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.

latestReferrers.py

The script reads from an apache access log file, counts how many times a referrer occurs and writes the output in RSS 2.0 format using PyRSS2Gen. Have a look at my referrer feed to see how this looks. The the script needs and no javascript, no database and no cron job (as it is directly called by the http request). All it needs is an apache log file.
Now, apache log files mostly are log rotated, that means working on the latest log file just covers the last day or the last week (this depends on how much traffic your website has). This somehow is a problem as I don’t want referrer urls showing up again after each log rotation.
Now the neat thing about rss aggregators is that they just show up new items so you won’t see referrers over and over again. I just have to subscribe to my latestReferrer.py rss feed and tell the aggregator that it shouldn’t notice me if the feed has changed and voilà, I’ve got a poor mans solution to my “new referrers” problem.

If you want to install latestReferrers.py: put the python scripts into a directory where apache grants the right to execute (i.e. cgi-bin), edit the few variables at the start (regex of urls/agents you don’t want to show up in your referrers, number of times a url has to show up in the access log so it shows up in you rss, etc.), subscribe to your new feed via a feed aggregator and then leave a comment here.. :-)
The code is published under LGPL.

Other solutions

• reeferss offers a “latest referrers RSS feed” (requires javascript on your site). No installation required. Neat!

• it is PHP. I am much more familiar with PHP than with perl
• it is more “community spirited”. The documentation is a wiki site. I hope there will be many plugins and stuff in the future
• I think it’s better structured. I have not yet looked at the code but just from using this it feels more logic (that is: to me, a web application programmer.. :-)
• I can manage my pages (as my about and creations page). With Movabletype I hacked the blog into some wrapper just to include my static pages. Now with wordpress managing this pages I can have comments on these pages too and I can alter them from the webfrontend.
• Adding a post into multiple categories is much faster than in Movabletype. And I need multiple categories desperately (at least three per post..)
• I have “edit” links to every post also in the frontend. That helps a lot.
• The posts seem to be valid HTML automatically. In MT I had problems all the time to keep my pages valid HTML

Disadvantages of wordpress:

• I cannot have static html pages. I miss that quite much.
• The user interface is not as polished as in Movabletype. Deleting multiple post or just altering a post and watching the frontend doesn’t run as smooth as in MT.

• 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 :-)

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.

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!

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..

Finally, here is my code:


<div class="photo">
<MTEmbedImage basename="../photos/archives/[MTEntryExcerpt].jpg"
default="default" height="160" thumbsuffix="-160">
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink valid_html="1"$>" class="noborder">
<img src="/mt/<MTEmbedImageThumbFilename>" alt="<$MTEntryTitle$>"
height="<MTEmbedImageThumbHeight>" width="<MTEmbedImageThumbWidth>" />
</a>
</MTEmbedImage>
</div>