Weblogs

A Spamtastic Mystery

Neal Stephenson, Weblogs / /

One of the joys of maintaining a website is dealing with spam. Over the years, I’ve had to deal with several different varieties of spam here, including comment spam, trackback spam, even my old forum got inundated with spam. As such, countermeasures were deployed with varying degrees of success. Movable Type has improved its spam blocking capabilities considerably, and I use a plugin to close comments on posts older than 60 days, so the blog has remained relatively spam free for a while now. I replaced my forum with a new system that requires registration (ironically, even the new forum was spammed with a bizzarely intriciate scheme to sell, no joke, biodynamic cheese).

This leaves referrer spam. I don’t know that there’s anything to really be done about that short of banning IP addresses and the like, but I never really used my site’s raw referral logs that extensively, so even though I’m sure I get a decent amount of referrer spam, I don’t really see it. Instead, I use sitemeter, a popular web stats application that uses an image and javascript to collect the appropriate info (you can see the little multicolored image towards the bottom of every page on Kaedrin). I’m not sure if sitemeter does something on their end to prevent referral spam, or if spambots simply ignore the technology they use, but I get next to no referrer spam there.

Until this morning.

I awoke to find my site had several hundred hits overnight (much more than usual). When I looked at the referrals, I noticed that I was getting a huge amount of traffic from a bunch of sites that were all variations of the same domain. A sampling includes:

http://qfm96.listenernetwork.com/SearchWeb.asp

http://wmvx.listenernetwork.com/SearchWeb.asp

http://973thebrew.listenernetwork.com/SearchWeb.asp

http://98online.listenernetwork.com/SearchWeb.asp

As you can see, all the referrs are coming from some sort of search application. Going to the various “listenernetwork.com” home pages, it became obvious that they were all radio station sites that were apparently all using some central application to produce cheap, easy sites for themselves (they all use the same template with content and styles tailored towards individual stations). The sites and referrals were distributed all throughout the country. At a glance, they seemed to be legit stations. How odd.

All of the referrals were going to my Neal Stephenson category archive page, which was strange. At first, I thought, hey, maybe Neal Stephenson announced a new book on the radio this morning! Of course, that doesn’t make much sense, but I’m a sucker for Stephenson and so I wanted to believe. In any case, it immediately became obvious that something else was going on (damn!).

The most frustrating thing about these referrals is that they’re obviously coming from these radio station sites’ built-in search engine, which apparently uses a HTTP POST request instead of a GET request. Most search engines use GET requests because then the search parameters are contained in the URL, which allows users to bookmark searches. POST requests hide search parameters, so users can’t bookmark their searches and referred sites can’t see what the search terms are. So not only was I getting all this traffic from a mysterious search engine, but I didn’t even know what people were searching for…

Back to the logs I go. After rooting around a bit, I found some other search engines like ask and google were referring to the same Neal Stephenson page… but they had the search terms in their URL:

what unit of length used in nuclear physics is named after a famed manhattan project scientist?

Allright, so I’m making progress. My Stephenson category page contains most of those terms, so that kinda makes sense. I went to one of the refferring sites and was quickly able to reproduce the search on their site and see my page come up in the results. But this question is rather odd, and there were many people searching with that exact question. What the heck is going on here?

Confused and a little intrigued, I started clicking around one of the referring radio station’s sites hunting for clues. Then I found it. Apparently, all these stations run some sort of big national contest, and the mysterious question above was today’s “Really Hard Trivia” question. The site even conveniently notes: “Don’t know the answer? Search the web below.” Bingo.

So it appears that these are all indeed legitimate referrals, though I can’t imagine anyone becoming a reader, as they didn’t find the answer on my page. However, in the off chance that someone is still looking, the answer appears to be the Bohr Radius, named after Neils Bohr.

