Akismet is the “official” WordPress response to the soul-sucking rampages of blog comment spam. It promises to make spam magically vanish by harnessing the Hive Mind to banish spam en masse. But it doesn’t work. I’ve been getting a fair amount of spam approved by Akismet as ham, when they are obviously spam. Not sure what’s going on there, but I’d guess that since anyone can flag comments as spam/ham, that the spammers are getting in the game themselves. Total guess though.
Three Amigo Camp will be running the day before Moosecamp, which is in turn the day before Northern Voice. On Thursday afternoon (Feb. 9), we’ll be hanging out at UBC from 12:30-3pm, and everyone is invited to drop in and chat, show/tell, and most importantly mooch on some free catering.
This will be a “Three Amigos” (Brian, Alan and myself - plus guests) production, so expect lots of irreverance, jocularity, sarcasm, and twisting of metaphors. And free food.
There was a coComment invitation waiting in my inbox this morning. I activated it, and tested it out on a couple of blogs. It actually works! It provides a simple way to track comments I’ve left all over the place. Very very cool.
I do have a couple questions about the service though. It’s provided by a Swiss startup company - so, will they pull a bait-and-switch and start charging? What are they going to do with the data? These conversation threads could be mined for all kinds of good/evil. Can we opt out of sharing some conversations? Can we delete (not just hide, but nuke from orbit) a monitored conversation?
I just saw a link to coComment (via an OReilly blog, IIRC - can’t seem to find the link at the moment) It looks like a way to track comments that you make on various blogs, providing a way to keep on top of conversations distributed throughout the blogosphere.
I’ve been doing a low-tech version of this by tagging blog comments on del.icio.us with “blogcomment” so I can periodically check in on them. But this appears to but some intelligence, or at least some automation, behind the concept.
I finally got around to doing something with some of my photographs. Instead of just gathering dust in iPhoto, there are now a bunch of great photos proudly on display in our living room. We made a trek down to IKEA on the weekend (the same weekend when the rest of the province was busy intending on spending their $400/person “Ralph Bucks” peak oil prosperity cheques - so every store was insanely busy).
Zack Rosen just posted a comparison of Moodle and Sakai, based on some available online web- and project metrics (not an evaluation of the software itself). The comparison reads like something written by a Moodle supporter, intending to show how viable it is when compared with Sakai. It is viable, but language like “All signs point strongly towards Moodle kicking Sakai’s butt and to the Mellon Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Sakai Partners wasting $6.6M” really isn’t productive or conducive to an objective comparison.
One of the biggest questions I get from people who want to use wiki.ucalgary.ca is “How do I protect or lock a page?” I’ve had to respond with a gentle suggestion that the wiki is an open resource by design, but that doesn’t go very far. There are valid reasons for locking down a wiki - ranging from sensitive information that shouldn’t be In The Wild, to protecting privacy (K-12 collaborations can’t have info about kids leaking onto the ’net for obvious reasons).
Cole’s looking for information about Zope/Plone for possible use in an academic setting. I’ve dabbled with Plone, but that was something like 18 months ago, so my info is a bit stale.
Thought I’d fire off a question into the Lazyweb to help Cole gather info (because I’m curious, too).
Anyone have any experience with Zope/Plone? How does it compare with Drupal? Pros? Cons? Scalability? The service may need to scale to an institutional level, IIRC…
We’re starting to do a lot of Drupal hosting for various projects around here. It looks like we’ll be having about a dozen or so Drupal-powered sites running by summer.
I’d been planning on putting together a “Learning Commons Drupal Distro” that had all of the modules that we like, and themes, etc. so I could easily set up new sites without re-downloading each module repeatedly. I was even planning on writing an install script, which would copy stuff into a specified directory and prompt for easy configuration. Turns out I won’t have to do that…
So I just did something radical. I quit both Mail and Blogbridge. I’ll fire them up a couple/few times a day, but they don’t need to be open all of the time, just begging me to pay attention to the new, urgent, and interesting stuff that might be waiting for me.
Trying the free blog editing client app Bleezer - it’s a cross-platform java app. A little rough around the edges, but has a pretty decent UI (but categories are provided in a popup, so you can select only one category for a post).
The editor is not WYSIWYG, but toggles to preview mode easily. It doesn’t grok the convention of skipping p and br, so the preview is spaced oddly. The app provides an interface for direct FTP uploads of images etc. as well.
