The site hasn’t changed too much in those 4 years. I watch a lot less movies now then I used to, which sucks, but otherwise I think the site still has the same vibe. Lots of inane posts with me bitching about America mixed in. (I actually feel like I’ve toned down the bitching about America a lot, but that might just be in my head.) At times I feel like I should redo this layout, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.
[10] Weblogs
16 October 2007, lunch time
That page where I had links to blogs I read and what not is now gone. It was bith horribly out of date and, according to Mint, unused.
[3] Weblogs
2 August 2007, early morning
I started using del.icio.us links back in May 2004. At the time I didn’t post links to this site the way I do now, inline with larger blog entries such as this. Interesting things I found on the net would get their own little blog post, regardless of how long or short that post might be; I wasn’t fond of doing things this way. Shortly after I started using del.icio.us, I began posting the links from there on the links page here. The page was populated with my last 10 or 20 links on del.icio.us, in addition to the links that are currently there. I also wasn’t too happy with this scheme, since it forced people to browse to another page to check for new links. That solution was short lived. When I started posting links here inline with my posts, I also started cross-posting those links to del.icio.us. This worked seamlessly till August 9th 2006. By this time I had really stopped checking my del.icio.us links page to see it was being updated properly, so I didn’t notice things had stopped working till some time in December. del.icio.us had changed its API and I hadn’t noticed.
Recently Jody mentioned he wished I posted my links to del.icio.us. (He is a lot more creative with the way he uses del.icio.us than I am.) Up until this time, no one had really said anything about the loss of my links on del.icio.us. I had really only been cross-posting for the sake of doing so. It was a programming exercise and that’s about it. Yesterday, I sat down and tried to figure out what had changed between del.icio.us and my script. The details are short and boring, but it didn’t take too long to fix things. My links are now being cross-posted to del.icio.us again.
A side note on PHP, and languages that let you pull variables out your ass: declaring a variable before you use it is a good thing. For example, in Pascal I wouldn’t end up with a bug like $title = urlencode($tittle);, which left me wondering why $title is empty when you urlencode it. Maybe i’m just a sucker.
[1] Weblogs | Code
20 July 2007, early morning
John Gruber links to a post by Joel Spolsky on weblog comments, presumably because Spolsky’s take on the subject matches his own. The choice quote from the article according to Gruber is the following:
When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.
Now that’s a little fatalistic: if Spolsky ends up with a bunch of “noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish” whose fault is that? If you are too lazy to maintain your site, then yeah, I can see why turning comments off would be a great idea. But it’s a bit of a disrespect to assume your readership is too ignorant to post a thoughtful remark in your space.
My site is low traffic enough that it’s easy enough for me to trim comments I think are a waste of space. A busier site like Daring Fireball or Joel on Software would probably get a sea of comments, but even then there are all sorts of schemes one could put in place to make managing this sea easier — moderation and throttling are the first two ideas that come to my mind. John Gruber actually has a very simply means to allow a limited subset of his readership to comment on his site: he could make commenting an option only for paying members of his site. Turning off comments completely is of course easier, but to pretend that doing so improves the experience for yourself and your readers is disingenuous.
Until it is truly easy for true back-and-forth conversations to take place via disparate weblogs comments are the best way to go.
Of course, I don’t read Daring Fireball to hear what some schmuck on the Internet thinks of the latest thing to come out of Gruber’s head.
Weblogs
17 May 2007, early morning
Discussing the state of Textpattern is in vogue at the moment. Apparently Textpattern, which is the software I use to run this site, is in dire straights, and “the long term prognosis isn’t good.” It would seem that it lacks direction. The developers disagree on that point. This topic comes up on occasion in the Textpattern forum. People seem to want Textpattern to become Wordpress, but at the same time, don’t want to simply use Wordpress. Drew’s post on this topic is actually one of the better ones I’ve read, though I’m not sure I agree with his take on things.
Read the rest of this post. ( words)
[3] Weblogs
1 February 2007, terribly early in the morning
Carvill and I went to Banu for a late dinner last night. The restaurant is run by two sisters: one has long hair and wears black boots, the other has short hair and doesn’t wear black boots. They both sit down next to you when they take your orders, which gives the place a very casual vibe. It is easily my favourite kebab place in the city.
One of the sisters stumbled on my post about my first trip there, and left a comment. I didn’t say anything about it because, frankly, I had no idea they would even know what I’m talking about. Also, even if they did, I imagine we’d have a short and boring conversation about it:
“Hey, I’m Ram. You left a comment on my website.”
“Yes I did.”