It turns out that I probably could have saved myself a good deal of effort by simply googling “listenernetwork referrer spam,” as this issue has apparently struck others before. Still, it was somewhat intriguing and I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be referrer spam…

Blogroll Call

2 Comments / Anime, Humor, Neal Stephenson, Weblogs / /

Everyone loves to be on a bunch of blogrolls, but just because you’re there doesn’t mean you’ll get a lot of visitors. This becomes more true as the blogroll gets larger. Blogrolls are subject to an inverse network effect; the more blogs in the blogroll, the less valuable the link. Kaedrin gets a small amount of traffic, so even though I have a short blogroll, I’m guessing most of those blogs don’t get a ton of visitors coming from here. So I just figured I’d throw some additional links their way:

  • Transit of Mercury, Photoblogged: Jay Manifold takes some nice pics of the planet Mercury, as well as an amusing comparison of Manifold Observatory and Powell Observatory.
  • Team of Rivals: Andrew Olmsted reviews a recent book that chronicles Abraham Lincoln’s rise to the presidency, as well as the coalition he formed and maintained to fight the civil war:

    Lincoln’s ability to hold together a coalition of abolitionists, conservative Republicans, and war Democrats during the American Civil War stands as a signal feat of political dexterity that seems yet more impressive in light of more recent American history. … the book really hits its stride once Lincoln is elected and he assembles his Cabinet, beginning with his three rivals for the nomination. The contrast is particularly stark with modern politics, where Cabinets are formed from the victor’s circle of political allies. Lincoln, on the other hand, selected men who not only wanted the job he held, but who viewed him poorly at best in some cases. It’s hard to imagine a modern politician selecting men who viewed him with the kind of contempt Edwin Stanton viewed Lincoln, let alone getting the kind of results Lincoln did. Lincoln’s ability to get results from such disparate men is an impressive primer in leadership.

    Interesting stuff, and I think I’ll pick up the book at some point, as this seems to be an impressive example of compromise and tradeoffs (subjects that interest me) in action.

  • Ars Technica 2006 holiday gift guide: Make shopping for the geek in your family a little easier with this guide (sheesh, that sounded like advertising copy *shudders*). Most of the hardware and gadget gifts are pretty good, though expensive. However, they also include lots of interesting books and smaller gifts as well. Ars always has interesting articles though. I’ve already mentioned the Ars System Guide on the blog recently, but they also have reviews of the Wii and PS3 that are worth reading.
  • Casino Royale: Subtitle: Die almost never � nearly forever! Heh. Alexander Doenau’s take on the latest Bond flick is roughly in line with my own feelings, though one of these days I’ll get around to talking more about it on the blog.

    Which may beg the question of some audiences: where is the fun when there�s nary an insane scheme to be seen, and no psychedelically decorated gyrocopters? (thank you, Roald Dahl). The answer lies partly in Bond himself. Without the scary misogyny that Ian Fleming endowed Bond with 50 years ago, Daniel Craig plays Bond as an excellent bastard. This is a Bond so confident in his own skills that he doesn�t give a care who sees him because he has a licence to kill. This is probably the only Craig film we�ll see in which Bond is able to cut as loose as he did in Uganda, because part of the story involves developing a marginally more sensible and responsible MI6 agent, but he takes the sorts of risks that make the movie fun without being stupidly unbelievable.

    I love the description of James Bond as an “excellent bastard.”

  • Steven Den Beste has an interesting rating system (another subject I’ll tackle on the blog at some point). He uses a 4 star scale, but also includes a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” graphic (for obvious reasons). This is interesting because it allows him to recognize a technical accomplishment without actually recommending the film (for instance, I would give Grave of the Fireflies **** with a thumbs down because it is masterfully produced, but so heartbreaking that I can’t actually recommend it). In any case, if you scroll down on the link above (no permalinks there), you’ll see that Steven has started rating individual anime episodes for a series called Kamichu. For episode 6, he rated it zero stars with six thumbs down. I wonder if he liked it?
  • A collection of Jonathan Swift’s journalistic texts: Ralf Goergens over at Chicago Boyz makes an Jonathan Swift-related annotation to Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle:

    Attentive readers of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle will remember Daniel Waterhouse reading a a number of astonishingly vile newspapers. Some of the most acrimonious articles were from Jonathan Swift, writing for Tory papers. Stephenson didn’t make that part up, the articles can be found here.

    I didn’t have time to do more than a bit of browsing, but some of the historical characters from the Baroque Cycle are mentioned, like Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Harley and of course Queen Anne. There also are extensive footnotes explaining the concrete circumstances under which the articles appeared.

