Recently in Blogging Category

This is Microsoft Dynamic Languages Team, responsible for IronPython and IronRuby. Not as big as you might expect for the "most important project at MS today", but 100% blogging! Dynamic languages are the next big thing so believe me you want to keep an eye on these guys. I compiled an OPML file for the team, which you can import into your favorite blog reader to subscribe to the whole team in one shot.

In no particular order:

• John Lam - IronRuby PM
• Harry Pierson - IronPython PM
• Jimmy Schementi - PM for Silverlight integration
• Shri Borde - dev lead for the team
• Dave Remy - PM lead fro the team
• Oleg Tkachenko - Visual Studio integration
• Dave Fugate - IronPython tester
• Curt Hagenlocher - IronPython/IronRuby dev
• Jim Hugunin - architect for the team, DLR and Visual Studio languages
• Tomas Matousek - IronRuby dev
• Srivatsn Narayanan - IronPython/IronRuby tester
• Jim Deville - IronRuby tester
• Dino Viehland - IronPython dev

I still can't believe my name is on the list...

Jim Deville of Microsoft IronRuby team has started blogging. If you are interested in IronRuby, definitely subscribe.

Sergey Dubinets, the guy behind Microsoft XSLT engine and tools is blogging. Subscribed. Highly recommended.

More XSLT bloggers from Microsoft:

• Dimitre Novatchev, XSLT: Riding the challenge
• Anton Lapounov: XML XSLT and Beyond

David Carlisle and Jeni Tennison are blogging. Skies are falling. Enough said. Subscribed.

According to the Official Google Reader Blog Google feed crawler, Feedfetcher, started to report subscriber counts. "The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds."

What I found it interesting is that they do it via User Agent string. That's a very simple and nice solution and it's apparently not something new as I just looked at my blog log file and found subscribers info from a variety of feed crawlers:

GET /blog/index.xml - x.x.x.x HTTP/1.1 Bloglines/3.1+(http://www.bloglines.com;+154+subscribers)
GET /blog/index.xml - x.x.x.x HTTP/1.1 NewsGatorOnline/2.0+(http://www.newsgator.com;+99+subscribers)
GET /blog/index.xml - x.x.x.x HTTP/1.1 Feedfetcher-Google;+(+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html;
+167+subscribers;+feed-id=xxxxxxx)
GET /blog/index.xml - x.x.x.x HTTP/1.1 Newshutch/1.0+(http://newshutch.com;+12+subscribers)

And even such funny user agent as

GET /blog/index.xml - x.x.x.x HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/5.0+(X11;+U;+Linux+i686;+en-US;+rv:1.2.1;
+Rojo+1.0;+http://www.rojo.com/corporate/help/agg/;
+Aggregating+on+behalf+of+15+subscriber(s)+online+at+http://www.rojo.com/?feed-id=xxx)+Gecko/20021130

One might claim that's user agent header abuse, but I don't think so. Here is what RFC 2616 (HTTP) has to say:

14.43 User-Agent

The User-Agent request-header field contains information about the user agent originating the request. This is for statistical purposes, the tracing of protocol violations, and automated recognition of user agents for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations. User agents SHOULD include this field with requests. The field can contain multiple product tokens (section 3.8) and comments identifying the agent and any subproducts which form a significant part of the user agent. By convention, the product tokens are listed in order of their significance for identifying the application.

Statistical purposes that's it.

Oh, and while at it I should admit I hooked up to the Google Reader completely and haven't run RSS Bandit for months now. RSS Bandit has tons of cool features, but I always knew I need lightweight Web based feed reader. I tried Bloglines repeatedly, but only with Google Reader I found myself really comfortable from the first minute. That's great application.

If you like the "Daily Grind" by Mike Gunderloy you might like its Microsoft-free version "Quick Links" at the "A fresh Cup" site ("Notes from a recovering Microsoft addict") too. Worth subscribing anyway.

I'm blogging since March 2003 and as time goes I noticed my blog archive list became way too long and ugly. Finally I figured out how to generate it in a nice expandable list form you can see on the right. Here is a my small how to for MovableType powered blog. It's a little bit hacky, but works fine.

