Rereading Alan’s post on his blog hiatus, where he takes a month off of posting on his blog to comment elsewhere, I was struck (as always) by the patterns in activity he described. I decided to take a closer peek at the activity on my own blog – I’ve been thinking a lot about discourse analysis lately, so it’s at least partially non-navel-gazing.

Here’s the graph for the first few years of life for my blog. It started out as a private, personal outboard brain, then kind of took off with a life of its own.

Interesting. This blog’s heyday was 2005-2006. A lifetime ago, in intartube years. Then twitter happened in January 2007. It would be _really_ interesting to run some latent content analysis on both posts and comments, to see if they’re different BT vs. AT. Are the activity patterns different? Is the content different? Linking patterns? etc… It’d be completely nonscientific, but fascinating nonetheless…

I’ve been messing around with my blog as a hub of stuff, but think I’ve finally got it working the way I have in mind. I use asides for more-than-twitter but less-than-blog-post entries. I now have delicious.com exporting daily linkdumps into a Links category. Neither of these 2 things show up on the front page of the blog, nor in the RSS feed. But they ARE archived on the blog, and are searchable. Persistent archive of stuff, without the noise and ugly mess. I’m using Advanced Category Excluder to prevent the 2 categories (asides and links) from showing up on the front page and main feed – although they still have their own feeds through the category system.

Update: I decided to put the delicious.com daily link posts into the RSS feed after all, but not on the front page. Not sure if I’ll leave it that way or not…

I’ve switched themes on my blog. Again. And, once more, I just yanked an off-the-shelf theme and slightly tweaked the CSS to make it do what I want.

Before (left), using the excellent Journalist theme, and after (right) using the Magazine Basic theme:

They’re both good, so why switch? I was messing around with Magazine Basic for a blog at the Teaching & Learning Centre, where we needed a more magazine or newspaper feel to it. And was struck by how much I liked the theme. I like that it’s very clean, but polished. It only shows excerpts for the last few articles on the front page, and will show small versions of images if they’re available for a post. I like that it’s not purely river-of-posts – there’s no “Older Posts” link on the front page. Once things trickle off the front, they’re accessed via the category and tag pages. No humans use the “Older Posts” stuff, and googlebot has a full index of the site, so that design was redundant clutter anyway. I like that full posts aren’t on the front page – that means more posts are visible at a glance, and most people won’t even notice because they’re coming from Google (directly to a post anyway) or RSS.

I’ll give it a try for awhile. But so far, I’m really liking it.

I just cracked open the Google Analytics stats for my blog, and was curious to see how much data was available. I had it display all data (going back as far as November 16, 2005, which is apparently when I first started using Analytics). Google has tracked over 1 million page views on my blog. Over 600,000 unique visitors. The scale of that just blows my mind.

I was just invited to enter an entirely reputable “blog awards” contest, for the low, low entry fee of only $195 – but ACT NOW! The entry fee goes up to $275 in January!

I can’t wait to be invited to attend the Nigerian Dead Relatives Blog Directory Awards…

I switched to mollom for antispam on my blog one week ago, using the wp-mollom plugin. I wanted to give it a week so it’d get a fair shake, and figured anything had to do better than Akismet and SK2 were doing on my blog.

There was an initial warming up period for the first couple of days – I didn’t realize this, but apparently my blog attracts a particular dialect of spam that is different from what had been seen by mollom before. After teaching it about these silly spammers (most appear to be based in eastern Europe, and use fragments of text from my own blog posts and comments to appear legit) mollom started to do pretty well.

The mollom service tracks stats on “ham” vs. “spam” and it is definitely doing better – unfortunately, the “ham” stats also appears to include comments that I had to moderate manually so the stats are a bit off kilter.

1 week of mollom antispam stats - "ham" appears to include legitimate comments and manually moderated spam.

The initial green spike of “ham” on August 6 was actually almost entirely made up of comments that got through mollom and that I had to manually moderate as spam. My current mollom stats indicate:

So far, Mollom has blocked or moderated 3803 messages on your website of which you moderated 4.92% yourself.

Over the entire week, there were only 35 legitimate comments posted to the blog. My current stats say there have been 3803 messages yanked as spam (either directly by mollom, or manually). That means over 99% of comments that were attempted to be posted on my blog were spam. mollom’s stats say I’ve manually moderated 4.92% of the spam comments – that’s 187 comments manually spanked. 26 per day. But it’s definitely getting better.

There are still occasional spam attacks (most notably by an apparent ring of eastern European spamroaches), but by and large, mollom is already outperforming both Akismet and SK2 on my blog. I’ll be sticking with mollom for awhile – hopefully the trend continues and it keeps getting smarter and more effective at dealing with the particular variants of spam that get sent my way.

The wp-mollom plugin could use some minor refinement – much of the spam I get reuses bits of text from my own blog posts and previous comments on that post to appear legitimate. It would be much easier to detect this if a link to the post was provided on the mollommanage page.

It would also be much more effective if the referring web page and user agent were indicated on a comment so I could see at a glance if it came from a spambot, or was sent by the various pagerank backlink checking utilities – both obvious signs of spamass activity.

I’d posted some previous feedback on the mollom forums, and it looks like the suggestions have already been implemented. That’s fantastic.

I just took a quick peek at the “Top Posts & Pages” stats for my blog, as calculated by the WordPress.com Stats system. I had it run the numbers for my most popular posts of all time, and was both surprised and dejected. Apparently, this is not an edublog after all.

I’m actually not sure what kind of blog this is – my most popular post of all time was a comment on potential political/police entrapment of protestors. Followed, way back, by a stupid post on how (the then newly released) Google Maps could see my house. There are a couple of posts with source code or tips. One on MediaWiki. At #19, the first post that might be interpretted as educational in nature – talking about podcasting.

Whatever. It’s my blog, and I’ll probably keep posting crap on all kinds of topics. Maybe I should set up a new WordPress Category just for “edublog” posts…

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 few WordPress plugins to help ease the pain, but for the love of Xenu, this bullshit should not be necessary.

But, if I think a comment is spam, I reserve the right to nuke it. Or to remove the URL and leave the comment in place. It’s my blog, and I’m sick and tired of people crapping on it in order to game google. PFO.

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…

Seems to have worked, so far. The “Similar Posts” plugin borked, so I had to disable that. Everything else Just Seems To Work™.

So, what’s the difference between Categories and Tags now? I used to use Categories as tags. Are they both interfaces to the same table in the database? One way to find out…

Update: oh. they’re separate things. well, that’s silly. so, now all of my old /tag/tagname links that used to point to category pages now point to empty “tag” pages because none of my posts have actual tags. That’ll be fun to clean up…

Update 2: wasn’t so bad. just went into the permalink settings and had “tags” point to /tags and left my “categories” pointing at /tag. Not exactly what they had in mind, but whatever.