  • Weblog Awards: Kevin Murphy notes that since he was inexplicably passed over for the Weblog Awards, he might as well add a bunch of categories and simply declare winners. Normally, this would seem like the actions of a snarky blogger, but since Kaedrin won a Koveted Kevy, I’ll say it was the result of long-standing multifaceted research project considering nearly 2 billion blogs. Also, Kevin apparently knows something I don’t: Kaedrin won the Best Blog With A Japanese Word As Its Title. Hmmm. It would be pretty funny if it actually was a Japanese word (anyone know what it means?)
  • The New Threats: John Robb continues his incisive commentary on global guerillas:

    As the debate over the value of the Iraq study group’s report rumbles on, it’s important to reflect on larger frame within which this debate is taking place. This frame, little discussed, encapsulates nature of the threat we face in Iraq and will be increasingly likely to face in the future. With Iraq, we can catch a glimpse of the new class of threat that will increasingly define our future (and given that even a glimpse is enough to stump the establishment should be a dire warning). This new class of threat is characterized by its bottoms up pattern of growth rather than the familiar competition between nation-states. It percolates upwards through catalyzed organic growth until it overwhelms our ability to respond to it.

    My general reaction to Robb’s theories is that he is usually too pessimistic and that there must be a better way to fight these global guerillas, but he always makes for interesting and worthwhile reading.

  • Depressing Anime: Fledgling Otaku’s thoughts on Grave of the Fireflies are a little harsher than my own, but I have to say that he’s justified in calling it anime for emotional masochists. Don’t miss the comment threads on that post, the follow up post, and the recent post (in which he mentions my review). Like me, the more he learns of the context, the more he says he can appreciate its value as a work of art.
  • Tax Law Is Complicated, But Is It Vague? : James Edward Maule reads about a Judge who “struck down a portion of the Patriot Act on the ground that despite amendments to the provisions they remain ‘too vague’ to be understood by ‘a person of average intelligence’ and thus are unconstitutional.” As a professor of tax law, he wonders if the Internal Revenue Code is actually vague, and asks some interesting questions:

    If everything that could not be understood by a “person of average intelligence” were to be declared unconstitutional and removed from the planet, what would remain? Is there something wrong when a patient cannot understand a medical procedure used by a surgeon? Is there something wrong when a driver does not understand the engineering formulae used in designing the bridge over which the vehicle is crossing? Is there something wrong when someone enjoying a fine meal cannot understand the recipe?

  • Take my advice, or I�ll spank you without pants.: Johno over at the The Ministry of Minor Perfidy takes note of the glorious Chingrish of actual English Subtitles used in films made in Hong Kong. Some of my favorites:

    9. Quiet or I’ll blow your throat up.

    11. I�ll fire aimlessly if you don�t come out!

    18. How can you use my intestines as a gift?

    18. How can you use my intestines as a gift?

    19. This will be of fine service for you, you bag of the scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your manhoods and leave them out on the dessert flour for your aunts to eat. [sic, of course]

    20. Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your gynecologist for a thorough examination.

    21. Greetings, large black person. Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feets on some ass of the giant lizard person.

    This sort of thing is funny, but bad translations are also responsible for ruining a lot of decent foreign movies.

  • Extremely Cool: Indeed it is:

    The Antikythera Mechanism is a 2000-year-old device, somewhat resembling a clock, found in 1902 by sponge divers in the waters off a Greek island. It has long been believed that it was a form of analog computer, used for astronomical calculations, but its precise operating mechanism was not well-understood.

    Interesting stuff.

  • Not the intended market, but still fun: Fritz Schranck has been sucked into What Not To Wear (one of those smug reality shows that berate people for having bad style, then attempt to help them out). While I’ve never seen this show, similar reality shows do have that sorta “I can’t look away from this trainwreck” quality that makes them entertaining.
  • DM of the Rings: In terms of link love, I’ve been woefully neglectful of Shamus’s brilliant DM of the Rings comic, which somehow manages to be both humorous and insightful (well, in terms of RPG gaming anyway). Using screenshots from the movies, it’s essentially what the Lord of the Rings would have been like if it were played as a D&D game.

Holy crap, that took a while. I just realized that I would have probably been better off if I’d just done one or two a day. That way I’d have had posts every day for at least a week! In any case, stay tuned for the weekly Animation Marathon review (This week, it’s Akira. Review should be up Tuesday or Wednesday).

Traversing the Geek Tail

1 Comment / Weblogs / /

Shamus laments the difficulty of traversing the long tail of geek blogs, and I can sympathize. The need for better information aggregation and analysis has been something of a theme on this blog for a while, so I figured I’d make a few comments. Interestingly enough, this dovetails with another discussion I followed a while back (and never got around to writing about).