“Cool…”
“Yeah…”
It is always strange when the real world and this virtual one overlap. I was of the opinion random people who stumble on the site don’t match my face to this website. You can figure it out easily enough, but it’s not so straightforward. There aren’t that many photos of me here. The last one was from September. I mean, when the site was profiled on BlogTO the picture that went with it was of Mezan and Patrick.
Carvill and I finished dinner, paid, put on our coats, and started to make our way to the door. As we were leaving, the short haired sister said, “Thanks for coming Ram, have a good night.”
[2] Life | Weblogs
31 January 2007, early morning
Here are instructions for using Bird Feeder with Textpattern 4.0.4. This isn’t an ideal solution, as it involves modifying atom.php and rss.php. C’est La Vie.
Read the rest of this post. ( words)
[3] Weblogs
4 January 2007, early morning
Yesterday I was so frustrated with how slow the site felt I emailed Dreamhost. Over the last few days I noticed it was taking upwards of 6 seconds to get anything form the database. If we were living in the 60s I think I could let that slide, but it’s 2006: nothing you do on the internet should take 6 seconds. Dreamhost responded to my email very quickly. I got a reply to my email from a fellow called Justin who sounds like he is a real person. They moved my database to a new server, which looks to have fixed everything. I can’t stress how much of an improvement Dreamhost’s customer service is over 1&1s. I mean, the fact you don’t have to seriously dig to find their support contact form already made them winners in my book even if they ignored my email.
Weblogs
13 December 2006, mid-morning
Is it just me, or is this site particularly slow now? I wonder if Dreamhost just isn’t as fast as 1&1. I need to check out my Textpattern setup and see if I can improve on how quickly it generates pages. I hate waiting for this site to load.
[1] Weblogs
23 November 2006, late morning
Today, dd-wrt made the front page of digg: Turn your $60 router in to a $600 router, FOR FREE. There is nothing new or exciting about dd-wrt. It’s one of the oldest firmware updates for the Linksys WRT54G. (I linked to it in December of 2005, and it wasn’t new or exciting then either.)
This is a common problem with digg. Since everyone who uses the site is a twelve year old boy who has just discovered the Internet, stuff that isn’t new makes it to the front page fairly often. With this in mind, I present my second way to get on the front page of digg: write about stuff that has already been on the front page of digg. It makes sense if you think about it: people liked the story the first time, so of course they’ll like it the second time. And since digg users have memories a little worse than Goldfish, they’ll be happy to rediscover this gem of a news item you are providing them with.
As I cautioned before, use this knowledge for good, not evil.
If digg isn’t your thing, you may recall I’ve also written about how to get on the front page of Reddit.
Weblogs
16 November 2006, early evening
If you are seeing this, it means the DNS server you are using has updated to point to my space at dreamhost. Right now, this blog is all that works. My photoblog and shima’s site are both down. Sucks I know. Lets see how long it takes to get them back up.
update: Well, now seems as good a time as any to stop using Movable Type. I imported all of Shima’s stuff in to Textpattern. Need to do the layout next. We Must Abuse the Broadband will be next.
update: Shima’s site is sort of back up, but running of Textpattern. My photoblog is still down. I’m not sure what to do about it.
update: Krishna’s blog is back up.
update: The photoblog is back up, though without MT in the back-end.
Weblogs
10 October 2006, mid-afternoon
I was reading my RSS feeds in Bloglines today when I saw my name in big letters in the Daring Fireball feed. “Wow,” I though, “I wonder what I did to get written about in Daring Fireball.” I read the title more closely: Reminder for Ramanan Sivaranjan: Daring Fireball membership expires on October 26. It’s been a whole year since I bought my Daring Fireball membership. He was the second blogger I decided to support, the first was Jason Kottke. I think Kottke’s Micropatron idea was a failed experiment; I didn’t really enjoy the feel of the site the whole year he was reader supported. I’d say kottke.org has a much warmer feel since Jason added ads and stopped with this patronage business—which, if you think about it, seems kind of backwards. Not that I regret donating to his cause, I liked the whole idea of quiting work to blog. Gruber’s site on the other hand has only gotten better since he started doing it full time, supported by ads and his readers. I don’t regret the money I coughed up last year, and i’ll most definitely renew my membership again this year; I steal so many links from Daring Fireball its nice to have them show up in Bloglines.
[1] Weblogs
15 July 2006, the wee hours
Moveable Type is free again. Free as in beer that is.
We also continue to make our personal license for Movable Type even more open: The personal version of Movable Type is now completely free, and supports as many blogs and authors as you want. Of course, we continue to offer paid support as an option for personal blogs, along with services such as professional installation
You may recall some time ago, everyone with a blog went totally ape shit when SixApart declared they wanted to make some money off the product they built and supported all by themselves. Shocking, I know. There is nothing people love to do more than freak out on the Internet. I suspect this announcement won’t generate the same sort of feedback, either in volume or in ferocity, as the last big announcement.
