Posts Tagged ‘blosxom’

Migration to WordPress.

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Since I got the job to set up a blog for someone else, and since it was decided that the blog should be done with WordPress, I started to play around with this blogging package a few days ago. To learn how to set things up and make modifications, I tried to replicate the style of my own blog, which is based on the very simple blosxom. One thing came to another and finally I tried to import all of my blosxom blog entries into the new WordPress database – and here we are! I decided to switch to WordPress because:

  • it is maintained much more regularly,
  • it is much more comfortable to use,
  • it offers more and more useful plugins,
  • I hope it will make it easier to keep off spam,
  • it finally allowed me to make a tag cloud.

The latter can be marvelled at to the right. I am quite baffled at how closely the tag cloud represents those aspects of my life that I put into this blog in the course of the last six years. It will be interesting to see how the cloud develops in the future…

I decided against keeping the content in the same address location because of the cryptic cgi blabla that was part of the old address. Therefore I would like to ask you to update your bookmarks and feed readers to go to the new address: http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/frers/blog.

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Posted in tech | 4 Comments »

Measures against comment spam implemented.

Saturday, November 6th, 2004

Most of the time I spent on my blog during the last weeks has been spent removing comment spam. I thought that removing comment spam manually wouldn’t take up that much time but I was wrong. One argument against implementing an automatized solution to this problem was that they often block IP addresses or even ranges of IP addresses. This wouldn’t have been a good solution, since blocking these address ranges would keep other, legitimate users from accessing my blog. After being frustrated by another wave of comment spam I did some more research and found a modified comment plug-in for my blog software (blosxom). This plug-in is based on a keyword blacklist, which is regularly updated. It sounds good and I really hope that it helps keep the comments in this blog spam-free without requiring too much maintenance effort.

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Posted in tech | 2 Comments »

Waves of comment spam.

Saturday, June 19th, 2004

Comment spam is becoming more frequent these weeks. Yesterday I had to delete about 20 comments that were linking to a bunch of porn sites. Usually, I only have a few scattered comment spams per week, but sometimes there is a more massive generation of comment entries. I am hoping that the next revision of my blogging tool Blosxom will include some kind of anti-comment spam mechanism that does not rely on password protection (which I wouldn’t want to introduce).

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Trouble with trackback.

Sunday, April 18th, 2004

Today I tried to finally implement more trackback functionality for this blog (I wanted to trackback to a comment that I made in which I mentioned an entry in Betalogue, Pierre Igot’s blog). I failed. I could not get the trackback cgi scripts offered by Moveable Type to run and communicate with blosxom, even though others obviously were able to get this running. I did not invest too much time, since it seems that Rael Dornfest will publish blosxom 3.0 in a reasonable timeframe. Then I will take another stab at implementing trackbacks.

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New features.

Monday, January 19th, 2004

I added some new stuff to the blog. In the column to the right you can now choose a category by which to browse this blog. This was always possible – you had to click on the category link below the article to do that. As not everybody is technical-minded enough to use this feature in such an implicit way, I put explicit links to the main categories into the sidebar.
The other feature is really new; I had to install a plug-in for blosxom to enable this feature. The plug-in is called recentwritebacks. It allows everybody to add the ending “?recent=x” (without quotes and a number instead of the x) to the URL of my blog and then see all entries that were commented during the specified last x (number) of days. To make this feature more accessible I put a new link into the sidebar which takes you to the entries commented during the last week. Check it out!

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Updated to Blosxom 2.0.

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2003

Today I updated from version 2.0rc5 to version number 2.0. Not a lot of code was changed, so I guess there shouldn’t be any trouble for you. If something is not working correctly on your browser/machine, please tell me.

There’s another minor technical detail to report: finally this blog actually validates as correct HTML 4.01 Transitional. As inquiring minds might have found out there was one incorrectly tagged post at the end of the queue which falls out with the posting of this entry. Yay!

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