Roblog

Welcome to my first post in my new blog. That's "web log" for those of you not in the know. Why am I doing this? Not to gain a loyal following or to provide a useful service. This is just to allow me to jot down the notes of my life whenever the mood strikes me.

I expect no more than 5 or 6 people to ever read my blog, so I might take a few liberties with the content. So I don't promise anything.

How did my weblog get into Google's index? I don't have a link to my weblog from anywhere else on my web page yet, so how did Google get a hold of it?

I finally decided that it must have seen the link on weblogs.com page. Part of Movable Type allows certain sites to be pinged whenever I add a new entry. I guess Google scanned that page when a link to my blog happened to be on it.

My wife has a blog! I helped her set one up so that she can reflect on her practice as a CFG coach, the teacher professional development project she is working on now. I'm eager to see if the rest of her group embraces it as another facet of their reflective practice, or if it's a technology that they consider too foreign to use.

Donna took quite a few pictures at the conference in Philadelphia last week, which she will be uploading into her blog soon. Several of the pictures she took was of posters, which must be viewed at a fairly large size if the writing on them is to be legible. This means that the full-size pictures can be larger than the average-person's computer screen.

The standard Movable Type code that it (politely) generates when uploading a picture doesn't handle this very well. The window that the picture appears in (once you click on the thumbnail) is set to have no scroll bars and is not resizable. This means that you are out of luck about seeing the entire picture unless you can move the entire window around. So I decided to try to change it.

I have no idea who these people are or who "mac_daddy_kaz" is:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mystic_wonder/9085.html
It doesn't bother me that they copied the picture, but they're using deep-linking to refer to my website directly. I could block that if I wanted to. Maybe I will...

I guess Elena's picture showed up in a search for "pot head"? The funny thing is, I can't find any evidence that those terms were used to search my website. It's possible that someone used a search engine that the program that tracks hits on my web page was not able to discern, but all the popular ones show up in a list of search terms. Very odd.

I've shut off the comments features of this blog for two reasons:

1. No one I knew was commenting
2. The last 150 comments I got were spam advertisements for either prescription drugs or porn

I can block IP addresses from being able to post to my blog, but that just slowed them down a little rather than stopping them. I quickly went from 9 IP addresses blocked to 52 in one week. That was a big hassle to delete all the spam comments and enter the IP address to block it. So I just turned off commenting.

I'm going to try to see how leaving the commenting on for the most recent entries works. If I continue to get spam comments, I'll turn it off completely.

I finally had to do something about the comment spam invading my weblog, since it was now affecting my wife's blog. She told me recently "I hate the computer," meaning that the increasing tide of comment spam was rendering her blog unusable, as well as cluttering up her inbox with continual reminders of that fact.

Movable Type has a facility whereby you can block specific IP addresses from placing comments on your blog, but this requires each and every IP address to be logged manually into the system. That's what I had been doing for this blog, but I was up to 103 IP adresses with no noticeable change in amount of comment spam.

So I did some research. The best option appeared to be the MT-Blacklist plug-in. This free add-on for Movable Type checks a master list of URLs that spammers include in their comments. Whenever a comment is added to a blog entry that references one of those URLs, it is prevented from being saved. It has regular expression pattern matching, so that it doesn't have to be updated for every variation of a website selling "cialis". You can try it, if you want. Try adding a comment with a URL that has "vioxx" in it. You'll get an error message saying the comments couldn't be saved.

This appears to be working well. Not only will this help Donna continue to use her blog, but it will make our presentation in Boston about using weblogs go much better. I would hate for her to have to say "I hate my computer" several times during her talk.

My wife's blog is now linked from a national organization's web site: National School Reform Faculty.

This was pretty exciting for her, since it might get her blog some attention beyond the people she works with or has explicitly told them about. At least it's a recognition from the people who run the NSRF website that her blog has value and is relevant to the activities NSRF is involved in. I don't really think it will noticeably affect her page hits or "Google rank", but we'll see.

My blog looks very different from what it used to be. That's because I wiped out all of my customizations while upgrading to Movable Type version 3.3. I had been on version 2.61 for a long time, because Six Apart (the company that makes Movable Type) started charging for their blogging software a few years ago. They still had a free version, but it only allowed one author, which was too restrictive for me.

But Donna has been veritably inundated with comment spam recently (100+ per day), so I went looking for remedies. When I checked the Six Apart website, it appeared the current free version (version 3.3) did allow for multiple authors and multiple blogs. It also is apparently better at combating spam.

So I downloaded it, installed it, and transferred my history to the new version. It was all surprisingly smooth, except for the quotation marks in the old entries being converted to some non-web-compatible characters. I just had to use a text editor to replace those quotes with their plain counterparts and it worked OK.

I converted my blog first to make sure I could do it cleanly. We'll see what spam comments I get with the standard 3.3 installation. I'll soon convert Donna's blogs, and implement whatever additional spam blocking techniques need to be used. The final result should be that we have a much cleaner and usable website.

I have always been pleased with my web host, JaguarPC. They recently implemented a program where they will automatically upgrade your account with additional space to match their current plans. That meant that one day, I noticed I had over 16 GB of free space on my webserver!

So what should I do with all that space? My first thought was to change my photo uploading process so that I upload every picture I take to my webserver. This would mean that I can refer to my entire picture collection regardless of where I am. Donna thought this was a bad idea, and I eventually came around. Not only are there plenty of pictures that show my daughters not fully dressed, but also there are plenty of bad pictures that don't make sense to upload.

So instead I thought of using it as backup file storage. I could create an Applescript process to upload particular files to a secure area on the server. If I run this routinely, I'll have a really easy backup process.

My first attempt at an Automator workflow for this worked! All of a sudden (well, it took 25 minutes for the files to upload), I had backed-up much of Donna's critical files to my webserver. It's pretty crude right now, in that the locations that are backed-up are hard-coded, it does not retain any folder structure, and it just copies everything up each time you run the backup (not just the recently changed files), but I don't know if I'm real concerned about those details for an emergency backup. I'm sure I'll spend some time to tweak the process over the next few weeks.

I have edited the audio recording of the girls' first day of school and posted it here:
First Day of School at Lovett.mp3 (16.7 MB, 14:36).

Donna says she might record the girls every Monday. If so, I might try to close the loop on releasing them as a podcast, but for now it's just a link to an MP3 file.