First, to illustrate a point, I wanted to recount how I found Twenty Sided. Basically, it all started with that infamous blond joke. I didn’t link to Shamus for the joke, but it turns out that we both linked to the same place (and we both apparently found out about the blond joke from Chizumatic). I was intrigued by the blond joke phenomenon, and made a half hearted attempt at mapping the tree of links (once I realized how many branches and branches-of-branches there were, I gave up). Since we’d both linked to the same place and since we’d both pinged that blog (so that our links showed up on the linked post), Twenty Sided was one of the first I recorded. At some point, I ended up viewing his main page and commented on one of this posts. Shamus apparently noticed and then started reading my blog, and on we went.

There are a couple of things to note here. I discovered Twenty Sided almost completely by accident. It was the result of a lame yet deceptively complex blog meme (the sort of thing I used to avoid like the plague). In short, I found his blog through serendipity. What’s more, I’ve found that many of my favorite sites were found in a similar manner: when I wasn’t actually looking for them.

Which brings me to a recent (er, 5 month old) article on the subject:

Serendipity is defined as the ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally. There’s so much of modern life that makes it preferable to the vaunted good old days – better hygiene products and power steering leap to mind – but in these disposable days of now and the future, the concept of serendipity is endangered.

Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find – with an irritating hit or miss here and there – exactly what you’re looking for. It’s efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding. Inside, the book might be a loser, a waste of the effort and calories it took to remove it from its place and then return. Or it might be a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life down a path you didn’t know was there.

… Looking for something and being surprised by what you find – even if it’s not what you set out looking for – is one of life’s great pleasures, and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience.

There is obviously value in analog serendipity (i.e. browsing the library stacks, etc…). Indeed, I used to take a guilty pleasure in ransacking the shelves of the library in which I was supposed to be studying. On one such expedition, I discovered The Book of Imaginary Beings (“a handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination”) which inspired me to create a new website (that has sadly been neglected for years). On the other hand, what the hell is this guy talking about? Like Steven Johnson, I have to wonder if this guy even uses the internet…

I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better. (I love the whole idea of pulling down a book because you like the “binding.”) Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere’s exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books.

Is there a way to harness serendipity in an organized fashion? After all, serendipity isn’t just random noise, it’s the unexpected discovery of signal. The trick is really getting started. Shamus mentions in his post that his starting points are Google, Technorati, and referral logs (i.e. noticing that someone has linked to you). Google is a reasonable starting place for general information, but there’s way too much information to sift through there, and it’s difficult to find a good geek blog that way. Technorati is hit or miss (mostly miss, in my experience) and referral logs are wonderful if you get noticed (but that’s not as easy as it sounds and doesn’t happen all that often, especially to beginners).

In the past, I’ve found blogs I’ve liked in many ways. Often, I will find a blog I like, then surf through blogrolls. This will sometimes result in a good find (often chaining through several blogroll trees), though it also seems to induce something of a short-term ADD in me as I mostly scan without reading unless something really catches my eye. I used to post a lot on discussion boards and do a lot of debating. This often led me to do some research on various subjects, which sometimes turned up interesting articles. Finding these articles, then exploring the site it’s on or googling the author will sometimes yield results.

There are, of course, the big social aggregators like Digg and Reddit. I’ve always found del.icio.us to be a good place to start (particularly the popular page). Of course, you still have to sift through all of these things to find the hidden gems, but once you do, the structure of the internet gives you the ability to follow a trail of associations (blogrolls being the key example here) easily and efficiently (once you find a blog you like, aggregators like Technorati become a little more useful). Those social aggregators are a good starting place, but they still leave something to be desired. However, all of these sites have come on strong only in the last couple of years and they’re growing better every day.

In any case, I’ve noticed that my blogroll has become a bit stale these days. I still read most of those blogs regularly and they’re all good, but I think it’s time to add some new ones. After all, the past several entries have referenced the same blogs over and over again! Alas, I’ll be away on vacation next week, with little or no computer access, so perhaps I’ll just start with a “link to someone new” type post…

Another Guest Blogger

Weblogs / /

I’ll be travelling yet again this weekend and thus won’t have much time to blog. However, long time Kaedrin compatriot DyRE will be posting in my absence (at least once on Sunday, as per the schedule). I feel confident that DyRE’s geek credentials will more that suffice. Have a good weekend everyone!

