blogging - 12.12.2003 - 19.1.2005

WordPress NoFollow Plugin

The WordPress NoFollow Plugin adds rel="nofollow" to links in comments to remove their Google ranking. While I personally find it a shame that links in comments are generally not followed, thus removing the useful opportunity for smaller blogs to promote their own through active discussion in other blogs. Okay, in the end it's not that bad, but somehow a small piece of the "one link washes the other" mentality of blogs is lost... A small handicap is that the author has directly linked the plugin and unfortunately his server executes the PHP directly. At the moment, you can't download it, you only get an empty HTML page.

The Temboz RSS aggregator

The Temboz RSS aggregator is a very nicely made aggregator in Python. It uses the Ultraliberal Feedparser for parsing and can import OPML. I find the interface nicely designed and the administration quite straightforward. And it has some nice features like the two-column layout and the fairly simple integrated filtering capability as well as quite useful feed list sorting options. I'm playing around with it a bit right now - even if that will probably reduce my motivation to write my own aggregator.

Candidate for the award of the most absurd WordPress plugin: a Code39 barcode generator. Well, maybe then people who print out websites can actually do something with it.

Planteopia - Knowledge Bending Magazine

The science bending magazine has put out a piece about weblogs - and a couple of bloggers provided input for it. The result was of course a total disaster - what else would you expect from a SAT.1 magazine? The reaction from Spreeblick to the nonsense is very amusing. And I can well understand the outrage from Schockwellenreiter.

Why Jörg didn't just do the whole thing for a fee in the first place, at least to get some positive result out of the nonsense, isn't entirely clear to me. Did he really expect that SAT.1 could produce anything meaningful on the topic of grassroots journalism? Factual falsification and manipulative editing are standard practice at such magazines - it's all about sensationalist garbage, it has nothing to do with real reporting or journalism.

And Planetopia itself? Well, unlike the tabloid press (whose escapades sometimes overflow with unintentional humor), the whole thing is so poorly done and the segments held so superficially that it doesn't even work as trashy entertainment...

Blogs - the new money machine?

A plugin I certainly won't install:

BlogMine enables content targeted ads in both feeds and web pages, simplifies and increases revenue generation for bloggers. The service provides a universal way to monetize all blog related content, regardless of whether it is published to the web or as an RSS feed.

:: t e k t o n i c a ::

mo:Blog is something I should take another look at after switching to WordPress, it could be even more interesting now. Especially since it should integrate better. Maybe I'll finally start moblogging before that trend becomes outdated ...

Update: So my initial experiments have been quite positive. What still bothers me is the fact that an HTTP timeout occurs at the end of an image upload. But if you browse through the menus a bit, you can actually find all the necessary settings. Somewhat spartan interface, but it is a Palm after all.

What I don't like at all though: the timeout doesn't go away even with corresponding configuration changes. And occasionally the program crashes my Clie. I didn't experience that a single time in all that time, I only had two system hangs with mo:Blog. And that in turn is a reason not to like the software ...

hobix&you!! feel yeah!!

hobix&you!! feel yeah!! is a weblog software written in Ruby. It comes from the author of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and the project's homepage is accordingly off the wall. You have to give him that: either he's completely out of his mind or he's a genius. Anything in between definitely doesn't fit (found at but she's a girl)

kasia in a nutshell: Spam breeds more spam

Kasia is conducting a fascinating experiment: she simply leaves two comment spam entries standing and waits for Google to index them. Less than 24 hours later, this entry was bombarded with spam - several hundred pieces.

One can therefore conclude that the spambots work at least partially in two stages and that it really is about Google ranking. The first entry is, so to speak, a test entry. If it remains standing so that it can be found again via Google, it is an entry where one can spam well - it is unattended and is indexed quickly by Google. Ideal fodder for spammers.

Google is thus an integral tool and target simultaneously for the spammers. One can certainly reduce the wind from the spammers' sails through technical separation of one's own comments (as my old blog had, where the comments were not only on a separate page behind a popup link, but additionally also on a completely different web server) and through indexing prohibition for these comment addresses. You would still be caught by the test samples, but the gigantic momentum afterward should be absent.

This could possibly also explain the Schockwellenreiter's problems: due to its exposed position, Google should visit it very frequently and if a spam comment once remains standing longer and could be indexed (it could also only happen by the spammer's luck if they spam just before Google's visit) the spammer has entered the server into spam lists. In principle, he only needs to have found the Schockwellenreiter once via Google regarding his test spams.

Now I just need to come up with a good idea how to implement the whole thing for WordPress. Popup comments already exist, but I would also have to place it on a different virtual address and exclude search engines there via robots.txt.

b2evolution: Home

b2evolution also makes a good impression on paper. It's surprising how far all these blog programs have come while you're not looking.

In any case, b2evolution makes a very good showing when it comes to antispam and security. And it also seems to have good XHTML support and a plugin architecture. The plugins are divided by purpose (Edit-Plugins and Toolbar-Plugins). I think the somewhat simpler form of plugins in WordPress will be easier for many to understand, but programmers will probably prefer b2evolution.

Personally, the admin environment is a bit too playful for me - though I only looked at it in the online demo. Also, the standard template doesn't look as clean and tidy as WordPress's - I think with the latter you have an easier start to impose your own layout. What's definitely nice is the choice of input parser for posts - I've done something like that in the Python Desktop Server too, precisely because you don't always want to have certain plugins active. Otherwise, it's of course very similar to WordPress - it's also a b2 descendant. WordPress probably has better support for images since it can automatically create thumbnails. Also, b2evolution lacks the metaWeblogAPI. On the other hand, what's nice is the integration of referrers and search engines directly into the blog - similar to the evaluation that the Python Community Server does for me. The usability design of b2evolution seems a bit confusing in places: permalinks to posts are small chain symbols, permalinks to comments are small document symbols. It's also somewhat inconsistent in other places.

Conclusion? If I can draw one at all from this mini-test, I'd say that for me, b2evolution implements just one small checkbox, switch, or option too many for most features. Therefore, I would personally lean more towards WordPress - I can imagine the code is somewhat simpler in structure and therefore custom hacks can be integrated more easily.

In terms of function, however, b2evolution clearly wins on points. Whoever prefers lots of features and likes to draw from a full well, or who wants to venture beyond normal blogs more strongly into the CMS area, will certainly be thrilled with b2evolution.

What I don't understand with either b2evolution or WordPress: neither of the two projects implements stories. That is, article formats that are not fixed to the calendar. Sure, you can realize that with a category or with a separate blog (with b2evolution's multiblogs functionality certainly much easier than the category hack needed for WordPress), but I find it impractical that you have to go to such lengths just for an imprint...

Here's the original article.

RFC: Subscriptions harmonizer - Synchronization of blog rolls via XMLRPC

Apple - RSS Information - Directory of Apple's RSS feeds

myelin: Feed Normalizer - Normalizer for feeds - can also convert Atom to RSS

d2r: comment spam filtering - it's all about the IPs - Möglicher Ansatz für Comment Spam Filtering im PyCS

Ari Paparo Dot Com: Big List of Blog Search Engines - A list of search engines that specialize in weblogs

Die Zeit 30 / 2003 - (c) DIE ZEIT : Article title from ZEIT on your website - RSS feeds for sections from Die Zeit