Archive for February, 2008

I really hope this is just a visual display bug. I’m getting the shakes just thinking about this. »

During the MooseCamp session “WordPress and your problems” I promised to look into a few items that we were discussing, and report back to the group. I’ve finally made some time to dig around, and here’s the goods. Nancy White asked some questions about tweaking her WordPress site, and they were all things that sounded... »

It’s my blog, and I get to determine what is spam and what is not. The latest round of human-generated spam is getting past the automated spamblocks because the comments look valid. They’re natural language, often on topic, and occasionally even interesting or insightful – or relevant to the post being spammed. I’m using a... »

I’m not going to post a conference recap, and others have beaten me to the punch with eloquent reflections on the event. It’s one of those things that sounds like fanaticism – the sense of wonder usually reserved for such things as the TED conference (aside: could you imagine going to that? how many... »

If you can read this, then the FeedBurner feed redirection is working properly. If your feed reader didn’t update your subscription automagically, the URL to the main feed for my blog is http://www.darcynorman.net/feed Hopefully things won’t get confused or lost in the shuffle… »

I just disabled two separate blog stats packages, each for a different reason. This move was partially inspired by the upcoming “F*** Stats – Make Art!” session on the docket at Northern Voice. First, I disabled the FeedBurner FeedSmith integration plugin. This is a handy way to automatically redirect requests for RSS feeds to the... »

The spam problem has been the bane of openly available “web 2.0″ sites since, well, forever. Everyone universally hates spam. Everyone, universally, wants to see it go away. Why is it still a problem? Wait. Not everyone wants it to go away. There are two groups of people who benefit from spam. spammers google Of course spammers won’t... »

My blog has been receiving spam in what looks to be a new wave of spam attacks. First, the spammers seed the whitelist by posting apparently innocuous comments with no URLs, or with a URL that doesn’t contain spam. Then, once they’re in, they wait a bit and then throw the switch. The spam... »

EduGlu is a concept that came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 – almost exactly 2 years ago – as a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple – a person publishes a bunch of stuff,... »

I’ve been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept – a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It’s getting really close – it can currently... »