Guest Blogger

Weblogs / /

I’ll be travelling this weekend and thus won’t have much time to blog. However, long time Kaedrin compatriot Samael will be posting in my absence (at least once on Sunday, as per the schedule). Astute readers may recognize the name from his Super Mario Mega Marathon of Madness and his comments on Pre-NES games. I don’t know what he’ll be writing about, but he assures me it will be something geeky. Have a good weekend!

Tag Map of Kaedrin

3 Comments / Weblogs / /

Via lots of people, here is a graph of the underlying HTML structure of the Kaedrin Weblog:

Kaedrin Weblog Site Graph, click for a slightly larger version

Each dot represents some aspect of this page. The application that generated this graph uses the following color codes:

What do the colors mean?

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

So what are we looking at in my graph? (One note, I generated this graph last night before I posted, so this graph reflects a page that has changed.) Well, the big clump of orange and blue on the left side of the graph is obviously my side navigation, filled with links and line breaks (i.e. the blogroll and archive links). The other big clump of orange and blue (bottom right) is the main area of posts on the page. Because I’ve recently gone on a spree of posts with lots of images, there is also a bunch of violent in that area. The image filled posts are also the cause of the offshoots from this area, as I’ve foolishly used some tag-soup to get the layout right. I believe the remaining offshoot, in the middle of the graph, is the masthead (the top of the page with the Kaedrin logo and main navigation links).

It’s not as pretty as those nifty XHTML/CSS pages, but it gets the job done (and it validates!) One of these days I’ll get around to actually converting this layout to XHTML and CSS, but don’t hold your breath. I tried to exactly replicate this layout once and just got frustrated, so when it happens, it will probably be accompanied by a minor design overhaul.

Weblog Usability

3 Comments / Weblogs / /

For the past week or so, I’ve been making various improvements to the weblog. Some of it is behind the scenes type stuff that isn’t even visible, and much of the other changes are relatively subtle. Many of the improvements are aimed at making things easier for new visitors, especially those who stumble onto an individual entry or archive page. For new visitors and those who aren’t so familiar with blogs, it’s important to provide some sort of context and assistance (especially for confusing technologies like trackbacks and RSS). So what’s changed?

  • Next Page: Ever find a new blog you like and start reading the front page? Whenever I do so, I’m invariably disappointed when I get to the bottom of the page. Usually, there’s nothing down there – no way to continue reading. Given that one of the most annoying things about maintaining a blog is that all your great content quickly falls off the front page to languish in the obscurity of the archives. How to avoid this? I used to just have a link to the archives down there, but the ideal solution would be to actually continue reading right where you left off… so I added a Next Page link (some weblog software provides this feature by default, which is great). That way, you can just keep reading. It only goes back a few pages, but I figure that’s better than nothing!
  • RSS: RSS is an interesting technology. It can be extremely useful, and a lot of people use it without even realizing it (on sites like my Yahoo, etc…) Unfortunately, usability tests have shown that most general web users tend to be a bit unclear on the value, use, and function of RSS feeds (and this is certainly an understandable reaction, I think). I still need to address this somehow, though I haven’t yet decided how I’m going to do so. In the mean time, I’ve made a few revisions to the feeds. I’ve always had the feeds available, but I noticed a few things I wanted to change. The main feed is now RSS 2.0 and I’ve changed it so that it contains the full text rather than just an excerpt. I’ve done this mainly because I’ve actually begun using an RSS aggregator, and it’s much more convenient when a blog has the full entry text in the feed (and annoying when a feed only has an excerpt). I also removed the images and moved the section further down on the side navigation. Power users will obviously be able to figure it out, but I didn’t want to clutter the top of the navigation with something that average visitors wouldn’t understand… Again, more work will be done to rectify this area.
  • Individual Entry Pages: One recurring theme here at the blog is that we need better tools for information aggregation and analysis. However, aggregated content (i.e. search results from Google, the aformentioned RSS aggregators, and even blogs themselves) has certain implications which must be considered. Most sites are designed from the top down, assuming that visitors will start at the main page, then make their way to the more specific content. However, with the increasing trend of content aggregation, visitors start on other sites and make their way to the lower levels of your site, bypassing a large portion of your site’s design (the portion that guides the visitor to their target content). Because of this, lower level pages like the indivudual entry pages need to provide some sort of context to the visitor (this context is normally created by the process of navigating through your site, but remember, visitors have bypassed your carefully laid out information architecture, so they have not gleaned any such context). So I’ve attempted to provide a little more context on individual entry pages (in the upper right area of the page). There are several other things I’ve changed on the individual pages, but that mostly has to do with meta data and page titles.
  • Montly Archives and Category Archives: Same issues here as on the individual entry pages, and similar changes have been made (adding context to these pages, again in the upper right). There are several other things I’m considering. With respect to the monthly archives, I’m not sure how useful it is to list every month on the right side of the main page (plus, I’ve been doing the blog long enough that the list of months is getting pretty cumbersome). Do people really navigate in that way, or are categories more useful? Also, categories would be a whole lot more useful if I used them better. For instance, I collected all of my recent Philly Film Festival Posts in a category page, which (I assume) makes it easier for folks who end up on any individual entry to get to other entries from the film festival.
  • Trackbacks: I’ve often considered just getting rid of trackbacks. If people are confused by RSS, they must be doubly mystified by trackbacks. Plus, trackbacks are major spam magnets. It apparently got so bad here that my web hosting service disabled it for me because it “was causing the server to become slow and unstable for other users on the system.” (incidentally, that’s why it wasn’t working for a while, in case you were trying). Trackbacks have been enabled again, but I may decide to remove them at some point. If I do keep them, I’ll have to make several improvements, similar to the above (i.e. provide explanations and context for them).
  • Comments and other areas: Lots of other smaller improvements need to be made, including a better way to list out comments (right now, it’s difficult to tell when one comment ends and an other begins – the byline doesn’t stand out enough). I’ve added some text explaining what happens when a comment is submitted (mostly explaining why some comments may not show up right away, though most do). The About area of the website could also use some updating. And there’s probably another million little things I’ll want to do as well.

