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.

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.

\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.

“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?

There are at least two ways of approaching trackback’s use: these two uses contrast with each other in the time a trackback request is made relative to when the weblogger publishes their own content. The distinction here is the time a bloggers article is written versus the time that a blogger requests a trackback placement. In one usage, a weblogger reads someone’s article, then decides to write their thoughts about it on their blog. Before publishing their thoughts, the author prepares the requested trackback link; this trackback is sent upon first publication of the blogger’s article.

1. I’ve read your thoughts, now let me build upon them with mine.

Another use is when the time of the requested trackback works in the opposite sequence. Someone writes a post, delineating their thoughts on some topic of importance, then publishes the post. Later, either through looking around the blogosphere for related content, or having accidentally stumbled upon it, the weblogger decides to send a trackback request, which adds their already existing and related thoughts to the newly discovered conversation. Is this something to be avoided? As long as the topic is related to the trackbacked article, it presents to readers another viewpoint and it grows the related interconnections in the blogosphere.

2. I’ve already written down my thoughts, now I see they are related to yours.

Number two is somewhat like neighbors waving hello to each other, kindred spirits seeking each other out, or like minded individuals meeting together. Why would this type of trackback be a source of malcontent?

Is one method of trackback usage superior to the other? In academics, I’m told, it is usual to build upon the work of another. This is well and fine if the other’s work is presented to the academic first. But what if it isn’t? What if the academic comes to a conclusion or inspiration independent of exposure to already existing work? Does it invalidate their work, or instead lend credence to it?

Should one trackback use be preferred over the other? If the objection to a trackback is solely that there is no reciprocal link, then simply trackback to it yourself. The reciprocal link is thereby created in the dance of conversation.

I think trackbacks are one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of weblogs. They allow readers to find related information, they allow emergent conversations to have a multiplicity of voices, and they allow an author to retain transportability of their portion of the conversation. No human blogger can be aware of all other related content in the sphere, therefore allowing trackbacks at all times is preferred. The essence of the Internet is its decentralization. As articles are discovered by each blogger, new interrelationships can be created through trackbacks. This doesn’t mean you have to retype a personalized version of already existing content.

In answer to Adam’s question, “Is that sufficient to make trackback spam worthwhile?” I would have to answer that there may be multiple layers of reasoning behind trackback spam. On a surface level, it may be non-paid advertising, on a deeper level it may be an inflation of page rank, and there may be still deeper layers, layers of which outsiders can only guess.

Looking at some effects of trackback spam, I note that a large number of bloggers turn off their trackbacks. This alone has a marginalizing effect on the conversation. In imagining what deeper layers might exist in the reasoning of spammers, can demonstrated effects be ignored?

Why would I want link category sub-headings to be granted H2 status? For the sake of analogy, this would be like ordering the content of a book’s bibliography before the table of contents (TOC), and ordering the TOC to be sequentially located after the content itself.

The content of other books is more important than what’s in this book?

For example, continuing the analogy, let’s say I go to a bookstore, and am looking at books, spine out, lined up on a shelf. Great, the title is one of the first things I see of each book, so let’s grant H1 status to the title. Now I might look through many titles, before picking one that interests me. Once picked, I would likely open it and look at the TOC, so let’s give that H2 status. Next, I might page through some of the content itself, and sample some of the writing. So, following the analogy, I would give the chapter titles H3 headings. If I was contemplating purchasing the book (in a bookstore) I would likely give little heed to the bibliography. That seems to be there more for research and copyright purposes, in my opinion the bibliography is more useful in a library setting, but to continue the analogy, I would give the bibliography an H5 level heading. Oops, what about the index? :)

The way WordPress 1.5 grants H2 status to link categories, to follow the above analogy, would grant higher heading status to the bibliography than my contents. There might be valid reasons why some would like to see the link categories granted higher status than any particular blog’s content, but in my mind and for my website, that would be like steering a potential purchaser to others’ books before presenting my own book’s chapters.

