Something is wrong with my RSS/Atom feeds. I’m not sure what’s up, but for some reason the feed does not have any content in the items even though the blog has updated content. I’m still trying to investigate the problem.

Tags: blog, feeds, RSS

The act of maintaining ones weblog via proxy or more specifically, using an API feature from a remote service, such as the one from del.icio.us, to automatically post to your blog.

I’ve been using the daily blog posting feature of del.icio.us for a few years. It started out sparse, but admittedly the daily link dump has dominated my blogging activities (as you can see from the archives).

I’m sure my wife and friends can attest to how many times I’ve stated, “I need to blog more”, but the quick “select text”, right-click, “post to del.icio.us” is just too damn easy. Perhaps if I state my ambition more publicly it would inspire me to post more “manual”.

After maintaining this blog for over seven years I owe it to myself.

Nah… Lazy Blogging rules! I’ll do both.

Much of my blogging these days has been taken over by the links and quick comments I have been posting to the del.icio.us social bookmarks manager. So I decided to completely mesh what I’m doing @ del.icio.us with my blog.

The integration process is actually fairly simple with the help of the experimental daily blog posting interface found in del.icio.us (@/settings/USER/daily). Basically, you enter the XML-RPC interface entry point from your blog, some user credentials and the process will deposit into your blog any links posted to your del.icio.us account in the last 24 hours — complete with extended comments and tags. Nice!

Much better than the feed splicing I have been utilizing with FeedBurner — although that is admittedly cool too.

Now, if I could find a mechanism to auto summarize the daily links into relevant titles for each post, instead of the standard ‘links for yyyy-mm-dd’ title template available now, I’d be delighted!

Sweet! Dan Grigsby just informed me that he created a Windows Installer for my del.icio.us Context Menu script. Aside from how clean and professional Dan’s installer makes the context menus, you can also use Add/Remove Programs control panel in Windows to remove the menu.

Thanks Dan!

I decided to consolidate many of my XML feeds using the excellent FeedBurner service. The process was very simple using Matt’s straight forward tips on redirecting existing feeds to FeedBurner.

In addition, I opted to use FeedBurner’s Link Splicer to include daily dumps of my del.icio.us bookmarks into my main feed. So if you’re reading this via a news aggregator you’ll notice the post flow increase.

Over the past six or so months, I’ve found it to be faster to post quick annotations using my del.icio.us right-click context menu hack (shameless plug). So much of what I formally posted in my main blog now gets tagged and shared with del.icio.us. This is especially useful when I’m short on time.

Let me know if you’d rather have a separate blog-only feed option.

BTW, Due to DoS attacks I had to disable commenting and trackbacks on this site (again). So, send comments via email.

Last night I decided to upgrade Movable Type to version 3.01D. The upgrade went very smoothly. I’m very impressed with the seamlessness the MT crew created with this upgrade. Overall the system feels much faster too.

I think the hardest part was backing up my current installation and database, which really wasn’t that hard.

I’m attempting to re-enable commenting and trackbacks, but I think I have to rebuild my site to get the TypeKey registration working correctly.

I may have to experiment with some of the older plug-ins I have running as well, but so far I haven’t encountered any show-stoppers.

The Seattle Times has an article saying Bill Gates may become a blogger (via Anil).

“Yes, the world’s richest man may start his own blog, one of those online diaries that have been the rage among techies for the past three or four years.”

As funny as it is to think of a secret Bill Gates Blog, I think it also sends a clear message to corporations at large that there’s viability in utilizing blogging to connect with customers, partners and employees.

Indeed, there’s nothing new here and MSFT is well known for coming late to the party, but when they do arrive, they make a strong showing. Even without the latest Billy Blog rumor, the visibility of a MSFT Blogging initiative is evident in the ever-growing list of Microsoft Bloggers.

Weblogs, Inc. new Blogging Baby weblog is like Slashdot for Parents (sans all the MSFT bashing ;-)

Of course there are a few RSS feeds too — no Atom feed though.

I couldn’t take it anymore! Last night I took Burningbird’s suggestion and turned-off commenting on any post older than 30 days. I may turn commenting off entirely if this weekend is any indication of the logarithmic growth in comment spamming.

Comment Spammers… why do you bother? You’re not getting any extra PageRank points from your messages due to the external URL redirects MT 2.661 has in place. Plus, thanks to MT-Blacklist, your polution is trashed almsot as quickly as it’s posted.

So I can’t imagine your getting any value from this effort.

Update:
Even after I disabled commenting on old posts, the spammers continued to pound away at the server, yet nothing was actually getting posted.

Pointless (again).

However, this time I decided to let Apache help me rid the server of these digital cockroaches.

A simple .htaccess hack was in order.

I added the following LIMIT Apache directive, which applies only to the HTTP POST method on the mt-comments.cgi file:

<Files mt-comments.cgi>
<Limit POST>
deny from all
</Limit>
</Files>

This effectively (and unfortunately) disables commenting for MovableType at the Apache server level.

I haven’t tested this thoroughly, but it should only disable posting, editing and deleting comments. If not, I’ll fix it, but for now I shouldn’t be getting anymore comments spam.

I must have missed this, but back in December 2003, Johann Schmidt released the latest version of MTshell, which as the subject says is a CLI for MovableType.

“MTshell is a perl program which allows you to maintain your Movable Type blog from a command line prompt. If you’re a Linux/Unix user and run an instance of Movable Type on a server which you have shell access to you’ll probably be interested.”

I like it!