Technology – Page 9 – Noise Between Stations

Spam Proofing

Dan Benjamin’s Win the SPAM Arms Race offers a clever way to create a clickable mailto: link on your web pages while greatly reducing the ability of spam harvesters to find it. Some people are so nice.

I’m combining that with some email filters, started with Heather’s list plus a few additions that are working well. So far I’m filtering on:
1618
opt out
ADV
[ a blank subject line ]
$$
!!
mortgage
loan
stock
click here
Section 301
FREE

I still find myself looking through the spam I’ve caught, like sorting through the odd creatures entrapped in the net before throwing them back.

Best Spam Subject Line So Far

‘I never said I want to be alone‘, on spam selling a stock. I still don’t understand why they think we’ll be in a buying mood after they trick us into looking at their unsolicited marketing message.

Looking for an IMAP Account

So I’m planning on moving away from Yahoo mail. It’s been wonderful to go many years without having to change my personal email address, but:

the reliability has been spotty lately
they started charging, which is fair, but it makes me wonder what other services are out there
the email hack, ugh
it’s time to ditch POP and move up to IMAP. I span multiple computers and multiple places, and can’t deal with having messages trapped on a particular hard drive anymore

So I registered a shiny new vanity domain name. I just want to point it at an IMAP account. So I’m looking for a service. I started trying mac.com, which is mostly good except for

webmail doesn’t seem to work on non-Macs
they started charging $8.33/month, again this is fair but makes me want to evaluate other services
i can have my mail forwarded to mac.com, and set my vanity domain as the return address, but mac.com still shows up in the “To:” field, not ideal.

If you know of an inexpensive, reliable, personal IMAP provider let me know. I’ll post the results right [here].

Here is here: Christina mentioned both dreamhost and oddpost. Dreamhost seems like a great option if you also need hosting, but I’m all set with pair.com. Oddpost only works on IE/Win. I’m willing to switch out of Mozilla now and then, but Win only is a deal killer.

I ended up with myrealbox, a site set up by Novell to display the capabilities of their NetMail product. While that makes me feel a bit like a guinea pig, it seems OK, and the user base is pretty big. It’s free, there’s no ads, it does IMAP, and the web interface is pretty good, though not entirely Mozilla/Mac happy, but then that’s not too rare these days. If it collapses completely I can always bail and go back to mac.com without having to change my email address. It’s mine, all mine, I’m a greedy miser.

Validation, The Movie

I’m gradually going around my site, cleaning each room, applying a template here, fixing a link there. In the process I’m finally getting around to reading Owen’s Validation, a persuasive argument for proper code, which could have been subtitled ‘Markup for the Long Now‘…

My view is validation is very important, and not because I’m a stickler for rules. I actually dislike rules…I don’t think it’s widely understood how unique the code is. This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out it’s early versions. Because that’s what we need the code to do: this code is for recording what we think.

He also points to the handy Gazingus validation bookmarklets and, of course, the W3C validator.

Aside: A funny image in my head of people 50 years from now initializing their virtual museum to learn about early 21st Century Internet communication. The readable content consists almost entirely of CSS tutorials. The aural connection says, ‘Before the Great XML Convergence of 2023 humans actually used keyboards to type medium-specific display information, or used crude applications to generate non-standard display code…‘

Blood Book

Mark Bernstein has an interesting review of Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook.

For Blood, as for many diarists, the exercise of writing is its own reward. “If you allow yourself to begin posting entries based on what you think someone else wants you to write,” she warns, “you are missing the point of having a weblog.”

to which Mark points out a bit of contradition:

More seriously, Blood’s romantic conviction deters any extensive discussion of craft. If simple authenticity is the goal of weblog writing, and if you — the Audience Of One — are the only reader that really matters, then what craft is needed?

This is a balance I sometimes struggle with. Ideally I’m crafting words others will enjoy as well, words that still propel my own ideas. Isn’t that usually the case in publishing? Or journalism?

Rebecca nails it when she says, ‘The more your weblog reflects your interests and your world view, the stronger your voice will be.‘ I’ve always thought ‘voice’ is the most significant reason I like some blogs over others.

BlogSpam

Spotted! Well, not exactly the BlogSpam I referred to. But crazy random posts on the topic of air-conditioning and mold appeared on Molly’s blog here and here.

