Category: Weblogs

I’ve changed the comment process slightly as recommended in Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog. Comments will show up in a normal browser window instead of a popup.

I am so bummed. I just found spam in the comments of one of my posts. I deleted it, of course. It just goes to show you don’t have to have a high-traffic weblog to get spam. I suppose I will have to track down the articles I have been seeing about how to defeat comment spam.

Yesterday, the writer of J-Walk Blog announced he was discontinuing his excellent weblog. Today, he stated that the emails and posts about his decision made him reconsider. I am so glad that I took the time to send him email yesterday about how much I had enjoyed his weblog over the past few months since I found it. Now, if he would just add a comments feature.

I finally decided to figure out how to download my server logs, and then wrote a small Perl program to help filter out some of the dross. Then I engaged in the time-honored tradition of looking at the referral search terms. I am sure that the person who was looking for bareback riding video was very disappointed. The person who was looking for “sunset sheltie cave creek” was obviously in search of something very specific. However, I am truly baffled by the person who was looking for an orange flannel shirt. Why would anyone look here for an orange flannel shirt? Why would anyone want an orange flannel shirt?

Right before I went to New Mexico, I was editing some changes to my sidebar information for this weblog to get rid of a problem that showed up in MSIE. Although I had saved my templates to my desktop machine, I managed to overwrite the important one in the process. I discovered this right after I overwrote the index template with a default version. So I salvaged what I could until I had time to fix it. I didn’t have time to put in everyting including my photo, the recent comments list, and the categories list.

A rainy day gave me a little time to work on it this afternoon. Thanks to “ETC.”:http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/, I didn’t have to do as much recoding as I had feared I would, since I used the comments code and categories code from the generous examples of code at that site. I wish I had found Jennifer’s site before I coded the stuff the first time.

Bloglines is a web-based aggregator that I am trying out. So far I am quite pleased: it has a simple, clean interface, and a speedy response time. One nice feature is that it allows you to both import and export via opml files, so you can use it when away from your regular computer, even if you prefer another aggregator for your desktop. Bloglines describes itself as:

Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregation system. Many blogs and newsfeed services publish RSS feeds, special files containing the content of the site formatted for easy parsing. Bloglines allows people to subscribe to these feeds. Once subscribed, Bloglines periodically checks the feed for changes or additions.

I added a few additional Movable Type features to the sidebar. There is now a list of the various categories for posts. If you click on this category, you will see all the posts for that category. This way you can see all my photos at once for example.

There is also a list of the last few comments made in the comments section. This is to encourage people to make comments (don’t make me beg, people) and to remind me when someone has requested a reply or clarification. You do not need to leave an email address or webpage url if you don’t want to, though I would like to see your name.
Continue reading Changes to sidebar and elsewhere

I’ve spent the day loading the data from my Coffee and Oranges weblog archives into Movable Type. The format can be found at Coffee and Oranges. You can search both Five Acres with a View (this weblog) and Coffee and Oranges (my old weblog) using the search box on the sidebar.

Photodude in a comment suggested that it was better to save all structural information and just delete the weblog. While thinking about this approach, I found php scripts to do most of this at Virtual Venus with their
Multiple Blog Suite.

I didn’t know that Avedon was posting in her other weblog until she linked to my photo of the sunset the other day. Her most active weblog is The Sideshow.