Weblogs
14 July 2006, early morning
I’ve gotten 4 pieces of comment spam at this site in the last 24 hours. To some of you, that may not sound like much, but it’s actually a lo considering I’ve managed to go almost 3 years with probably only a handful of spam comments making it onto my pages. I hope this isn’t a harbinger of crappier times to come.
[8] Weblogs
10 March 2006, early afternoon
Reddit is a cool site, but is not without its problems. Since I took time out of my busy day to make fun of Digg a little while ago, I feel it is only fair to make fun of Reddit as well.
Reddit works reasonably well, but as with Digg, could use a human hand to help keep its front-page clean. The quickest ways to get a link you post to the front-page of Reddit are:
- Link to an article about Reddit (or another Y Combinator site).
- Write about how great LISP is.
- Link to an article by Joel Spolsky, it doens’t matter how old the article is.
- Link to an article by Steve Yegge, it doesn’t matter how old
- Link to an article by Paul Graham, it doesn’t matter how old
These are some sure fire ways to see your link on the front page of Reddit. Why would you care if your link makes it there? Why for all the Karma of course. Why would you want to earn Karma? I really don’t know, but the fact that your Karma is visible to everyone makes you want to earn it; trust me, it does. This is yet another problem with Reddit. I am certain people post simply to try and earn Karma. (This is probably why their are so many duplicate stories, and so many old stories on the site.)
Comments, recently added to Reddit, are for the most part better than those found on Digg, but I suspect this is solely because it has a smaller user-base. There is currently no way to filter them as far as I can tell. As more users start using Reddit, I imagine the quality of the comment will decline. (They are already pretty lame for the most part, but there are so few of them this is OK.)
The hot page is a bit of a mess to read; the page changes throughout the course of the day, so if you check back, you will find a mix of links you saw earlier in the day and new links, all mixed together. (If you made it a point to rate all the links you saw this wouldn’t be the case, you could identify new links on the page as those without a highlighted arrow.) The recommended links page seems to suffer from this problem as well.
All of this said, I still like Reddit. For the most part it is a good source of interesting links.
Weblogs | Technology
28 February 2006, late evening
I’ve finally fixed the feed auto-discovery links on this site, and in doing so made a new plugin. This plugin will generate the auto-discovery links that you place in the head section of your HTML document. These are what feed-readers use to find the feeds available at your site. This plugin lets you specify whether you want the feeds to be “smart” (aware of what section and category they are in) or not. You can download the plugin here.
This plugin will produce audo-discovery feed links. There are two parameters:
smart – this can equal 1 or 0. If it is 1, then the feed links will be section and category aware.flavour – this can equal ‘rss’ or ‘atom’. This is how you set what sort of feed link to produce.
Also, if you find my feeds are all really broken, please let me know.
Download the plugin: rsx_feed_auto_discovery_link-0.1.txt
Code | Weblogs
25 February 2006, late at night
I finally upgraded to the latest version of Textpattern, 4.0.3. (I remember when I used to be so cutting edge when it came to all things Textpattern.) If you see anything that seems wrong on the site please post here.
Read the rest of this post. ( words)
[13] Web Design | Weblogs
24 February 2006, the wee hours
Digg is a technology website, similar to Slashdot, but with really dreadful comments—and compared to Slashdot that’s saying a lot. That said, Digg is usually on the ball when it comes to discovering interesting stuff on the internet.
One easy way to get on Digg’s front-page is to write a list of the top ten Mac applications no one should go without. It doesn’t matter how many such lists have been posted to Digg in the past week, month, or year, your list will shoot up to the front page. It might take a little while, but it will happen.
Use this knowledge for good, not for evil.
Weblogs
10 January 2006, mid-morning
I am back from Tokyo, and, since you are reading this, back online.
[1] Life | Weblogs
12 December 2005, mid-morning
I will write a proper post about the Referrer Filter Pepper shortly. Till then, briefly, the Referrer Filter Pepper is a plugin for the web statistics package Mint. This plugin is a more generic version of the Google Images Pepper I wrote for Mint 1.14.
Download the referrer filter pepper: funkaoshi-referrer-filter-pepper.zip
View the forum topic in the Mint Forum: [New Pepper] Referrer Filter
Code | Weblogs
22 November 2005, late evening
I missed this site’s anniversary by a day. A Funkaoshi Production has been online for 2 years now. Not much has changed on the site in that time. I still write about the inane details of my life. I still watch a lot of movies. I still bitch about America. I imagine these things will be standard fair for the upcoming year as well. Hope you guys are still enjoying things here.
[2] Weblogs | Life