Is it someone’s idea of a joke? Do you wish you thought of it first?

Spam-Proof?

We have email spam and IM spam. Today I received a spam text message on my mobile phone (either Sprint sold my number or the spammers haven’t even bothered to harvest numbers, simply sending them out in numerical order because it’s so inexpensive). Oh joy. Next I predict – and I probably shouldn’t say this out loud – spam in the comments section of blogs. Essentially anything we use to communicate, unless it’s a private network, is vulnerable. We’ll have to start anticipating this and designing protection in at the beginning, but I wonder if that’s even possible.

Comment Engines

Just an implementation note…I recently spent several hours researching and trying out comment engines. The various hosted systems like YACCS can be quite nice, but when their servers slow down it slowed my site down. There are some nice PHP systems, but that was a learning curve I wanted to avoid. I ended using SnorComments2, a simple little Perl-driven system. Set up was painless, it doesn’t require any additional Perl modules, the interface is highly customizable, and it even has its own little admin interface.

Within Tinderbox, I set up a Boolean attribute for notes that let’s me turn on comments or not for each note.

1fps

Adrian Miles’ first axiom of network video:

legibility is more important than the representation of movement.

Which means that over the web when we have to decrease the size and resolution of video we should also lower the frame rate instead of trying to jam 24fps down the wire. How low can the frame rate go?

…1fps with a continuous intelligible soundtrack.

why only 1fps? because people are much happier people when what they see is able to be seen. who cares if it don’t move much? at least you can see it. this works for all content. and more importantly 1fps works over a domestic modem right now.

.htaccess – it slices, it dices

This .htaccess tutorial reveals that this one little file is more than you ever imagined! Password-protect files, redirect files or whole directories, specify error pages, prevent directory listings and hotlinking to images, and more!

Apache web server not included.

Tinderbox Service

Last night, modifying this here blog, I shot Mark Bernstein an email after having tried about ten variations of Tinderbox syntax that I thought should work (I was mistakenly making an assumption instead of paying attention to the docs, prolly some decade old Pascal knowledge rearing its ugly head). This morning in my Inbox was a message from Mark with the corrected syntax. This afternoon, before I had a chance to change my code, was a new version of Tinderbox that made my syntax valid. That’s service!

Philip Greenspun’s Future

Philip Greenspun’s Research page reveals several interesting ideas. He’s known for explaining how to build robust database-backed websites when most people were still hand coding everything. That was a process of making everything modular and separated from the presentation, and in many ways the next generation of the web is a continuation of that. He gives the impression of being a mad scientist at times, but the resulting ideas are solid.

Comment Survey

Because the Noisy One values your opinion he asks, should Noise Between Stations offer you, my dear visitor, the ability to add comments to each post? ~~Your answer here.~~ (Survey closed.)

Update: The survey revealed 75% in favor. Comments included:

…you might find them annoying after awhile, and after awhile you might find that you are writing more for the audience than yourself…and after awhile you might start to filter your own writing.

Too many cooks spoil the soup. If I wanted to read others’ comments, I’d read their weblogs. Buck the trend and keep NBS comment-less…

Let your thoughts stand in splendid isolation, i’ll link to them then we can all argue over at my place…

Of course! finally!

On occasion I’d like to bat around an idea here, but I don’t want to change the nature of what I originally wanted NBS to be, so I plan on putting in comments sometimes.

It’s funny when I see a high-traffic site link to something interesting on a lower-traffic site, and in so doing ‘stealing’ the community by hosting comments regarding said link. This isn’t my reason for wanting comments here, but it’s worth observing.

Instantaneous Posting

There’s a sidebar on your blog and it too is a blog. But it’s simply a list of links. And the list is powered by your visitors. They stop by and, like a coin in the metal box at the cathedral, leave you a link. The metal box in this case is a text box with a ‘Post it’ button. No seperate pages, no passwords, nothing else. The page refreshes and the link is added instantaneously.

(I kinda like the cathedral metaphor, because the donations benefit all future visitors)

I’m sure this is a quick scripting excercise, but is anyone already doing this, or does the script already exist?

Ward on IAWiki

Wow, Ward Cunningham stopped by the IAWiki. That’s like Warren Buffett stopping by your local investment group to see what’s up.