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| | Central repository for referrer spammers?. Is there a public repository of referrer spammers and their IPs? I have to do some banning. My logs are so messy. I want to try to do it before the new month begins. They're unrelenting, aren't they? I know why I have them on just one of my domains. I installed a dev copy of Expression Engine on it and left the referrers page open for just a couple of weeks. Now, months later, the page long gone, they'll still clogging up the works. There has to be a place in hell for people who don't mind that they are perpetrating this crap. |
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| | 'River of News' aggregator beta release tonight. Dave's released a simple browser-based RSS feed reader, named NewsRiver, as a module of the OPML Editor. The "River of News" style aggregator just displays one feed after another in a browser window -- no panes, no pain. The controls are in the menu within the OPML Editor client. It's superfast, like the editor itself because a lot of what's happening is on your own computer. I like it. Dave said he'd get some reaction from the OPML community, then open the beta to a wider group. You can try it now. OPML community membership is no big thing. You just install the editor and use it and you're a citizen. You will feel more a part of things if you test the blogging tool, though. Recent postings by OPML bloggers. |
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| | Shoot, what's up with Technorati?. Technorati hasn't updated my blog for four days. I even manually pinged it with their form. Pingomatic has been giving me funny messages too. Not sure what's going on. Maybe I should see if something's amiss with my feed. |
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| | Wow. The NSA has been putting cookies on our computers.. NYT tells about the cookie campaign. Session-only cookies are allowed according to OMB rules, but not persistent cookies unless there is a compelling need. "Oops!" an NSA spokesperson said. It makes you almost afraid to blog about it, doesn't it?  The CIA was sniffing around for my college records some 8-9 years after I graduated, I learned through a grapevine. The university registrar wouldn't cooperate, which I thought was cool. I never could think why I might have been considered any sort of threat, unless it was that Chinese magazine I subscribed to for a short time in the early 70s.
I used to go out with a guy who had a sort of macho gauge for activism: the number of pages in your FBI file. His ran to over 100, since he was editor of a college paper at one of those institutions where anti-warriors burned down the ROTC building, didn't merely occupy it as they did at my tamer alma mater. I definitely consider myself, at 51, to be in that generation, but I always wished I'd been born just a few years earlier rather than bringing up the rear of that era. Guys my age were the very last of the draft. |
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| | Ever wonder about the little snippets of theme music played on DVD menus?. Oh, sorry. You thought I was going to tell you something about it. I'm just wondering too. Here's one opinion about it: some of the snippets are too short. And when they are too short paired with being too thrilling, like the 30 seconds they play on the DVDs of the TV show "24," that's double bad. Especially if you are an old fart who falls asleep on the sofa and you wake up all stirred up. I like the theme. The deedle-deedle-deedle piano part I imagine to be running, and of course it trails off to Black Helicopter sounds. My kids are making fun of me for getting hooked on an action show. They also make fun of me for blogging and podcasting my opinions about TV music. When I did kind of a dumb recording of TV westerns, comparing them to a theme from Tommy, my older son said he didn't find it weird for someone to enjoy thinking about stuff like that, but that putting your own commentary about it on the internet was quite another matter. I said, "Who else's opinions would I put on the internet?!" |
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| | E-mail me, you sillies. I swear Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ, has spent more on snailmailings to me than I ever have contributed. Why don't they e-mail me, since I donate that way. I'd listen. I wrote something about preferred method of contact on a customer service blog I've abandoned, but I've moved some of the posts over here.
Consider making e-mail the default contact method when a customer orders on the web. Doesn’t it make sense that if Acme Company buys something in your online shopping cart instead of phoning or mailing in the order, the buyer likes online transactions? So, it follows that your Acme buyer would prefer to hear from you in e-mail rather than on the phone if there is a problem with or a question about the order. Doesn't that make sense? |
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| | Got amyloo.com. I registered amyloo.com. Should have done that a long time ago, but I probably wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been prompted to sign up for a cheap Windows hosting service. I wanted a sandbox for playing around with some Cold Fusion/SQL Server stuff. I'm experimenting with FDF. I'll probably narrate some of it, especially if I hear that anybody is interested. I'm figuring out how to output data entered into a web form in a PDF template. I've had my sites on shared Linux accounts for a number of years recently, but have gone back and forth. I learned on Unix starting in '94, then reluctantly moved my stuff to Windows when I thought I should, went back to Linux when so much exciting LAMP stuff was coming out and I wasn't afraid of databases anymore, and now it looks like I'll have both for a while anyway. We also have both at work, but my heart is with LAMP. I asked the guy at work who replaced me in the web department (after I moved to the publishing arm) where his heart was and he emphatically said "Windows." But he's alright. |
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| | Educational publishers embracing OPML. Thomson and now Reed-Elsevier. Comprehensive presentation on RSS and OPML in OPML by a Reed-Elsevier employee. My employer subs out an academic journal to R-E. I should ask them about it.
I must say I was skeptical about the RSS Labs ppt2OPML thingie but it's actually a good thing for PowerPoint loathers like me. You can buzz through the gist of a presentation without having to fire up the odious thing.
I wonder when/if Thomson's Delmar (elearning) division will see the benefits in OPML. |
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