Then each went to his own home

And now to something completely different (No, I won’t post cat photos now)

Trackbacks are out, unfortunately. Probably due to a misuse of spammers a lot of blogs have closed their trackback ping urls.
However, as I want to know what is currently written about my articles: criticism, praise or different views or whatever, I need to somehow track new referrers to my blog. I tried different solutions that all weren’t satisfying:

• I tried to skim through my awstats statistics but it was a pain to extract the new trackbacks from the old ones. Awstats way of displaying referrers is ok to have an idea of how my visitors reach my site but it falls short in showing me new referrers.
• I created a watch list at technorati, but it seems to track just a portion of the whole cake.

I ended up writing a python script for it. As a beginner in python, programming this task was easy enough to have a good result in small time.
In the danger of presenting the 1324th solution to this problem I hereby present my script. If you already have got a solution I’d be interested since I didn’t find any service or blog post concerning this problem. (more…)

Finally I moved my blog from Movabletype to Wordpress. This because we use blogs at the company where I work and we wanted a free open source blogger we could offer our customers. So to learn Wordpress I just moved my blog.. It was a bunch of work, the import of the posts was easy, but then to style up the site and integrate my tools (if you care: I created a separate page template for these pages, then in the post I put just the url of the PHP script I wanted to call and in the page template I did an include of that particular script) was a bunch of work..
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On my “recent” two entries about comment spam I stated the actions I wanted to take against the comment spam.
The solution, at the moment:

• Changed the position of my comment-script (as suggested). Resulting to that actionIn the last two months I had 47 error hits (404) on /mt/mt-comments.cgi. That means that this action prevented 47 spams
• Installed Brad Choates MTDSBL Plugin. Since this plugin deletes comments coming from not trustworthy ips (that is: open proxies), I don’t have statistic info on that.
• Installed Jay Allens MT-Blacklist. And this plugin finally saves my days:
  
  Of the over 500 comment spams, 60 comments have been moderated because they contain too many links, I had to “despam” them (updates sent to the central MT-Blacklist server). On the first days, I had to despam quite a few comments but in the last two weeks, just one comment-spam wave hit me. About 3 comments finally came “through” so they appeared on my page.

So, in the end, I am content with these three techniques working together. Ok, I have to admit that I rather have any comments on my sites (3 so far) so the best action would have been to block all comments :-)

Still in battle to fight my comment spam. See my previous posts on that subject.
The movable type plugin from Brad Choate did just half the work. Interestingly it just blocked half the spams. After each non-approved spam, the spammer sent another spam through a non-blacklisted relay.. :-) In a way fighting this is fun, but in a way I’d like to do more serious things!

I now installed Jay Allens MT-Blacklist and it looks promising. It also fights trackback pings and since trackback ping spamming hits me since yesterday, I’m looking quite forward to see this movabletype-blacklist-plugin doing some good work.

This is an update of my previous link-spammer-entry.

Since renaming the comment-script-filename doesn’t really do it (well, in a way I expected that), I installed Brad Choates MT-DSBL Movable Type plugin (very very easy to install). It seems to work since I tested to add a comment via anonymizer (a free anonymizer proxy) and the comment is set for moderation now..

P.S: There has been set up a domain&website for anti-nofollow enthusiast!

Ok, I’ve spent several hours to get MTEmbedImage (a thumbnail tool for Movabletype) working, so I thought I’ll share it with the world.

The stumbling blocks were these:

• The basename of MTEmbedImage is from the Movabletype directory, and not from the blog (like someone stated in the comments of MTEmbedImage)
• When I copy-pasted some code into the textarea of Movabletype, then it ended up utf8-encoded. I just saw this when I copy-pasted it into my editor to write an email concerning this plugin that didn’t work..

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This is my new Homepage now. You know, for a webcentered guy like me that is something..! For a long time I resisted that blog movement thingie. I thought these are all people that don’t have real life friends but want to express their feelings and thus they are doing this via the web.
It took a while to appreciate that new form of information flow.