Miscellaneous Blog

Patrick Crozier wants blogs with RSS feeds to include the full text of the blog posting rather than just an extract, so the entire posting can be read through an RSS aggregator such as Bloglines. He makes the valid point that it makes postings easier to read if you don’t have to click on a link to get the full posting. It’s even more useful for some people who use RSS aggregators to slurp stuff up which they then read offline on the train or bus on the way to work.

Some commenters make the equally valid point that bloggers like to know their traffic, and want to make visitors actually click through onto their site; this would be very important for a site that’s dependant on advertising. Boing Boing has suffered from this, and now includes text ads in the RSS feed.

This blog is currently one of those that only displays the short extract, largely because I use the default template that came with Moveable Type. What’s the consensus of the three people and the cat who read this blog? Are you happy with the things as they are, or would you prefer the whole post in RSS? Or perhaps I should make the extracts longer, perhaps 50 words rather then 20?

I’ve switched the blogroll on the front page from blogrolling.com to bloglines, which I’ve been using as an online RSS aggregator for quite a while. Over the past months the blogs I’ve been reading and the ones on the blogroll have been getting further and further out of synch with each other. Quite a few blogs, particularly American political ones are now gone, and there are just as many new ones.

There are a few weblogs I read that don’t have RSS feeds which are temporarily absent, notably Electric Nose and The Gline. I’m going to have to pare down the old blogrolling one to resurrect them.

Tom Coates thinks that Trackback is dead.

I think it’s time we faced the fact that Trackback is dead. We should state up front – the aspirations behind Trackback were admirable. We should reassert that we understand that there is a very real need to find mechanisms to knit together the world of webloggers and to allow conversations across multiple weblogs to operate effectively. We must recognise that Trackback was one of the first and most important attempts to work in that area. But Nevertheless, we have to face the fact – Trackback is dead.

It has been killed by spam and by spammers – by the sheer horror of ping after ping pushing incest and bestiality links. It has been killed by the exploitation of human beings quite prepared to desecrate the work of tens of thousands of people in order that they should scrabble together a few coins. It has been killed by the experience of an inbox overwhelmed by the automated rape of our creative endeavours.

Trackback has been disabled on this site for several months. A spammer actually broke it, by posting so much trackback spam in one go that the site exceeded it’s disk quota and corrupted the database. I have since had little indication to fix it, and trackback will not be coming back in the forseeable future. It’s just not worth the hassle any more. Thanks to spammers, the cost to me in time and aggravation of supporting trackbacks is far more than their utility.

Comments are still hanging in there, just. I have considered getting rid of comments as well, since I got very few legitimate comments and rather too much spam. But recently I’ve had a couple of posts recently that have generated a significant (for me) number of comments, and for the moment, comments are still worth having.

For now.

Silkenray wonders aloud:

Apparently, most spousal visas for US citizens moving to the UK take one day to process.

Conversely, most spousal visas for UK citizens moving to the US take more than one year to process.

Add to this that the landing card for non UK citizens entering the UK is half the length of the landing card for US citizens entering the US.

Why is our system so f—ed up?

But our visa waiver form (do we even have one?) wouldn’t sound nearly as funny set to music.

Of course, if the British electorate makes the mistake of electing the Welsh vampire on May 5th, then we might end up with something as Kafkaesque and inhuman as America’s INS.

I’ve going to be out of town for a few days, with some gaming at Gypsycon in deepest Cambridgeshire. I hope to run the GURPS Kalyr adventure I’d intended to run last year. There’s also going to be an Ars Magica LARP, which sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun. A lot of other interesting-sounding games including Mage:Sorceror’s Crusade and Cyberpunk, although I don’t yet know which of those I’m going to be playing in.

I’ve pre-emptively disabled comments and trackbacks so that I don’t come back to find the weblog buried in comment spam. Normal comment service will be resumed in about a week’s time.

Two things wrong with the BBC2 drama The Rotters’ Club. Firstly the stereotypically negative portrayal of prog-rock (Why couldn’t we actually hear some of Tales from Topographic Oceans?) And why was the train from Birmingham to London hauled by a split-box ‘Peak’?

Moveable Type have just introduced a ‘nofollow’ plugin. This works for both 2.661 and 3.1, and adds the ‘nofollow’ tag to all links in comments; this magic tag will tell Google not to index the URL that appears in the comment. In theory, this will make comment spamming completely useless.

Checking my activity logs, I saw that I had 850 comments blocked by MT-Blacklist in the past 24 hours. God knows how much of my bandwidth these slime are consuming.

While the rest of us were celebrating Chrismas, the bottom-feeding slime of the internet were busy in their trailer parks. I had to delete four hundred comment spams from the same idiot, posted while I was offline from three days. Not a nice thing to come back to. I hope the spammer got a bad case of haemorrhoids for Christmas…

I’ve spent far too much time on BlogExplosion the past couple of weeks.

Amongst the sea of blogs of the kind cruelly parodied by The Ministry of Information, I have found one or three worth bookmarking. Three that are worth reading (to me at least) are the decidedly non-fundamentalist Alex Strikes Again, the very strange Praxis, who claims to be a time traveller from the future, and Ian MacAllen’s Imperfect Now, which has an interesting transport-related post proposing Cities without cars.

Not nearly enough prog rock blogs, though.

How not to pull a car out of a harbour. Not sure where or when this happened, but my guess is it’s somewhere in Scotland. (Link from Live From the Third Rail)