Here is a nice trick how to build category cloud for your MovableType blog. No plugins required, just past this snippet into your template.

<div class="side" id="CategoryCloud" style="line-height:1.6em;">
<MTCategories show_empty="0">
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"
class="<$MTCategoryCount$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a>
</MTCategories>
<script type="text/javascript">
e = document.getElementById("CategoryCloud").getElementsByTagName("A");
for(i=0; i < e.length; i++)
{
if(e[i].className != "")
{
t = e[i].className;
if(t > 256) e[i].style.fontSize = "230%";
else if(t > 126) e[i].style.fontSize = "200%";
else if(t > 68) e[i].style.fontSize = "180%";
else if(t > 16) e[i].style.fontSize = "160%";
else if(t > 8) e[i].style.fontSize = "130%";
else if(t >= 2) e[i].style.fontSize = "110%";
else if(t = 1) { e[i].style.fontSize = "100%"; }
}
}

</div>

[Found here]

 The idea is simple - generate list of categories with count of posts embedded into class attribute and then in browser scan categories and set font size according to any kind of cloud algorithm.

Joe Fawcett, XML expert and my fellow XML MVP  has started a blog. Highly recommended. Subscribed.

Congratulations to all XSLT geeks - Dimitre Novatchev, XSLT extraordinaire is blogging! Whoha! Subscribed.

This is pretty cool blog post editor. I'm gonna test it and if it's ok I switch to Windows Live Writer cause wbloggar seems to be dead. Works fine with my MovableType powered blog also and has all features I need.

Allows plugins to be added, cool huh? I want a plugin for autolinking certain words, wouldn't it be cool? I wonder if the SDK allows such plugins. What other plugins would be useful?

Anton Lapounov is blogging! He's one of the brilliant guys responsible for XSLT in the Microsoft XML Team. If you are subscribed to my blog, you want to subscibe to "Anton Lapounov: XML XSLT and Beyond" blog too.

I've got an invitation to participate in Yahoo! Publisher Network Beta program, which seems to be another targeted ad system just like Google AdSense, but already supporting ads in RSS feeds. They support MovableType and WordPress. Alas I couldn't even login - it's currently USA only and USA tax information is required to setup an account. Why it has to be so lame?

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:54ff7668410b28a62e65b7362c37778c

RSSBandit users who are interested in Russian localization were probably disapointed when found no Russian language support in the Nightcrawler release. Sorry about that, I was too late for the deadline. Good news is that RSS Bandit bugfix release with Russian localization is expected really soon - most likely before Christmas.

I've been looking for a blog search service and been naturally inclined to use Google blog search, but I was quite disappointed to find out that feeds produced by Google are malformed. Trivial lame mess with encoding, hence no use by XML tools. Apparently XML is too hard for Google. Oh well, at least Technorati sucks less.

This is a repetitive pattern: once in a 6 months I get tired of comment and trackback spam and go upgrade my blog engine or install some antispam plugins.This time is not different. I've been massively attacked by spam trackbacks so I had to upgrade to MovableType 3.2. Not without a troubles though. Somehow it just didn't work after upgrade, but happily I found a solution at the MT support forum. Now all comments/trackbacks I get are subject to junk filtering and manual approvement.

I chose this strategy: each comment/trackback goes into unapproved queue and never makes it into a live page (except for authenticated comments). I get mail notifications for each comment/trackback and if I see not a spam one I approve it in just one click, spam ones I don't touch. Once in a week or so I go to blog admin and junk/delete all unapproved stuff again in a couple of clicks. Not that I love it, but still I can live with it.

42. "Make all your family blogging" - done.

• Oleg (myself) - "Signs on the Sand"
• Alenka (my wife) - "Tigra Julia's Journal" (Russian only)
• Catherine (our little dauther) - "Little Catherine's Journal" (Russian only)
• Alexandra (my mom) - "wildgrass" (Russian only)

Jonathan Marsh, who is one of Microsoft's representatives at the W3C, an editor of XML Base, XPointer, XInclude, xml:id, some XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 specs and is by the way the original author of the defaultss.xsl which is used in Internet Explorer to display XML documents, is blogging. His blog called Design By Committee. Subscribed.

[Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life]

Dave Pawson investigates if there is enough interest in a community developed web logging system based on XSLT processing and Atom8. He welcomes any feedback.

I've been using XSLT-powered online publishing systems such as Docbook Website and definitely see enough potential behind Dave's idea.

Dave Pawson is blogging! Great, subscribed.

I'm setting up new notebook (HP Pavilion ze2070ea - really really nice one) and just realized I can't download one of the most important piece of software I just can't live without - w.bloggar, blogging client, because its site seems to be hacked and defaced out. When you go to the site (even google cache of it) you see empty page and view source reveals just some stupid cewl hacker comment I won't cite. What a shame to deface a site offering cool free software!

Anyway, does anybody know where can I get w.bloggar installation please? I'm writing this using MovableType web admin and it sucks.

Dare writes:

This is the final release of the version formerly codenamed "Wolverine". This is the most significant release to date and has a ton of cool features. Enjoy.

I made the Russian translation again, so all typos and lame Russian words are my fault. I hope it can make an experience of reading news with RSS Bandit even more exiting for those in Russian-speaking community who prefer localized GUI.

Btw, what about server-side feed aggregation? I need some sort of aggregation/filtration service (which would allow to aggregate feeds I choose into a single one and filter out a junk) for a site I'm developing and I was looking around and found not much available free tools. The first part is of course server-side feed aggregation - just like an aggregated feed at blogs.msdn.com, Planet XMLHack or TopXML's Reblogger with some sort of administration of course. The different layer is Bloglines like Web-based news reader, which allows users to have own feed lists and stores the context (read/unread items etc). I think the first part could be done easily using RSS Bandit's core, wisely detached apart from the GUI. Am I crazy or there are such tools already or nobody's gonna need it or it's a good idea?

Well, I must admit it wasn't a smooth upgrade neither. Finally I had to remove all posts, migrate to MT 3.15 and MySQL as a backend and then to reimport all posts in a way they all get the same entry_id (to keep backwards compatibility with the archives).

I'm going to upgrade my blog's MovableType engine to 3.15. I'm full of hopes it helps with damn comment spam.

Ok, I can't take it anymore, too many spam. I turned comments off temporary untill I upgrade my blog engine. Sorry.

They say Microsoft is about to unveil MSN Spaces blogging service, may be even this week:

Microsoft's MSN division is expected to take the wraps off its MSN Spaces blogging service this week, according to sources close to the company.
MSN is expected to tout MSN Spaces as a direct competitor to blog-creation and hosting tools, such as Blogger, Blog*Spot, LiveJournal and TypePad. Microsoft also will position MSN Spaces as a way to allow users to more easily share photo albums and music lists, too, insiders said.

Sounds like all other MSN services like Hotmail and MyMSN are going to support RSS and blogging as well. At least that's how I get Dare's hints. I believe there will be no support for Atom as Microsoft traditionally uses RSS for its feeds.

Elliotte Rusty Harold has started a new site called (not surprisingly) "The Cafes" - for articles "longer than a typical Cafe con Leche news item, but much shorter than a full book". Here is the RSS feed. Subscribed.

That's sort of news that make my day - Derek Denny-Brown is finally blogging. Derek is working on XML/SGML last 9 years and currently is dev lead for both MSXML & System.Xml.

Here is his atom feed if you can't find it on that dark-colored page. Subscribed.

[Via Dare]

Dare writes on "News Aggregators As Denial of Service Clients":

Recently I upgraded my web server to using Windows 2003 Server due to having problems with a limitation on the number of outgoing connections using Windows XP. Recently I noticed that my web server was still getting overloaded with requests during hours of peak traffic. Checking my server logs I found out that another aggregator, Sauce Reader, has joined Newzcrawler in its extremely rude bandwidth hogging behavior. This is compounded by the fact that the weblog software I use, dasBlog, does not support HTTP Conditional GET for comments feeds so I'm serving dozens of XML files to each user of Newzcrawler and SauceReader subscribed to my RSS feed every hour.

