Recently I added a plugin named Sociable to another weblog. While perusing the blog of Sociable’s developer, one post caught my attention. Peter Harkins asked his readers if they could recommend a good feedreader for Linux. Unfortunately, not having yet made the switch to Linux on our personal machines, it’s not possible to fully answer his question from the perspective of that operating system.

Recently I looked around for a newer feedreader for Win98SE, either one that runs under Firefox as an extension, or as a standalone program similar to FeedReader, and had some success. After finding some that didn’t work quite in the desired way, and others that had promise but unfortunately were still quite buggy, what I eventually settled upon was BottomFeeder, a standalone cross-platform Atom and RSS reader. It appears open-source and released under an Artistic License.

From the BottomFeeder front page:

“BottomFeeder runs on Linux x86, (also FreeBSD), PowerPC Linux, Sparc Linux, Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP/CE 4), Mac OS8/9, Mac OS X (PPC), AIX, SGI Irix, HP-UX, and Solaris (SPARC and x86).”

I have no intention of critiquing the program, as they all seem to have shortcomings and strengths of one kind or another; in the case of BottomFeeder, its feature set is impressive. This may imply it isn’t the simplest feed reader out there. I’m currently watching just under 100 feeds and have noted no big issues, but then I’m a simplistic user with basic needs who has always been attracted to the usefulness of powerware.

While it’s not perfect, you might like it — try BottomFeeder.

Wow, I haven’t posted for a long time, I guess I have nothing to say publicly, at least not using my real name! Yes, I do post elsewhere under the alias that I’ve used for something like 7 or more years now, but posting under a real name seems, somehow, different. I’m under no illusions of anonymity, however, I’m quite certain the government knows precisely who I am and the alias I post under, with the NSA and alleged telephone eavesdropping that’s been under some, ahem, fire.

I just found that Contact was still sending email to the old email address of the now disconnected ISP I used to use, but I thought I had changed it. I sure hope that nobody tried to email me—never mind that nobody has used the Contact button in all the months that it’s been on this site. So if you tried to email me in the last month or two, sorry(!), I never received it.

On an unrelated note, “U.S. scientists say the more consumers are absorbed in the narrative flow of a story, called transportation, the less likely they’ll respond well to ads.” I wonder if this means when person is caught up in the narritive flow of life in ‘the now’ moment surrounding them, that they won’t respond well to ads? If so, then marketers would logically concentrate upon the future and what could be, instead of what actually is, because reaility is part of the narrative unfolding of each moment with respect to each individual’s life. This seems to explain the so-common culture of ‘denial of reality.’

Have we been indoctrinated, perhaps starting when we are young and continuing through all of our individual years, by a media and various supporting societal structures and culture, to always be ‘looking forward’ or ‘preparing ourselves’ for some illusory world to come, instead of the world we’re actually in right now?

Has the world been hijacked by slick marketers?

While in this blog’s control area, I noticed that in the last few days 239 spams advertising all sorts of drugs piled up. It seems that the spammers are targeting blogs that appear inactive, but that has probably always been true; what seems odd is that they aren’t bugging my partner’s blog much, no more than one or two a day, and she posts every couple of weeks or so.

Why would spammers be avoiding more active blogs? They don’t want to upset the non-abandoned blogs’ users, but if it’s been abandoned, then hey, who cares? Seems as likely as any other answer, if there is an answer.

Note of 6/21: Spammers are still hammering on the door, so perhaps they’re not targeting inactive instead of active blogs.

Note of 8/22: While it’s not the source of the increased spam, the real-time blacklist (DNSRBL) opm.blitzed.org has ceased operations, and that would explain the massive increase of spam: the timeline seems about right.

The files that appear to have changed in WordPress version 1.5.1.2 from 1.5.1.1 are:

\wp-content\themes\default\header.php \wp-includes\functions.php \wp-includes\template-functions-category.php \wp-includes\template-functions-general.php \wp-includes\version.php

Please note that the above is not an official WordPress list. It was made using the win32 program WinMerge, from zip downloads of WordPress versions that I have saved.

Adam Shostack wrote:

“I have to say, I love getting real trackbacks. I like it when people take what I’ve said and expand on it. I hate getting semi-trackbacks, where a poster sort-of refers to what I’ve said, doesn’t link to me, and throws in a trackback. I hate, hate, hate, spam trackbacks.”

Every weblogger with trackbacks turned on is currently burdened with trackback spam, but this is the first I’ve read of “semi-trackbacks” being a construct of malcontent; in fact it’s the first I’ve read of semi-trackbacks at all, perhaps I’m ignorant on the issue.

It appears the use of trackbacks is to build on others’ existing conversations at close to the same time as adding content to one’s own weblog. This is trackback’s advantage over comments, where content is placed in only a single place. It’s important that “at close to the same time” is understood as not precisely simultaneous. Further, a trackback request can be placed at the time of publishing one’s own writings, or it can be added later to existing postings. This latter type appears to be one of Adam’s objections, where the content may not be strictly personalized.

