shwango! blog
life, love and some other stuff…

Archive for the 'bloglife' Category

Test post from ScribeFire

Ok, I hate test posts, but you need ‘em!  I’m testing ScribeFire right now.  Seems ok to me - and I’m not happy with the WordPress editor.

Note: You can do away with the default “powered by” in the settings - click the arrows on the left.

The thing I really dig about ScribeFire is that it’s a Firefox extension so it’s always available without firing up an application.

Ping

Ok, I’m still here!

Once again I guess I’m falling into blogrot… I do have stuff to say and want to say it, but I guess I’ve been to lazy or busy to post.

Anyway, I’ll try to post more often - famous last words, eh!

I’m a “Cultural Creative”

Just as Aaron posted, I too will use the “World View Quiz” to post something!

cultural-creative.jpg

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Cultural Creative

69%

Romanticist

69%

Existentialist

56%

Idealist

56%

Postmodernist

56%

Materialist

50%

Fundamentalist

44%

Modernist

38%

Auto save, anyone?

I feel Adam’s pain! The TEXTAREA does generally suck. Maybe someone will come up with a great ajax application for this - at least for an “auto save” feature. I’d say I’d do it, but the moment I say I will, it’ll be years before I get around to it!

By the way, I’m not fond of the term “ajax” for these “new” apps, and “webplications” is even worse! But I’m glad to see folks finally catching up to me! ;-) Maybe I didn’t have the cool ideas like Google, but I knew this stuff was good!

Closing comments!

If you’ve tried to post a comment recently you probably got a 404 message. Due to the amount of comment spam, I just got fed up with it and renamed the file. Now I’ve finally had time to rebuild my MT install to use the renamed script.

To help prevent future comment spam, I’ve closed comments on posts older than 30 days. This sucks, but I had no choice, especially since it was killing the server! Thanks to David Raynes simple script, I was able to close all the comments in a snap. Then I found Alan Carroll’s MTCloseComments plugin so that every time I post an entry or rebuild my main page, posts older than 45 days have their comments closed. Thanks guys for some great plugins! I’ll be adding the “nofollow” plugin soon as well.

Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist has been great, I just can’t keep it updated enough to block the spam and new ones pop up so much, it’s insane!

It’s unfortunate that so many bloggers have to resort to this since it sort of puts a time limit on interaction. I still get comments and emails about older posts that spark new ideas.

Damn blog spammers! (again)

I’m turning off HTML in comments for a while as some others are doing. I’d hate to turn off comments all together, but I may have to do that too. MT-Blacklist is great, but not 100% if I don’t update the signatures all the time.

What’s playing now…

Using httpQ with winamp, I now post the current track I’m listening to over on the side bar. It’s not 100% real time yet - wasted’s resources are a little low, but I’ve got a cron job running every minute to update the text file I’m including via SSI - yup, server side includes are alive and well! (The cron job calls a little perl script that queries my laptop via httpQ. Yeah, it could all be in the cron job, but I added a little logic for offline, etc.) I’ll probably put it in php later on today, but just wanted to hack something quick and dirty. I also hacked a similar perl script that I run locally to put fav track titles into a file - since most of the day I stream from 97X or other online stations it’s nice to have a reference.

I can’t remember where I saw it first, but I found out that iTunes has an SDK for Windows - “iTunes COM for Windows SDK“. So I might hack up some code to do the same thing with iTunes. And maybe put all my mp3 from iTunes in MySQL or something. (I want to do the same with my DVDs using the Amazon API, but have yet to actually get passed the “that would be cool” stage.)

And maybe someday I’ll get shwango radio running again…

For some reason I feel the need to push my favs out to the world! (I think that’s an idea shared by many!)

Blogger burnout?

Maybe I too am suffering from “blogger burnout” as 0xDECAFBAD posted recently. (”Dork Funk” is a great title, by the way.)

There’s a lot I’ve been wanting to post about, but just haven’t had the time or energy or something…

Topics I intended to post about…

1. Perl and XML - nice and easy hacks!
2. Jen’s family visiting two weeks ago. (Jen’s cousin is visiting now.)
3. Enterprise web application development and version control.
4. Web/J2EE Java development and Eclipse. (Tomcat 5 is cool too!)
5. The Da Vinci Code and the other Dan Brown books.

Probably more too, but that’s what’s been in my head for the last few months.

Blog spammers and MT-Blacklist

I know it was mentioned to me before, but I didn’t install MT-Blacklist until today. The blog spam just was getting out of control! Let’s see how well it works!

Doesn’t make sense…

I haven’t posted a lot because I’ve got too much stuff to post about! OK, I know it doesn’t quite make sense, but trust me - it’s the truth… hopefully a real post will soon follow…

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