I'm really irritated at this behavior and have considered banning Sauce Reader & Newzcrawler from fetching RSS feeds on my blog due to the fact that they significantly contribute to bringing down my site on weekday mornings when people first fire up their aggregators at work or at home. Instead, I'll probably end up patching my local install of dasBlog to support HTTP conditional GET for comments feeds when I get some free time. In the meantime I've tweaked some options in IIS that should reduce the amount of times the server is inaccessible due to being flooded with HTTP requests.

This doesn't mean I think this feature of the aforementioned aggregators is something that should be encouraged. I just don't want to punish readers of my blog because of decisions made by the authors of their news reading software.

New and long awaited release of the MovableType blogging engine has been announced. New features of MT 3.1 include:

• Dynamic pages - now it's possible to switch between generation of static pages and dynamic generation. Well, I'm going to stay with static pages anyway.
• Subcategories
• Post scheduling
• Improved extensibility
• Plugin pack, including of course MTBlacklist (a killer plugin, allowing to control comment spam easily)

Well, I'm not sure really if I want to upgrade. I'm quite happy with my MT 2.66 + MTBlacklist installation.

Kurt Cagle is blogging. Unfortunately it's Atom only blog (via Google's Blogger) and my RSS Bandit 1.2.0.114 (SP1 RC1) doesn't seem to understand it. Grrrrrr, how does thay say it - "Don't be evil" and "Google's mission: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."? Rubbish! When it comes to blogging, Google Is Evil.

[Via DonXML]

I just got several instances of what I believe is another resourceful form of blog comment spam. It looked like an ordinar spam, somehow making it through MT-Blacklist system I've got installed and after "Name: free government grants" I was aready clicking on "De-spam using MT-Blacklist" link, but then I realized the domain name to be banned is "journalism.nyu.edu". Hmmm, free government grants on nyu.edu site???? Wait a minute!

And yes, that wasn't a joke. That linked page at journalism.nyu.edu is a very serious political blog rant with lots of comments and obviously "free government grants" comment among them! So here is how I think it works: they post an evil spam comment to a trustworthy blog B. Then if it doesn't get cleaned soon, chances are high that it will be staying in archives for a long time, so they start to spread more evil spam comments linking to the infected page at the blog B.

The bad thing is that banning such spam you have to ban (trustworthy) site B, which can be actually even your friend's site. Ergo: clean your blogs guys, don't keep spam comments in archives.

Isn't it cool:

A visitor to your weblog Signs on the Sand has automatically been banned by posting more than the allowed number of comments in the last 200 seconds. This has been done to prevent a malicious script from overwhelming your weblog with comments. The banned IP address is

67.30.130.142

If this was a mistake, you can unblock the IP address and allow the visitor to post again by logging in to your Movable Type installation, going to Weblog Config - IP Banning, and deleting the IP address 67.30.130.142 from the list of banned addresses.
--
Powered by Movable Type Version 2.661
http://www.movabletype.org/

For sure it's a must for any blogging engine nowadays.

I'm tired of comment spam... It reached 15-30 spam instances/day level and finally I decided to install MT-Blacklist plugin for my blogging engine. 5 minutes of installation, updaing the blacklist, deep de-spamming and that it, I'm clean and protected. Well done, Jay Allen! Hope it's gonna help. Anyway if you are not a spammer and your comment has been refused, don't hesitate to mail me about that.

Here are new feeds worth to subscribe:
Microsoft Research News and Headlines Feed
Microsoft Research Downloads Feed
Microsoft Research Publications Feed
Cool.

[Via Roy Osherove]

RSS makes its way. TechNet's security team announced the first version of an RSS feed for its security bulletins: Microsoft Security Bulletin RSS Feed.

New version of the RSS Bandit has been released today. Amonst new features: support for Atom 0.3 support, ability to synchronize installations (killer!), 5 translations including Russian one made by me and lots more! Updated. Didn't check new features yet, but I can say the responsiveness is also improved!