Is the only appropriate use of trackbacks to request them at the time of one’s own original writing? Should we attach stigma to trackbacking of older articles in a newer conversation? (read more . . . )

I haven’t yet updated this blog to Wordpress 1.5, but I have upgraded another blog. Right off the bat, the template needed minor tweaking to adapt, then thankfully a strange visual problem appeared. I write thankfully because otherwise it likely would have been some time before I noticed it. The getlinkslist() now gives category sub-titles the H2 header. I was able to solve the appearance issue simply by making some minor changes to the CSS file, but there’s a more fundamental, underlying issue with WP 1.5’s flexibility. (read more . . . )

On edit, February 23, 2005, I added: The following technique does not appear to work. We’re still getting referral spam in spite of keywords existing in WordPress’s moderation keys. It’s possible that I disabled its functionality when I modified the explode() and implode() commands in order to eliminate browser errors; or perhaps it’s not working for some other reason. I’ve left the rest of this article mostly as originally written. Dave’s technique for Row_deletes is useful, it works great.

Here’s the original text: (read more . . . )

I’m making available the basic template we adapted from Ruthsarian’s Skidoo Too layout. In my mind, it is only fair, since his template was in the public domain. The colors were modeled from the bird named the California Scrub Jay of the Pacific Coast, a sub-species of the Western Scrub Jay.

While the older templates below for Wordpress 1.2.x are still available, they will not be updated. I’ve updated the basic template for WordPress 1.5.x using newer versions of Ruthsarian’s Skidoo Too HTM templates. Portions of these templates have been copied from the WordPress Classic theme by Dave Shea and Matthew Mullenweg, covered by the GNU GPL.

Disclaimer: I’m not a programmer, nor a commercial site designer. I will change the template used on this site somewhat from time to time, and the files below will probably not be updated. If you notice any bugs, feel free to make a comment here to tell me, but consider that the files are offered “as is”, and any features that you don’t believe are working correctly are your problem to figure out.

Update of 12/12/2005: Fixed a left-column rendering issue for visitors using Internet Explorer 6.0. This issue was related to WordPress’s calendar and my lousy CSS skills. Please note that this update only applies to WP version 1.5.x. The template for the older WP version, 1.2.x (see below) was not updated as I no longer use that older WP version.

One file below, comments.txt, has only one or two minor changes versus the released WordPress 1.5.1.2 Classic theme.

index.txt style.txt comments.txt

Save the three links above by renaming each one:

1. index.txt as index.php
2. style.txt as style.css
3. comments.txt as comments.php

Create a new directory in your WordPress 1.5.x theme folder, I have assigned the name “bluejay” to that directory:

/wp-content/themes/bluejay/

Move the three files you saved from here into that directory on your blog using an appropriate tool such as FTP or a file manager of some kind. You can change your blog’s active template in the Presentation > Theme administration area of your blog.

Simply open the two links above then save the index.txt file as index.php, and the wp-layout.txt file as wp-layout.css. Before uploading them to your server, make sure you backup the files of the same name used on your current Wordpress 1.2.2 blog: rename them to something like indexbackup.php and wp-layoutbackup.css. Then upload the files you saved from here to your blog.

His blog is titled The Forgettable Mister Ruthsarian, and if you’d like to look at some nice CSS layouts, his are not copyrighted: “© Nobody. All CSS/HTML is released into the public domain.” Don’t let the empty blog fool you, the layouts are easy enough to find.

I’ve spent the last few days—um, let me correct that—Barbara and I have spent the last few days recoding his Skidoo Too layout to work with WordPress 1.2.2.
(read more . . . )

To answer the question, “What’s a blog?”, first we could look up the quoted phrase “what is a blog” at Google, however, it is clear to me that those over-simplified definitions walk a fine line between conciseness and inaccuracy, as glossary entries often do.

If you didn’t get lost at that last hyperlink, and you’re still reading this, then I better move along with answering the question.

A weblog, or simply blog, is a type of database driven website. Its purpose is often similar to a paper journal and it lends itself to common use as a simple web-publishing system. However, blog usage isn’t limited solely to journalizing or journaling, its uses are likely as varied as the imaginations of bloggers are diverse. (read more . . . )

Kubric is such a beautiful template! Alas, I don’t want a pointer to his site in the footer of every page, and when I found the following thread on his site titled Villagers Demand Credit, I realized that I was not willing to comply with his wishes. I would have been happy to put a single post up, like this post, announcing the template I used or modified and granted source credit to him. Alas, that is not what he asked for.

Moving on, months earlier I’d downloaded another WordPress template named Trident, a basic three-column layout for another project: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/Trident/index.php. During the day as I was picking through the CSS and making minor changes to font presentation, margin placements and such, I realized the logic of the CSS was confusing to me.

So, I’ve loaded up Rubric, the same template I used on Barbara’s site, from Alex King’s Template Competition.

It’s the end of the day, and I’d really like to tweak it some, but for now it will have to do. It presents a nice, clean, readable page for aging readers like myself who no longer have youthful vision. Since I’ve altered this template before, I know that the CSS layout is logical (to my mind).

No more coffee, not until tomorrow morning.

On edit, 02–7-2005: Rubric is no longer the template used on this site, nor is the site based upon it, today the template and CSS were changed. I still like Rubric, I just wanted a slightly different look, and 3-columns. I made a posting where you can read more about it.