As implied above, lots of additional changes coming in the future. I’ve been meaning to do this stuff for a while, so it’s nice to actually make some progress. There have been a few papers released recently about weblog usability that were very helpful in this process.

First is Jacob Nielson’s recent alertbox column, Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. Quickly going through his list of mistakes:

  1. No Author Biographies: Well, I do have an About section that explains the site and me a bit, but as I mentioned earlier, it needs to be updated.
  2. No Author Photo: I question the validity of this. However, while I don’t display one on every page, I do have the Fake Webcam (which is kinda silly and hasn’t been updated in ages)…
  3. Nondescript Posting Titles: This is one thing I think I’m actually pretty good at (with some exceptions, of course). I used to lament my inability to come up with clever titles, but the lame titles I come up with that just explain what the post about are probably more useful to the average visitor. Also, I think I’m pretty good at writing for the web (i.e. using lots of lists, providing emphasis, and generally making content scannable.)
  4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go: This is another one I think I’ve been pretty good at over the years.
  5. Classic Hits are Buried: This is something I’ve done a lot of thinking about in the past, and the result was the Best Entries page, as well as the little random image on the side navigation.
  6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation: Earlier in this post, I wondered how important the monthly links were in the side navigation. Nielson clearly thinks they’re emphasised too much: “A timeline is rarely the best information architecture, yet it’s the default way to navigate weblogs.” He suggests the use of categories, which as I’ve already mentioned, I need to improve.
  7. Irregular Publishing Frequency: Another thing I used to struggle with and attempted to fix a while ago by setting a regular schedule. I make at least one post a week, and I always post on Sunday. Unfortunately, I don’t post nearly often enough to really build up a lot of traffic.
  8. Mixing Topics: Color me guilty here, and while I know that a blog that serves a certain niche tends to fair better, I have difficultly settling on such a niche. However, several recurring themes have emerged here that have narrowed the focus of the blog considerably, which I think helps.
  9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss: A good point, but I don’t think this has that much to do with usability (at least, from a visitor’s standpoint).
  10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service: Check. No blogspot or livejournal for me. However, a colleague recently suggested that I make the weblog the front page of the site. That might work out, but that would also pretty much bury the other content on this site (which is more than just a weblog, after all, though most other areas of the site aren’t updated very often anymore). Then again, the previously mentioned tendency for information aggregators to subvert top down navigation structures might make that a moot point (i.e. most people get to the Asimov area through a search engine, not by navigating from the homepage). Getting back to the point at hand, I think this is somewhat valid, though I think TypePad blogs do not suffer from this just yet.

