Then each went to his own home

Recently, on del.icio.us mailinglist, I asked the question “Does anyone know the database schema of del.icio.us?” .
I got a few private responses so I wanted to share the knowledge with the world.

The Problem: You want to have a database schema where you can tag a bookmark (or a blog post or whatever) with as many tags as you want. Later then, you want to run queries to constrain the bookmarks to a union or intersection of tags. You also want to exclude (say: minus) some tags from the search result.
(more…)

Now I could come up with political statements but, no.. :-)

Btw: Google Maps is quite cool. I long for the day when they arrive switzerland.. Using google maps you can even take a sightseeing tour.

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..
(more…)

I want to share some experiences I gained from using the javascript wysiwyg editor Helene. The editor is quite cool. It supports php and smarty highlighting. It’s a pity that neither I can reach the creator of this editor nor I can write to the helene mailing list (the email doesn’t come through: user not found). So I share here with you (whoever) some dos and dont’s:

• Don’t try to run Helene directly (that is, without the <iframe> indirection). I thought it would be easier and the integration would be more seamless but that wasn’t the case
• Helene has to run on the same server as your script. That is, because helene runs in the <iframe>, you have to write to the editor (that is: textarea) after reading a file and reading from the editor when posting the form (that is, you do that via onsubmit parameter of <form>). If helene runs on a different server (that is, the src-parameter of <iframe> points to a different server), javascript suppresses that for security reasons
• Read the HOWTO of helene. It spares you some headache (it deals with removing some newline characters from the input file)
• Don’t try to use <object> instead of <iframe>. I don’t remember exactly but I think ie had problems with <object>
• After reading from $_POST I had to
  
$source = $_POST['helene']
$source = stripslashes($source);
$source = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $source);


That’s it. I hope it helps someone. I surely hope that someone does some further improvements on this great editor.

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 :-)

No, neither
nor

I think that Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) as described on Adaptive Paths site sounds very promising. I was amazed when I tried out my gmail account at how smooth it runs. There are some other google betas that run on a similar technique. Well, I’m looking forward to see some neat web services growing. (Well, I’m thinking about putting into mine)

Well, it was just about two or three days ago when I realized, how cool del.icio.us is. I then added all my links I previously managed in a private Movabletype blog to my del.icio.us account.

Then, inspired by the amazing demo of Matt Biddulph I implemented “related del.icio.us” in this blog. You see it when you are in the individual entry archive view.
(more…)

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!

Well, recently I searched on google for “foaf“, search results restricted to switzerland. And, surprise, my foaf was on rank 7.. Well, I suppose this won’t stay long like this, so here my screenshot: