Results tagged “blog”

If you're anything like me, you love comment spam. Love it. And by love it I mean want to punch yourself in the face. Just recently I've seen a marked increase and while I think it's amusing that 'Ivan Trench Coats' is leaving me a comment, it is getting a little time consuming to remove it.

Movable Type itself does an ok job detecting and junking spam but some still sneaks though. I can't tell if it's automated or if someone is manually typing it in. So what to do? Turn on moderation for all comments? That's a bit of a pain in the arse so before I take that final step I'm going to give Jay Allen's Comment Challenge plugin a whirl.

So now when leaving a comment you'll just have to enter a little word.

Update: I haven't had a single spam comment since installing Comment Challenge. So I'm going to tentatively say that it did the trick.

I think it's true that the more you write, the more you write. If you get out of the habit of putting fingers to keyboard, something inevitably happens. You slow down. Your inner muse just says cheerio and goes on holiday for a bit. There's seems to be nothing you can do about it, it just sort of happens.

I like writing. I like getting ideas out and sharing my opinions on things. Over the years I've experienced the inevitable ebb and flow of posting frequency. Ever since I made the decision to write in public back in 2001 I've had prolific periods, and I've had periods of drought. No prizes for guessing which one I'm experiencing at the moment.

So, what to do about that? Well, in a nutshell, write.

So while this post is complete filler and devoid of anything I would even remotely class as interesting, that's ok. I just need to get something written. To start the flow again. To clear out the cobwebs in an attempt to get things moving.

Sure I could have just written this privately, but for whatever reason I don't think that would work for me. I guess I just need to say something to an audience. To know that someone other than me is listening. Whatever the reason, I'm glad that the five or six people who actually read this blog are being my muse. Even if they didn't realize they'd signed up for that today. I appreciate it.

Onward then.

Siteadministrivia

If you're one of the few who actually visit this site instead of reading in a feed reader, you'll no doubt have seen a "Photos" link in the header bar above that for the longest time, just sent you to Flickr. I've always thought that was arsey and just didn't fit at all. So I've changed that.

Clicking Photos now takes you to a local page on this server instead. It's all auto generated using the Flickr API, phpFlickr, and some dodgy PHP code I wrote last night to glue it all together. I write Perl code for a living so hacking away at something different appealed to my inner geek.

Apps I Use The Most

My current iPhone home screen has the apps I find I use almost daily.

Around Me - finds things, er, around you. Most handy.
Todo - best "todo" list manager I've found. Bar none.
Tweetie - I've tried just about every Twitter client for the iPhone and this is the one that appeals to me the most.
Flickr - Nice "official" Flickr app, little crashy but still useful.
blog - web app, uses the iMT plugin to control Movable Type blogs from iPhones.
Reader - web app, mobile version of Google Reader. Solid, fast.
Flickit Pro - best iPhone Flickr app I've ever used. Love it.
SplashId - keeps all manner of information nicely locked up for you.
Simplenote - the official iPhone note app blows chunks. This one doesn't.
CameraBag - apply filters to your photos. Lovely Helga filter.
Nike + iPod - tracks running progress via chip in your shoe.

If you have a smartphone, what apps do you find you use the most and have you organized them onto your home screen? No? Just me then?

A Little Vacation

For the next 10 days I'll be thoroughly in vacation mode as my family are crossing the pond tomorrow. I've gotta say I don't envy them the flight. Still, these days you can catch a direct flight from London to Phoenix so it's not as long a trek as it used to be. Hope they have decent movies to watch and their iPods are fully charged.

This is more of a web server HTTP header issue than a MT one, but anyhoo. Something that has bothered me about running MT on this web host since, well, forever is the problem of comments not immediately showing after a user submits them. Refreshing the page in your browser always makes the comment show up so it's browser caching.

I ran into this again on another MT powered blog today and for the life of me I couldn't remember how I ended up fixing it on this site. After poking around for a bit I finally remembered that it was a quick ugly hack to one of my templates to force your browser to not cache MT pages.

Add the following to the <head> of your pages will fix things right up:

<meta http-equiv="CACHE-CONTROL" content="NO-CACHE">

Just recently I've been getting some really nice comment spam.

"Hi, I was researching the net for ideas for valentines day and I discovered your site. Keep up the good work."

"Very interesting read. Thanks."

"Nice post. Do you accept guest writers?"

"Awesome blog post. Thanks for keeping me busy."

"Really digging the layout of this site. Good work."

"This is an inordinate blog and I like reading it every morning."

"Your posting really landed right on the top. Good work, I look forward to your next information."

It really makes my day to be thought of so highly by spammers. Bless their cotton socks.

I've never liked the name of this blog and always thought it was a bit crap really. So now I've just renamed it to, well, something probably equally as crap actually.

But hey, at least kevinspencer.org matches the domain name at last. So, er, yeah, nothing really to see here then. Just thought I'd mention it.

You know, as you do.

[Moozik: The Glove - Mouth To Mouth]

Over the years I've written little pieces of code that have come in handy for whatever task I was trying to accomplish at the time. In other words, it was of no use to me 47 seconds later but at the time, priceless.

Of course, I wasn't always the conscientious backer-up-of-data (cough) that I am today and the majority of those code snippets were lost forever as new hardware was acquired. I'm a bit bummed about that actually.

Going forward, anything I write that I find remotely handy, will be added to the new code section of this site. I'm a big fan of git and github in particular and have started migrating all my little code snippets there as well.

</geekpost>

[Moozik: Underworld - Moaner]

Recently I've noticed that I don't post here anywhere near as often as I used to and wasn't really sure what to put my blogger's block down to. Well, until yesterday that is. Dan wrote an interesting post that linked to something Simon wrote about the impact Twitter has on your blogging. Go read both, I'll wait.

There are some good points in there. Maybe Twitter does indeed eat away at those creative flashes of inspiration you have throughout the day. For me personally, I'm finding it so much easier to post random thoughts to Twitter than compose a lengthy blog post. I wonder if that will continue and for how long?

[Moozik: K.T.S - Buran]

I upgraded to Movable Type 4.24, held my breath, and... it just worked. Good lord Six Apart, this is the second time I've upgraded and nothing broke. Makes me all nostalgic about the good old days spending hours fixing templates after each upgrade. Wait, no it doesn't.

For those of you not viewing these posts from a feed reader, you'll notice a new 'Asides' link in the navigation header menu. I'm trying out a side blog experiment built with the rather excellent Action Streams plugin.

[Moozik: The March Violets - Slow Drip Lizard]

Quite frankly I'm a little shocked. I just upgraded MT from 4.01 to 4.23 and nothing appears to be broken. That can't be right. Every time I've upgraded MT ever, something broke as a result. I must have done the upgrade wrong ;-)

[Moozik: The Cure - Underneath The Stars]

As a followup to my post about starting from scratch, another change you'll notice in my future rambles is that you'll be seeing we where in the past it had just been I. Well, there's a reason for that.

I've been somewhat remiss in discussing a massive part of my life of late. My girlfriend. Now, while some other blogs have pet names for their significant others: "the fella", "mrs rob", or "she", I'm going to try and make a point of keeping that part of my life somewhat private. So, for the time being anyway, we will be all you'll get.

Unless it isn't of course and I change my mind. Because I'm good like that.

[Moozik: Seabound - Scorch The Ground]

Anyone who still visits this blog instead of reading via the feed will notice a little change I've made around these parts. I'm starting from scratch.

I've been blogging for about seven years in various forms and have found the decision to start over really rather liberating actually. So here's to another seven years then.