This synchronizing feature is a real killer. I'm reading news from both home and work computers and now I can save huge amount of time having synchronized installations! That was so boring and depressing when I open RSS Bandit at home and needed to go through all feeds, thousands of items to see which I've read at work already and which I haven't. No more that silly waste of time, thanks to Dare and other members of the RSS Bandit team.

Ok, once I volunteered to make Russian translation for RSS Bandit - my favorite RSS aggregator, so finally I had to do it. It took me couple of days of my vacation time and it wasn't easy. There are just no established Russian translations for RSS terms, even for basic ones such as "feed" and "syndication". RSS is still extremely new stuff for Russian Web community, and very very few sites provide RSS feeds. So I had to discuss terms in Russian-speaking XML community and to invent the rest :) I did it once I translated XPath spec into Russian and I hope it will be successful translation again.

I believe it's a good one. I really hope somebody will find it useful. AFAIK RSS Bandit is going to be the very first news aggregator with Russian UI. Here is how it looks like:

So let's wait till next version of RSS Bandit is out. Needless to say: comments, suggestions, reports of typos and bad wordings - I appreciate all that stuff.

Arrrgh, I missed that day - 20 March my blog crossed 1 year timeline. Here is what I wrote a year ago:

Well, blogging is really infectious disease and finally I got the infection. I have installed Movabletype engine on my site quite easily (c'mon, it's cgi based) and here is my first record.

Lets see how it works. Administering is not bad and default template looks really nice, but I'm sure I'll modify all the style once I get some free time.

I named my blog "Signs on the Sand" (it took me the whole evening and the night to formulate my feelings), because I believe that's what all these words worth and that's their final destiny. Hmmm, whatever, I like it.

So happy blogging to me.

Ok, my productiveness was 190 blog items a year. Too bad. Must write more. Anyway, I'm glad I stepped in and today I just can't imagine myself without blogging and reading blogs. Every my morning starts with Mozilla Mail and RSS Bandit. So happy blogging to all of us!

Here is what MovableType blogging engine team writes:

We're taking our first steps towards the release of Movable Type 3.0. The pre-beta version has just finished its initial two rounds of alpha testing and we're now opening the testing to a larger audience ...

Starting today, we'll be giving all of our users much more information on what to expect in Movable Type 3.0.

Hey, apparently recent Opera browser beta has RSS reader embedded. Here are some screenshorts - here and here. I like that trend.
[Via 10x More Productive Blog]

Interesting new blog at blogs.msdn.com - "C# Frequently Asked Questions", where the C# team posts answers to common C# questions. Subscribed. Why doesn't C# support default parameters? Why doesn't C# support multiple inheritance? Why doesn't C# support #define macros? Ask your question here.

Six Apart has announced MovableType 3.0 Alpha testing is about to begin. Testers such as plugin developers, web standards advocates or just Movable Type users with an active commenting community are invited. Here is a list of upcoming MT 3.0 features.
I keep getting 5-10 spam comments a day, so sure I'd like to test comment registration system.

Breaking news: Aaron Skonnard is blogging! (Via Carnage4Life). A must feed for every XML geek.

MovableType version 2.661 has been released. The release aimed completely to fix spam comments problem. New anti-spam weapon includes:

We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable (documentation on the setting that controls N).

We've also added a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time.

Of course, there are no perfect defenses, and if you're truly concerned about the comments on your weblog, the best defense is prevention by closing old comment threads.

Also in 2.66, we've changed the behavior of <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> to use redirects when linking to URLs given in comments. The goal of this is to defeat the PageRank boost given to spammers by posting in the comments on a weblog.

Now I only wait for the next spam attack to see what happens...

Happy New Year to everybody my dear readers!

Now back to mundane things. Yesterday for the first time my blog has been seriously attacked by evil comment spammer. Last months I got used to receive 6-7 spam/troll comments a week and remove them out weekly, but this guy(application?) has sent 70 comments full of (200+) crap links during half an hour till I occasionally noted unusual activity and banned his IP.

Well, MovableType really sucks on comment spam. The only defence facility is manual IP banning. MT 3.0, whose beta is expected in Q1 2004 should make things better, they have announced it will include comment registration and improved comment management among other features. Well, I'm looking forward to see it.

