Mokka mit Schlag » Blogging

The comment spammers are getting smarter. I had a pretty effective antispam system of moderating any comments that included two or more URLs. However recently I’ve noticed several comments that included zero or one URLs. (The zero-URL spams work by shoving the URL on the commenter.) Plus they aren’t showing the usual gibberish I was seeing in comment spam. They’ve got plausible generic content in the comments. So far the amount of spam isn’t crippling; but if it continues to get worse I may have to take more serious measures.

John LeMasney asked a good question during my RSS and Atom presentation last night to the Princeton Linux Users Group that I didn’t know how to answer. Do Podcast clients, especially iTunes, support Atom Podcasts yet? I know Atom has the necessary elements but do the clients recognize them?
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I’m investigating external Weblog editors. I’m surprised there are no simple plugins for BBEdit or jEdit to handle this, and there doesn’t appear to any real open source software.
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Feed readers work better for full text feeds like enplaned or The Cafes that contain the real content.

Essentially headline feeds like the Cafe au Lait Recommended Reading or Memorandom work better in a browser. In fact, a feed like Memeorandum’s that forces you to visit their site first just to get the real link is almost completely pointless. The Cafe au Lait/Cafe con Leche recommended reading feeds are much nicer (though of course the real difference is in the content).

The Cafe au Lait/Cafe con Leche story feeds are sort of in the middle, but they probably run more to the headline end of the spectrum because the individual stories, even when syndicated as full text, are usually pretty small.

Like most blogs that enable comments, this one has attracted its share of spam. Interestingly I’ve noticed that most of these comment spams start off with something really complimentary. Some examples:

I’m asking myself: How can it be that I’ve never ran through your site before? It’s a great one!

Very nice. You’re site is very helpful.

I guess they hope I’ll be so excited by the ego-boo I’ll promptly approve it before reading on, where I find such Dadaist gems as “Table becomes Small Slot in final when Plane is Game it will Fetch Boy” and “when Stake is Chair it will Hope Cosmos”.

Cafe au Lait dates back to 1995. I know I’m not the first blogger. Ric Ford’s Macintouch precedes me, and probably others do as well. However, I was there quite early on, I think before the word “blog” was coined. Truth is I’ve never even really thought of Cafe au Lait, Cafe con Leche, and The Cafes as blogs, even after I added RSS feeds. Most obviously they’re organized by date rather than by post. And despite occasional off-topic posts, I mostly keep them focused on Java and XML respectively.

However, Mokka mit Schlag is very much a blog. It looks like a blog. It feels like a blog. It reads like a blog. Most importantly for me, it writes like a blog instead of a static set of web pages. Most importantly for you, the reader, it is no longer limited to one topic. Here I feel free to expound on any subject that wanders into my field of vision. I have carefully categorized posts so my birder friends can read about birds and my programmer friends can read about programming and my family can read my travel stories, without having to pay attention to the parts that don’t interest them; but I still get to write about anything I like; and that’s a good thing.