The internets and development tools

And I only have two links left, so I just drop ’em here so my linklist is clean again 🙂

  • Looking for a newspaper in another country? Try newspaperindex.com, a very useful resource if you are looking for local news.
  • Have you ever wondered why your life isn’t as exciting as you see in movies? Just visit Trailers for Everyday Life.

Goeie vraag

Waarom doet dit blog niet mee met Sargasso’s battle of the blogs?

  • Omdat eigengeilerij uit is?
  • Omdat de lijst met weblogs niet van mij is?
  • Omdat ik helemaal niet zit te wachten op veel bezoek?
  • Omdat ik m’n zooi toch ergens kwijt moet en dit misschien maar een rommelzolder is?
  • Omdat ik geen ambitie heb om een populair weblog te hebben?

Take your pick 🙂

Upgrade… eindelijk

Eindelijk is mijn site ge-upgrade naar de laatste WordPressversie. Dat houdt dus betere spamfilters (en weer comment) in, live search, een automatische flickr badge en betere archieven en een AJAX search. Maar vooral veel verbeteringen aan de achterkant waar u als bezoeker natuurlijk niets van ziet, maar verwacht de komende tijd wat meer updates in ieder geval. Ik heb er weer zin in.

Very good news for Drupal and WordPress!!!

On or around March 25, 2005 12:36 PM Chris Messina wrote this: #

I work for CivicSpace and helped create Spread Firefox. The choice to use CivicSpace for SFX was an important one and the right one because the tool fit the need.

In my discussions with Matt, we are working to come up with ways for open-source CMS’ like Drupal and WordPress to coexist and better comingle. It would be excellent, for example, if it were easier to port themes back and forth between the two so that you could run your own personal WordPress blog (as I do) but run your community with CivicSpace or Drupal and have the external (and internal) appearance be consistent for both admins and external visitors.

So Matt and I have been talking about how we can bring our user interfaces closer together so that the experience of moving between either tool is less jarring and more consistent. One real-world thing that’s happening as a result of our collaboration is that Drupal will be moving back to a separate admin UI, to be more consistent with WordPress. This will ultimately, or hopefully, lead to a more seamless upgrade path between WordPress and Drupal — so that you can start out with a personal blog and then scale up to a community when necessary, without having to unlearn or relearn a whole new UI. This improves the whole ecosystem of personal and community publishing.

Though the details are still hazy and is mostly talk at the moment, we are making progress. And since it’s my job to create a very positive user experience in Drupal (and by extension, CivicSpace), working with Matt completely makes sense. With the WP Foundation getting started up, I think that bringing our collective effort together will lead to a lot of really great things for the open source and blogging communities.

No follow, no interconnection

There is a lot of enthousiasm on the web about Googles steps to block comment spamming, by using the rel=”nofollow” attribute of links. That is, when you want to completely block any links originating from your website. And if spammers would stop posting their spam.

Sargasso is an informative site with a lot of commenters who nog only babble away, but also post valuable links and addons to our articles. Removing any links from the comments is a blow for the interconnected web. But there is another option, one that would be much more fun and that would leave the open structure intact. But it would require some manual labour from the search industry.

I think it would be much more efficient if spamsites were removed from the index directly. Set up a few hidden weblogs on several systems, watch what spam appears on those sites and remove the sites they link to completely.

You’d probably have to change sites every few weeks, but after a while, spammers will notice that plugging around their urls on weblogs will only result in removal. And therefor would become counterproductive.

Links in this article:

Google Blog: Preventing comment spam
Ben Hammersly: Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow
Simon Collison: Spammers get spannered by Google

+Eric Meyer: More Spam to Follow

Pretty WordPress Template

The WordPress community is definately heating up, more and more templates and plugins are released, I just found very cool template that is very ‘today’s style’.

I’m just a bit afraid that in a while the WordPress community will be populated with ‘Kubricks’, but then again, I might release this retro theme 😉

Disclaimers

There is a very strange weblog culture in the Netherlands, where a lot -and I mean a lot– of blog-readers think they’re entitled to ventilate their opinion no matter what. So telling a blog author that his website sucks, that his articles suck and that he deserves a shot in the neck seems a normal way of reacting to writings of someone else.

So moderate your comments you’d probably say? Well yes and no. Of course one doesn’t want to publish negative crap on one’s own website, but those ‘guests’ think that you are actually limiting their freedom of speech by moderating or deleting their vicious comments. And calling some friends to post some additional comments -sometimes a lot of comments- has been done as well. Those people might not realize that starting their own weblog might be the best shot they have at freedom of speech the way they like it.

I think that it is all about respect for the author and his writings, and not wether you agree or not. Disagreement may lead to some nice discussions that might very well be very entertaining and educational. Purely negative comments definately will not.

Deleting comments is a risk, also because some may interpret is as censorship. You need a site disclamer that they agree to as soon as they press that publish button. I read a nice one @ Seriocomic.

Read more