H5, 6, 7, etc., makes more ’sense’ to me than hardcoding the link category heading values as 2.

There’s a short primer on this problem at the WordPress support forums.

It’s nice to know there are several different ways of approaching a solution to this. As 1.5 works, as of this writing, if one wishes to change the hardcoded H2 to a different value users will have to not only update links.php to replace H2 with whatever number they choose, but also all the multiple template css files, so all templates that might be used view correctly. This seems like a lot of unnecessary and time-consuming coding work.

While it is not currently supported, users should be able to pass the heading value users desire as a parameter of the get_links_list() function in any particular template’s index file, perhaps even omitting the parameter if they so desire. RSL suggested this. If for valid semantics the heading value is required to be there, at least let the blog user decide what value they wish to use.

There is a fairly large issue with the WordPress linkroll no longer updating with 1.5. This is essentially because weblogs.com is no longer used as the source of updated blogs. Pingomatic is used instead, and it doesn’t appear to have non-WordPress blogs in its system. Here are some sites that I’m adding that discuss the issue further, I’m adding these here mostly for my own future reference. http://www.puretext.us/2005/02/25/wordpress-15/ http://blogged.btvillarin.com/2005/01/31/update-linkroll-broken/ http://blogged.btvillarin.com/2005/02/15/update-links/ http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=23457

I have now upgraded to WordPress 1.5. There are very good reasons to upgrade to 1.5. I’m still in a testing stage, perhaps there will be another posting on the topic.

Here’s the original text:

I’ve been having some limited issues with referrer spam, and Barbara’s blog is having and has had a huge problem with it. We’re both using StatTraq for quick statistics, and apparently it has some vulnerabilities with regards to this issue. Here’s an interesting fix to the stattraq.php file that’s written by Dave. It appears to integrate with an already existing wordpress file, and for some reason, I like that concept..

Unfortunately, after following Dave’s instructions, I kept getting some errors in Firefox 1.0: fortunately, after an hour or two of non-programmer’s stress, I located the apparent errors in explode() and implode().

Dave’s solution also references a text file that includes a series of MSQL commands that is run from phpMyAdmin to clean up the existing spam entries in the wp-stattraq table, it was easy to customize in a text editor. Since Barbara’s site has been subject to this type of attack for many months, there were thousands of entries to pick through to add to the DELETE from TABLE command string.

Everything appears to be working well now, with no more years of referral spam! We’ll see how it works over time.

While we were going through her referrer logs, we found one address that redirected to another site that appears to offer a software product designed specifically for generating this scourge. That site advertises the program has the ability to change the reported user-agent as well as IP spoofing through proxies. All for $50.00. If you want this program, don’t ask me where to find it.

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 index_backup.php and wp-layout_backup.css. Then upload the files you saved from here to your blog.

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.

Ruthsarian’s templates appear to only be XHTML and CSS, no php or solution that works instantly with Wordpress. Getting it to work on this blog involved cutting and pasting the relevant out-of-the-box Wordpress 1.2.2 index.php commands into the appropriate areas of Ruthsarian’s index.html page, then saving that as index.php. The calendar was quite difficult for us, the Wordpress CSS #wp-calendar instructions added to the bottom of Ruthsarian’s CSS seemed the best solution. We were able to format the calendar using only his CSS, but it wasn’t quite as flexible or advanced as the Wordpress solution.

Perhaps if we understood CSS better, we could have simply added a few instructions to Ruthsarian’s solution.

I still have some issues to resolve, comments and their headings don’t appear with the same size fonts and colors as the main page. I just noticed that, and haven’t yet looked into it. I guess I’ll need to check pingback and trackback aesthetics, as well.

When I’m done, I’m going to pass the template on to anyone who’d like to use it, likely with Ruthsarian’s mint green color scheme, but I don’t think this template for Wordpress is done yet.

