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 April 2008, lunch time
It has been quite some time since I’ve written a plugin for textpattern. This plugin is quite simple; it will produce a list of the plugins you have installed in textpattern. To use the plugin, simply place the tag <txp:rsx_plugins_table /> in a form or page template. The plugin will produce a table, which you can style with CSS if you feel so inclined.
Download the plugin: rsx_plugins_table.txt. More information can be found at the Textpattern Forum thread for this plugin.
Update: I’ve added a new plugin that generates a definition list of your installed plugins instead of a table. This may be good for people who were trying to display the table in a very narrow space. I’m using this plugin right now on my about page. To use the plugin, simply place the tag <txp:rsx_plugins_list /> in a form or page template.
Download the plugin: rsx_plugins_list.txt
Update May 29th 2006: You can now decide to not show inactive plugins in the listing or table by using the show_inactive parameter.
Update Apr 6th 2008: You can now decide not to show the description field in the list or table by using the show_description parameter.
[3] Code
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
16 August 2007, mid-afternoon
I finally got around to fixing my ATOM and RSS feeds for my link posts. When I link to another site, the link you click in the feed will take you to the site, not here. I think this makes more sense. The ‘#’ at the end of the link description will take you to the post about the link on this site.
[4] Web Design
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
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
6 February 2007, late morning
I’m redirecting any hits to this site at www.funkaoshi.com to funkaoshi.com, dropping the superfluous www. I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, but just read an article on the topic, and it seemed as good a time as any.
[4] Web Design
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
29 January 2007, terribly early in the morning
When I bought Mint a year and change ago it was a decision I put a fair amount of thought into. When I noticed late last night that the software had been updated I upgraded almost right away, vaguely aware of what the new features would be. This isn’t a good way to buy anything, but I figured the new Mint would be at least as nice as the old one. The set of new features is fairly terse. I don’t think it’s worthwhile buying of upgrading software based solely on its immense feature list. You want to buy stuff that works well. It looks like the way Mint works has been improved upon a fair amount. A lot of things have been cleaned up nicely. There is a new feed reader pepper by Shaun that looks promising, though its installation is a bit more involved than that of normal peppers so I haven’t had a chance to give it a run. The way the panes in the interface stack is a big improvement over the old layout of the interface. I’ll have more to say after using the new Mint for a little while I suppose. Of all the software I’ve bought, Mint is probably the one I use the most — next to World of Warcraft I suppose.
[2] Web Design
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
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
29 October 2006, early morning
I’ve made a plugin to allow for front end editing.
Read the rest of this post. ( words)
[16] Code
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
23 March 2006, early evening
While upgrading to the latest version of Textpattern, I decided to clean up the way I implemented my Link-Log. The goal was to minimize the number of hacks needed to get things working. This article should explain what I have done, and should be as terse as possible.
Read the rest of this post. ( words)
[1] Web Design | Code
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
10 January 2006, mid-morning
I am back from Tokyo, and, since you are reading this, back online.
[1] Life | Weblogs
15 November 2005, late evening
I’ve written a simple plugin to generate the meta information used by the google bot to decide whether to index a page or not. If the page generated is an individual article page, then the plugin will generate:<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">; if the page generated is anything else, the plugin generates: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">.
Scribbling.net has a couple good articles on this which are worth checking out: Noindex and Help the Googlebot understand your web site
Download the plugin: rsx_search_engine_meta.txt
Update Nov 14th 2005: The plugin has been updated so it works correctly in TXP 4.0.2.
[1] Code
20 October 2005, early morning
I’ve changed the way my comments are displayed—again. Let me know of any visual glitches. the comments should display like they have been thus far, except the comments are now surrounded by a faint orange border, and all have an even fainter orange back ground. I think this is actually how they looked the very first time I changed things, only the backgrounds were brighter then. I plan to have my comments display differently again, once I get around to figuring out how to do so in Textpattern. If you hate the new scheme, or see any visual glitches, please leave a comment.
[3] Web Design
6 October 2005, mid-morning
I have ‘fixed’ the way my link log entries display slightly. The final hash mark (the permanent link to the entry) should never appear alone on a line anymore. This was done by using non-breaking spaces carefully. A non-breaking space (NBSP) is a space that should not produce an automatic line break following its position. For example, if you didn’t want the number 10 000 to be displayed with the 10 on one line and the 000 on another, you would separate the two components with a non-breaking space. In HTML, this usage is sometimes forgotten, as most people use non-breaking spaces to simply produce more than one consecutive space between two words. In HTML, consecutive white-space is stripped, so, if you really do want two spaces after a sentence, for example, you would need to use two non-breaking spaces. The character code for a non-breaking space is . Use it wisely.
Web Design
5 October 2005, late at night
Victor: Hey Ram, did you censor my previously light hearted comment on grenades?
Yes. I also erased three comments from Sunny and Ryan because they were not on topic. I do that sometimes so that there isn’t a lot of noise in the comments. It’s nothing personal. I just thought your comment, following the quote from the story I linked to, didn’t fit. I thought it was too light hearted.
I don’t erase comments often, so I don’t have a real system for saying they are gone, or explaining why. I think I’ve only erased comments here because I thought they were off-topic, or were mean-spirited. (Your comment was off-topic, as were the comments by Ryan and Sunny in another thread here.) Usually if I edit a comment, I will leave a note at the bottom saying what I have changed.
I don’t erase stuff I don’t agree with here. (Need proof? Sunny is the second most frequent commenter here! :) If I’ve removed a comment, it is almost always because I think it takes away from whatever I posted here, or whatever other people have posted in the comments.
Update: Remember Big Brother is still watching. So no crap comments God damn it — unless they are my own.
[11] Weblogs
18 September 2005, late afternoon
As I mentioned in passing a few days back, I spent some of my hard earned money on the web site statistics application Mint. I hate buying software—a lot. Paying money for a bunch of PHP pages was even harder for me to do, but I am glad I did it.
Read the rest of this post. ( words)
[11] Weblogs | Technology