as you can see from the funky wide-screen image, everything starts to work. i’ve installed already the essential software and now i’ll go to bed, so i can then move all the data tomorrow…

since it’s so easy to install plugins in wordpress (upload, activate, finished), i’ve installed some more plugins here:

first: dropdown-archives. they unclutter my sidebar without a single line of coding. it compacts the full archives into a nice dropdown-field. i feel like noone uses the archives, but still felt like letting them stay in the sidebar.

the second one is more for safari users (because it degrades nicely for other browsers): the safari-search-field widget. it adds a search field to the blog that looks and behaves like the one safari-users have in their top-left corner (unless you installed inquisitor 3). if you use another browser it looks like a normal search field, as you can see below.

[both via wordpress widgets]

oh, and as you can see in the top-left corner: ich bin nicht elitär :-)

Technorati Tags: css, design, wordpress

i’m updating the site on different ends, correcting importing errors, and assigning categories to post that haven’t been categorized. so bear with me (and ignore the possible quirks in the feed for some days), everything will resume to normal state soon.

for rouge, the site now has a favicon, thankts to the favicon manager for wordpress, and cocomments is now integrated thanks to the really cool plugin from david.

Technorati Tags: cocomment, favicon, plugins

in the last few weeks movable type stressed the server more and more. after reading a bit into it, i found out, that wordpress is much fancier and much less resource-hungry as a blog platform.
and after trying out an install wordpress on habi.gna.ch, which really took less than five minutes, i was sold. now wordpress is powering habi.gna.ch and the blog is going to migrate to the root directory. everything else (pics, cv, my calendars and such) is still gonna stay where it is, and maybe be integrated into wordpress (which works quite well as a CMS) sometimes.
i’m still tinkering with the way of redirectong the old movable type archives to the imported posts, but this still has time.
if you’d like, you can change your feed addresses, but i will install a redirect-rule and leave everyting where it is.
after some time, when google and co. picked up everything, i’m gonna delete or inactivate /blog…

for your convenience [1] here are the new feed addresses:
for the posts: https://habi.gna.ch/feed/ and for the comments: https://habi.gna.ch/comments/feed/

[1] i also really like the URIs which are generated by wordpress. nice and clean (see the archives, for example…)

Technorati Tags: migration, movabletype, wordpress

oh, and just a quick note: the comments are down for some mysterious reason. i’m on it.

thanks sigi for noticing (oh, and what happened to your content?)

update: the comments-script nearly took down existenz.gna.ch (again), so someone chmodded it to 000. i’m nearly ready to switch to wordpress, if this goes on, i don’t want to stress the server that much [1]. for the moment i implemented the tinyturing-test from staggernation. so all commenters must now enter a random letter into the field when they want to post a comment, as seen in the image on the right.

i personally hate that kind of test (also captchas!), but it seems, it’s necessary to take some strain away from the server…

[1]: as far as i understood, wp is much easier on the resources it uses from the server…

i just cannot seem to stop it!

my blog is sometimes so majorly hit by spam comments, that chris sent me an email saying that i strain the server too much (technospeak: “ca. load 20”).

even renaming the relevant files did not help, so it had to take more drastic measures. [1]

i’ve installed a plugin for MT3.2 which tries adds a hidden input field and then obfuscates the code through some javascript trickery.

because that works before the spam comments get submitted to the system this should lessen the strain on the server a bit (i hope!).

and since i can leave comments, everything seems to work fine, so i’ll just have to wait if it really works with the server load…

[1] if that’s not gonna help now i need to start doing something with captchas, but i really detest them!

technorati tags: comments, movabletype, spam

yesterday evening chris, the admin of the gna-server informed me that my trackback-scripts stressed the server quite a bit.

and because i got a massive hit of spam in the morning (more than 100 spam comments that passed the junk-filter) i decided to do, what i’ve should have done a long time ago: rename my comment- and trackback-scripts so they cannot be easily guessed remotely

first, i used the direction posted here at the photoblogs-wiki and adapted them a bit:

first, i renamed

…the comment script. A good proportion of comment spam is generated automatically; i.e. a spam site will try to automatically contact your comment script which normally resides at:

http://yourURL/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi

If you rename the script you stop the automatic spam in its tracks. You can rename this file anything you like (e.g. death-to-spambots.cgi) but you a) need to retain the cgi extenstion (I think), and b) also need to make a change to your mt-config.cgi file (which resides in your cgi-bin directory. You need to look for the following block of code

# CommentScript mt-comments.pl

# TrackbackScript mt-tb.pl

# SearchScript mt-search.pl

# XMLRPCScript mt-xmlrpc.pl

# ViewScript mt-view.pl

… and make two changes. First, uncomment the first line by removing the hash symbol; i.e.

CommentScript mt-comments.pl

… and second, change the filename to match your renamed version; e.g.

CommentScript death-to-spambots.cgi

this means, that the scripts still work, but under another name [1], so noone should be able to just guess their location. but as a human person nothing changes, because you comment through the comment interface and get redirected to the correct script. the problem of this solution is now, that the spammers generate massive amounts of “404: File not found”-errors in the logs, because the original scripts are not there anymore.

to prevent this, i then implemented the Junk slow-down-solution posted over at the solid wall of code, which consists of throwing the junk-bots into a loop when they guess the original-file destination.

so if you now go to the original mt-comments.cgi on my server, you (or better your spam-script) has to wait 30 seconds before it gets to see an error-message. this should at least slow down the junk scripts and put a bigger burden on the junkers than it does on the server my blog resides on.

the whole setup seems to work quite fine.

before renaming the scripts i got around 5 comment spams per minute (!) and now it already has slowed down quite a bit, the last comment spam (as i write it) has been more than 2 hours ago and the one before already four hours ago.

see yourself in the screenshot on the left.