Meanwhile reading discussion on comment spam in Sam's blog I realized there are really interesting ideas on detecting/blocking spam/troll comments I'd also like to try to implement myself. Unfortunately MT is perl-based engine, so the only my oprions are: learn perl or to implement frontend for MT comment subsystem in .NET. Bad ideas both. It's only now I finally see why Don Box is writing his own blog engine.

I don't dare to follow this way, but switching to .NET-based blog engine, such as dasBlog looks evem more tempting now.

Here is small HOWTO on exposing comments to MovableType-running blogs to RSS readers.
Note: Target MT versions are 2.64 and 2.65, I'm not sure about other ones.

Intro

1. <slash:comments> RSS 2.0 extension element, which merely contains number of comments made to the specified blog item.
2. RSS 2.0 <comments> element, which provides URI of the page where comments can be viewed and added (it's usually something like http://yourblog/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=blog-item-id in MT blogs).
3. <wfw:commentRss> RSS 2.0 extension element, which provides URI of comment feeds per blog item (to put it another way - returns comments made to specified blog item as RSS feed).
4. <wfw:comment> RSS 2.0 extension element, which provides URI for posting comments via CommentAPI.

Step 1. Exposing number of comments made to a blog item

<MTEntries lastn="15">
<item>
...
<slash:comments><$MTEntryCommentCount$></slash:comments>
...
</item>
</MTEntries>

Step 2. Linking to "comments to this item" page

<MTEntries lastn="15">
<item>
...
<comments>
  <$MTCGIPath$><$MTCommentScript$>?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>
</comments>
...
</item>
</MTEntries>

Step 3. Exposing comments as RSS feeds

Also you need to fix "Individual Entry Archive" template a bit to generate id attribute for each comment (this allows linking to a partiluar comment by its ID). Go to "Templates", click on "Individual Entry Archive", locate "<div class="comments-body">" tag and change it to "<div class="comments-body" id="c<$MTCommentID pad="1"$>">".

Now you are ready to link generated comment RSS archives in main RSS 2.0 feed:

<MTEntries lastn="15">
<item>
...
<wfw:commentRss>
  <$MTBlogArchiveURL encode_xml="1">commentrss/<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.xml
</wfw:commentRss>
...
</item>
</MTEntries>

Step 4. Enabling posting comments from RSS reader via CommentAPI

Having this aspx page allows me to add <wfw:comment> element to my RSS feed enabling posting of comments from RSS readers supporting CommentAPI (such as RSS Bandit). Here is a relevant RSS 2.0 template part:

<MTEntries lastn="15">
<item>
...
<wfw:comment>   
  <$MTBlogURL$>CommentAPI2MT.aspx?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>
</wfw:comment>
...
</item>
</MTEntries>

Apparently there is no CommentAPI implementation or plugin for MovableType blogging engine. At leats I'm unable to find any. And the last thing I want to do is to code in Perl today. Well, proxy ASPX page should be just fine then.

Moving the blog I relaized it's kinda layered by dust from architectural point of view. So I upgraded MovableType engine up to the latest version (2.65), added RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds and implemented wfw:commentRss in RSS 2.0 feed. Also I abandoned RSS 0.91 and 1.0 feeds.

Implementing wfw:commentRss in MovableType engine turned out to be a piece of cake (should I provide detailed guide for those interested?) and now I can read this blog's comments directly in RSSBandit (and I hope you can in your blogreader too). So cewl! It's a shame for Six Apart that MovableType templates don't support such feature out-of-box. Btw, Dare has complained about this inconvenience recently, I really hope he'll be satisfied now.

Unfortunately I cannot still posting comments from RSSBandit to this blog. Hmmm... Something is missed apparently. Need to read some more.

Name: Sex Toys
Email Address: Dave@Dave.net
URL: http://www.sextoys######.om/

Comments:

We live in strange times, but someday I think we will look back on all of this and marvel at how crazy it was. God, I hope so. I sure wouldn't want this insanity to become the norm.