Category: Meta

Yes, the paint is new, but the place is still the same. I spent a chunk of the afternoon converting the site over from MovableType to WordPress and things *seem* to work, though I’m sure there are a few broken links here and there.

Why switch? JUST ‘CAUSE.

Oh okay, there are a couple reasons. MT used statically generated pages, which are nice for keeping the server load low but not so nice for incorporating dynamic data. WordPress has a few additional nifty features like password-protected entries and comment moderation. MT does have some similar features on the way, but the new version is also in a bit of a licensing kerfuffle. And finally, I just like tinkering with things.

Spam is no longer constrained to e-mail; it’s now an ongoing problem within the blog communities, through anonymously posted comments that direct you to the usual array of porn, penis pills, and Prozac. MovableType in particular has been a favourite target due to the simple comment system and it is now essential to run the MT-Blacklist plugin to automatically catch most of it. It’s not a perfect solution though as some spam still leaks through, and you have to be vigilant and keep the blacklist up-to-date.

The MT authors have a new authentication system planned for the next major release though, called TypeKey, which is supposed to solve the spam problem completely. That introduces a few new wrinkles, though…

– It introduces a dependency between my site and another site that didn’t exist before. If their site is down, then you won’t be able to fully use my site. Six Apart seem to know what they’re doing (they already run the fairly large TypePad) and it’ll *probably* be fairly reliable, but it’s still another point of failure.
– Movable Type may be relatively popular, but there will still be a large number of people who won’t already have a TypeKey registration, so having to go and obtain one will be extra work to them.
– And the usual array of privacy concerns, information tracking, etc. for the ultra-paranoid out there. :-)

The net result of all of these is to reduce the odds that someone will comment due to the ‘annoyance’ factor. A first-time visitor that might have left a quick greeting might not bother if it looks like it’s going to be a hassle.

Fortunately, it looks like there will be a middle ground: the comment policy can also be set as ‘moderated,’ where they have to be approved before they will appear, and this can be combined with the TypeKey service so that fully authenticated comments will appear right away and people who don’t want to use it can still leave comments that just won’t show up immediately. What remains to be seen is just what the annoyance factor on having to actually use and choose between these modes will be… And spam will still be able to be submitted in moderated comments, but at least it won’t actually reach the front page.

One wonders why I would even care for a site this small, but hey, I’m a control freak with nothing better to write about at the moment… :-)

Over on LiveJournal there’s a bit of an argument over exactly how the ‘friends’ lists should be managed, and it brings up the question of just what a ‘friend’ means within these systems and what behaviours that implies.

If I read your journal, am I your friend? Or are you a friend of mine? Not necessarily; the other person may not even be aware of your existence. Or the relationship is weighted; they feel like a friend to you, but you’re an acquaintance to them.

When you make it a friend-or-nothing choice and tie concrete benefits to that relationship though, then there’s bound to be trouble. Putting somebody on a friends list is a convenient way of being able to browse journals you’re interested in, tempting you to add people to the list even if you don’t really consider them friends. But then that also causes you to appear as a ‘friend-of’ on their lists, which is a relationship that doesn’t necessarily exist, and forces information into their profile that they can’t control. That also opens up your private entries to that person as a side effect.

It looks like the way they’re leaning is to separate people into ‘friends’ and ‘readers’ with only friends getting the additional friends-only post access, and the ability to ban ‘readers’ from showing up in your profile, so you don’t have to tolerate offensive names and such showing up in your info.

One wonders why they would bother listing readers on your profile at all, but apparently a lot of people want to know who’s reading them and consider it ‘stalkerish’ if you read them without revealing yourself. But then the expected way to ‘reveal yourself’ was to make them a friend of yours, with all the problems noted above…

Hopefully the new system will satisfy most people, but this whole discussion reveals a lot of attitudes about the relationships between bloggers that I hadn’t really thought about before. Why do I care, on my own separate site here? Well, the same kind of thinking can be applied, even if the formal system isn’t exactly the same, through things like linking and comments. I also do have an LJ account, though it’s really only for making comments on others’.

Dramatic statement about how much life sucks. Complaint about how I just cannot take it anymore.