Another extremely useful resource was this blog usability study, which touches on many of the things above (and in greater detail). I’d go into this one a bit more, but this post is long enough as it is. Perhaps more on this subject later in the week.

Spam Fighting Update

Weblogs / /

A few weeks ago, I installed Movable Type 3.2. One of the supposed big enhancements was improved tools for fighting spam in both comments and trackbacks. At the time, I wasn’t sure how well it would work, but after a few weeks, I can say that this system is great! Not a single spam comment or trackback has made it through (several hundred attempts were blocked) – and this is with almost no configuration on my part (much better than MT Blacklist on all fronts). This is mostly due to the inclusion of the SpamLookup plugin in the release. If you run a Movable Type blog, I highly recommend upgrading to 3.2 or at least installing SpamLookup.

Trackbacks

1 Comment / Weblogs / /

I took some time out this weekend to upgrade Movable Type to the newly released 3.2 version. Despite appearing to be a small number increase in versions, it actually contains a huge amount of enhancements and new functionality, much of it focusing on combating spam.

Not so long ago, I took some measures to deal with comment spam, but trackback spam almost immediately picked up and the options for dealing with trackback spam were, at the time, very limited. For those unaware of the concept, the trackback system is a way for a website (it was designed for blogs, but could be applied to any website) to list out other websites that link to the first website. This is accomplished by allowing people to “ping” an entry, thereby alerting that blog that someone has linked to that entry. The site receiving the ping typically displays the trackback information (typically including a title, a link, and a short excerpt) below the entry. It’s an open system, meaning that anyone can ping any site they want, even if they haven’t linked to that site. And that’s why the spammers love it.

After getting hit by a few hundred spam trackbacks one week, I decided to completely disable trackbacks on my blog, but I found that my options were limited. There was no easy way to do so, though I did eventually find a way that was easier than going back to every entry and disabling it manually. Then Six Apart announced that they were working on the 3.2 release and that it would include all sorts of ways to deal with trackback spam. For one, they’ve included a quick and easy way to disable all trackbacks (without having to resort to fiddling with the database directly), but they’ve also included some interesting spam filters which appear to be working well.

It seems to be working well so far, but I’m still considering whether or not to keep trackbacks. Aside from the spam, there are a lot of other issues with it. It’s not like everyone uses it. In the past few years, I’ve been linked by other blogs many times, but I’ve only gotten something like 5-10 trackbacks (and I lost several when I upgraded my database). But the whole experience has got me thinking about open systems and the potential for abuse. On the internet, it seems like such systems are almost always ruined by spam. It would be a shame if a service like del.icio.us were ruined by spam, but at least it isn’t quite as open to blatant abuse as trackbacks were, so perhaps there’s a chance.

Five Years of Kaedrin Blog

Weblogs / /

Yes, you read correctly. I started this blog a little over 5 years ago. Of course, it was much different back then and there have been some periods of inactivity, but the blog in it’s current form pretty much began about 2 years ago. It was about that time that I resolved to post at least once a week, a schedule I’ve held to pretty well and even exceeded for a while. Unfortunately, I’ve mostly regressed to the once a week schedule, which is part of the reason this blog has never really caught on (in terms of readers and links), though I have built up a small and loyal following (which I’m grateful for).

One thing that’s become more and more prevalent here is that I’ll latch onto a concept and explore it from several different angles. Over the past few years, a few thematic threads have been consistently drawn, notably including the need of moderation and tradeoffs (which is part of the reason I identify with Bruce Schneier’s approach to security as a series of tradeoffs) and how self-organization can aid in information aggregation. Naturally, there are some topics (movies, in particular) which I can usually fall back on when the idea well runs dry (or when I lack the motivation to produce something more weighty). In fact, one of the things I wrote about this year was just how difficult it is to run a popular blog. Never having written for a popular blog, it’s mostly speculation, but I suspect that I’d have a reaction similar to Steven Den Beste‘s “Screw this, I’m only going to write about Anime from now on!”

Anyway, since one of the major frustrations about running a blog is that all your hard work essentially smolders in the largely unvisible archives, here are some of the best entries from the past year (all of my best entries from the past 5 years are collected here, and of course the archives are also worth pursuing as well if you really enjoy what you read):

It’s been a reasonably good year, though I feel like the good content has been declining a bit recently. Motivation isn’t especially high lately either, but blogging is all about ups and downs, so I expect to come out of this soon. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the archives and let me know if I missed anything…