[1]: i’m not gonna tell you, leave a comment to see for yourself. :-)

technorati tags: code, junk, movabletype

after reading a lot of buzz about cocomment (explained a wee bit here :-) i thought it’s about time to jump the bandwagon.

and now, after adding a little bit of code to the individual entry archive this blog is now officially pimped -ehrm- cocomment enabled.

have no idea what i’m talking about? i only start to get the implication of cocomment, but let me explain it here, as far as i get it: up to now, whenever i commented on a blog/site somewhere, i had to remember to visit the site later on or add the comment feed to my feedreader to not loose that particular conversation string. cocomment should be able to overcome that, because it enables a lot of sites (even flickr!) to “send” the comments back to one central location. i’m now able to track those comments in a central location and follow conversations more, thus participating more (talk about positive feedback loop).

so, if you want to see in which conversations i take part or want to stalk me you should look here or add this feed to your preferred feed-reader.

but now it’s officially too late, so i wish you all a good night!

[via the blogoshpere, steph and matthias]

technorati tags: blog, bloggers, blogosphere, cocomment, rss

chregu recently mentioned that he wants a feed for every blog (actually for every blog software…)

so i’ve modified my already present comment-feed, which i’ve been using to manage my comments (e.g archive nicely, edit, despam…) into a publicly available format, for all of you to consume.

the comment feed can be accessed via this file: comments.xml.

the full code is as follows [1]:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”<$MTPublishCharset$>”?>

<rss version=”2.0″

xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”

xmlns:sy=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/”

xmlns:admin=”http://webns.net/mvcb/”

xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”>

<channel>

<title><$MTBlogName remove_html=”1″ encode_xml=”1″$> Comments</title>

<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>

<description>Comments</description>

<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>

<dc:creator><MTEntries lastn=”1″><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></MTEntries></dc:creator>

<dc:date><MTEntries lastn=”1″><$MTEntryDate format=”%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S”$><$MTBlogTimezone$></MTEntries></dc:date>

<admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource=”http://www.movabletype.org/?v=<$MTVersion$>” />

<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>

<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>

<sy:updateBase>2000-01-01T12:00+00:00</sy:updateBase>

<MTComments lastn=”15″ sort_order=”descend”><MTCommentEntry>

<item>

<title><$MTCommentAuthor encode_xml=”1″$> on ‘<$MTEntryTitle encode_xml=”1″$>'</title>

<link><$MTEntryLink encode_xml=”1″$></link>

<description>

<![CDATA[

<$MTCommentAuthor$> @ <$MTCommentDate format=”%d. %B %Y, %H:%M”$>]]><br />

(<a href=”mailto:<$MTCommentEmail$>”>mail</a>, <a href=”<$MTCommentURL$>”>URL</a>)

<br />

—<br />

<$MTCommentBody encode_xml=”1″$>

</description>

</item>

</MTCommentEntry></MTComments>

</channel>

</rss>

so, if you want to add a comment feed to your MT installation, proceed like this. go to your mt.cgi (the main admin), add a new template, give it the name you want (comments.xml works nicely) and paste the code above into the Template Body field.

[1]: didn’t code it myself, but forgot where i’ve gotten it, it’s half a century ago (or so…)

technorati tags: comments, feed, rss

i’ve updated my blog to MT 3.2 [1] and now i lost all my customizations to the sidebar and stuff like that [2]. good that i documented the odds and ends, so i might be able to rebuild it rather fast. in the moment you must bear with the rather terrible view on /blog when you visit in the browser. if you access my blog through the feed, you shouldn’t notice a thing.

oh, and this is also a good opportunity to add some more plugins and bits and pieces here and there. for example, i updated the root index.html a bit [3] and deleted some unnecessary directories that were just lying around.

[1] mostly to get rid of the ever-increasing comment spam. lately not even the now deceased MT-Blacklist was able to cope with it..,

[2] i shouldn’t have “refreshed” the templates without thinking twice.

[3] no matter how you resize your browser window, the text is centered in it. done with some css-tweakery

i’m starting to really dig those social web-apps.

one the last discoveries of mine is upcoming.org [1]. upcoming. org is a social event calendar driven by people like you and me. people can manage their events there and i have a neat way of showing some of my upcoming stuff i’m planning to attend or just got in my date book.

in addition to that, i can subscribe to events for a certain city i like (as in “bern“, “zürich“, “tashkent” or “trachselwald“). or subscribe to events of a certain person, no matter city they take place. the subscription is possible as an rss-feed or as as a ical-calendar-file. so if you like, you can add the calendars of your buddies to your ical and see what events they go to and take part or start to stalk them :-)

i’ve started to add some venues and events in bern and hope this starts to catch up in my ‘hood :-)

and i also thought this might be a nice way of “collecting” the people that want to come to certain meetings. let’s see if it starts to take off a bit more. if you add yourself to upcoming.org, send me a note and we can start to share our events…

which leads me to the title of this post: “… in the sidebar” [2]. since the events can be shown to any site with the upcoming.org badge, i’ve added my next 5 events to the sidebar. with some css-tinkering it also looks like it belongs in the sidebar. so if you want to see what i plan to to in the next few weeks, then you can now peek there (but i’m not gonna tell you stuff that i plan to visit the einstein exhibit with nina this weekend, so no stalking me…).

[1] which got bought by yahoo yesterday, which made every news-site post about that, which made me tinker around with it a bit more. so it’s actually a re-discovery, i can’t remember when i first encountered it. what i know is, that i encountered it much later than b. (just look at my or his user number…).

[2] time for all you rss-feed-readers to visit my site

technorati tags: rss, social web-apps, upcoming.org