Description of events of a trivial nature, exaggerated to appear to be of monumental importance. Implication of wrongdoing by an unspecified friend, with blatant clues dropped as to the person’s identity. Vindictive derision of friend’s flaws and lack of loyalty. Gratitude that other friends are not like that person.

Unrelated comments about new element of personal appearance, minor complaint about some other aspect of same. Closing note about how I’ve made up with friend X from last week. Promise to be more upbeat in the next entry.

(Yeah, it’s an old joke, but a goodie.)

Silly spammers, I crush you like bug!

It did catch me off guard though; I’d never even thought of the possibility spammers would start making comments in blogs, guestbooks, and such automatically. I shouldn’t have been surprised though, as I’ve had to deal with spammers advertising in game forums before.

Fortunately there are already filters and plugins available to help stop them, for MT at least.

There’s something funny going on at Google…

Looking through the site logs, I see a number of hits from people coming from search engine results. That’s not all that unusual; that’s what they do, after all. The strange thing is, I seem to be abnormally highly ranked for some of those searches.

For example, for a particular pop-culture phrase my site is ranked #5 by Google at the moment. That’s even higher than its original appearances on SA and the Flash animation it inspired! There are also plenty of other sites that have discussed it considerably more in-depth, yet for some reason my one-time throwaway reference to it appears before the vast majority of them when it shouldn’t even be in the top 100.

Likewise I get a lot of hits for Diablo 2-related searches. I have discussed that topic in somewhat more depth, but there’s a different problem here — the searches are usually seeking raw information, whereas the discussion here usually assumes a working knowledge of that information already. I’ve had to go back through those articles and add links back to sites that provide the background and raw info just so those people who were searching for it won’t have completely wasted their time visiting here. You’d think that they’d have found that info first in their search, but no, somehow they wound up here first.

It’s possible that due to the way search engines like Google rank their pages, blogs are becoming overrepresented and overranked relative to their actual value. What would previously have been hidden on some subpage that few people would have linked to before is now present on the front page for some period of time, and the front page is highly linked among all of the blogger’s friends, which drives the ranking of the page up. Even when it moves to the archives, it still inherits some of the rank indirectly from the front page.

Discussions of topics on blogs aren’t necessarily all that useful, either. Like I mentioned before they typically assume a certain degree of knowledge about the topic already and are just relating it to that person’s own life or experiences, which may or, more likely, may not help someone who was just looking for somewhat more generic information. If you’re looking for technical specs on some product, do you really care that I bought the neon green version of it? The traditional blog format of putting multiple entries on the front page and often the archives also tends to group information together inappropriately. You may have hit a blog page from searching for terms ‘foo’ and ‘bar’, but they might have been from completely separate, unrelated entries.

Potentially the more useful information on the net is now being buried in a sea of overranked blogs. I don’t know if this is really a trend overall though; this is just what I’ve noticed for a few topics on my own site. Anyone else noticed the same thing?

Thanks to a combination of Telus and no-ip.com, you should be able to reach this site at http://www.planetcrushers.com/heide/ permanently now. (might take a day or two for all the name server changes to filter through)

Why planetcrushers.com? It’s pretty simple actually: when I first started posting on Usenet back at the UofA, one of the header fields I could change was the “Organization:” The default was plain and boring so, feeling a bit silly, I stuck in a made-up name instead. Ever since, I’ve been founder and CEO of PlanetCrushers Inc. :-)

And what the hell am I doing up this early on a Sunday…

I think I like fiddling with the site’s layout and code more than actually writing for it…

Anyway, things have been shuffled around a bit, links are now on a separate page, and a Recent Comments section has been added so new comments on older entries actually get noticed instead of remaining buried in the archives. Any other suggestions for improvements?

Now I have to start messing with the style sheet so it doesn’t look like every other MT site out there…

The URL to this place is kind of hard to remember and impermanent and I don’t have a proper domain yet, so for now you can bookmark http://members.shaw.ca/cheide/ and it’ll redirect you to wherever this place is at the time.

Whether this place actually becomes permanent or not remains to be seen. It started out just as a bit of experimenting with Apache and scripts and such, but who knows…