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. There are large, busy news blogs with many individual journalists posting content throughout the day, and there are personal blogs dedicated solely to one blogger’s content of daily routine, tribulation, and elation. Some specialized blogs are updated infrequently, if ever: others appear abandoned.

Unlike the early web days, once blogging software is setup on a website, content creation is relatively easy. The site owner or user logs in to the backend through an assigned web address, then the software presents the user with a screen similar to a word processor. The blogger doesn’t need to know much XHTML or Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, if any; the software automatically applies basic styling through the use of pre-configured index templates and CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, which format the text to the aesthetic standard conceived by the site designer. Blogs are a big improvement in usability from the days when each page of HTML needed to be carefully hand-coded and FTPd into a webserver.

Publishing the text or content written in the blog’s backend systems is as easy as pressing a button on your browser’s screen.

Most blogging software has the capability for RSS, otherwise known as Rich- or RDF-Site Summary, and which sometimes is referred to in affectionate manner as Really Simple Syndication. It is a short summary of blog content stripped of browser formatting codes. This vastly decreases the file size required for computer-to-computer content transmission and increases interoperability between different operating systems. Among other uses, RSS feeds present to the public new blog content without the public them needing to request the site’s web front page. For any of the sites people may choose to read, feed addresses can be easily added to RSS readers, programs people can install on their computers which download all headlines and site excerpts. Some browsers have integrated RSS and XML feed reading capability. If a headline intrigues a reader, they can easily request the article’s entire content. This makes it easy for information consumers and networks to assemble their own, customized, daily content.

People who do browse to a blog’s article often have the ability to comment on a posting, a function similar to message boards, unless the site owner has turned comments off. The absence of comments linked to an article is a growing blog phenomenon due in part to the problem of comment and trackback spam.

Trackbacks and pingbacks are other, more powerful networking features of blogging software, which have come under the routine attack of cyber terrorists strutting their commercial wares and services.

Often underutilized by some bloggers, trackbacks are a method of multi-linking similar-content blog articles to each other, a convenient aid to readers looking for related information, whereas comments appear only in one location. What distinguishes pingbacks and trackbacks from comments? When an article is ready to publish, a trackback or pingback can be created by the blogger, and when it is, an excerpt of the article’s content is automatically placed on another blog’s comment or trackback page. Comments are essentially singular postings about an article only appearing on the article’s comment section, whereas trackbacks and pingbacks are designed to be multi-synchronous, placing content on several different blogs at once.

Pingbacks, like trackbacks, are cross-blog, simultaneous-linkings to related content, but this isn’t quite correct. Pingbacks notify another site that a link to them has been created in the article’s text, whereas trackbacks are manually entered into a separate field in the backend of the blog. Sometimes a person needs to use something to fully understand how it works, and how it works differently from platform-to-platform and site-to-site.

It’s important to realize that the use of blogging software is subject to the varying discretion of the bloggers publishing their articles, as well as publishing their and others comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Integrated networking tools such as RSS feeds, trackbacks and pingbacks along with reader commenting have created a powerful publishing platform with efficient information dissemination capabilities. Over the last few years, the deployment of millions of blogs across the Internet has itself created a wide variety of information in the content-rich blogosphere.

Never before in human history has communication between people been so easy and fast.

It is also easy to understand why unscrupulous and desperate businesspeople, owned spambots under greedy arms, would try to freely exploit the built-in and real-time networking capability of blogs without paying a site owner any advertising fees. The apparent purpose of spammers may be free advertising, but is that all they achieve? Spammers utilizing automated bots may create the false appearance of a large group: a much smaller group’s purpose could be to disrupt the ability of people to easily and efficiently communicate and build virtual communities. Bloggers often, in response to overwhelming and time-consuming message management issues related to comment, pingback, and trackback spam, turn these powerful features off.

What groups benefit from the disruption of potent global communication tools between the virtual communities people are driven inspired to build?

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.