sstream of consciousness - Web

Deleting unapproved comments in Drupal

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 20:01:58 -0700

I use Drupal to run this site. While Drupal looks like a bit of an overkill for running just a personal blog, I don't want to switch to any other blogging engine now (No, not even to trendy WordPress, thank you).

And of course Drupal has its long-standing annoying quirks. One of them is a deletion of a comment spam - you have to hit a delete button for each comment individually - which results in a horrible user experience when you have Web-based interface. Fortunately there is a workaround.

One piece of advice though - change URL from the article to something which cannot be guessed or, better yet, add authentication. I hope Drupal maintainers will get the message and turn this workaround into feature.

Shooting the troubles

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:30:35 -0700

Probably the most interesting part of web log statistics for my site is a page with keywords that people use in search engines to come to my pages. The most popular search is for information about C++ string streams. Ironically, this blog does not provide much help here, though I put some useful links on my front page.

Over the course of my career I bumped into many different technical problems. Often these problems required a lot of time or mental effort to investigate. Needless to say, web search engine made that task way easier, but sill there were problems I had to spend considerable time on. Once I had this blog I have started to put some results of my troubleshooting sessions, primarily as a sign of gratitude to all the people who do the same.

So, when I look at search term statistics, I am always glad to find that people came to the solution at my site, using search keywords describing their problems, like the problem of putting spaces to LD_PRELOAD environment variable or Coloured bash prompt screwing multiline input in a terminal.

Maybe separate articles or pages instead of blog entries is more appropriate for that kind of texts, but I am pretty happy with the present format now.

In near future I am going to post a couple of entries explaining problems related to GNU C library application binary interface (ABI) revisions and incompatibilities and problems with C++ language ABI.

We need standards for Wiki syntax and interchange format

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 18:28:27 -0600

Having used a lot of different software tools for a long time, I know how important data exchange is. As Wikis become increasingly important collaboration and knowledge management tools, the need of having standard wiki syntax and interchange format will be more and more acute.

The problem is that different wikis cannot agree neither on wiki markup language, nor on common storage format. Some people believe that there should be no standard Wiki syntax at all

There is little consistency across WikiEngines for a variety of reasons. One, there should be no standard syntax. The WikiSyntax is the UserInterface, it is not the data encoding. This point gets lost on many people (e.g. the TikiWiki RFC for standard syntax), but wikis aren't really a medium unto themselves. They are more like pure expressions of CyberText. To get away from philosophy, many wikis have to change their local syntax to fit their local users' needs, such as adding LatexInWiki or conforming to pre-existing documentation markup or pre-existing text formatting conventions in that community. This is as it should be. By now, given the proliferation of syntaxes, it should be clear that it is not reasonable to standardize the syntax.

I agree that decoupling of wiki syntax from interchange format is extremely important. However I do not agree that syntax should not be standard. Granted, some specific Wiki uses may require special syntactic extensions, but syntax base must be the same for all Wikis. I use three or four different wiki engines on a daily basis and every now and then I find myself typing "!!" instead of "==" for headers, or word between quotes when I should really put it between asterisks. This is irritating to say the least. Besides, user interface standartization is even more important than standard things behind the scenes. While we can perform a lot of different transformations on user-invisible parts, we cannot do the same for UI. The truth is, users hate even slightest difference in the interface, that drives them mad. Every good programmer should think about users first and only after that about his or her own convenience. Just put Windows-only user before the Linux desktop and watch...

While common wiki syntax is really really nice to have, common interchange format is an absolute "must have". Open wiki interchange standard will help to avoid vendor lock-in and simplify data retention One would easily transfer wiki data from one application to another, just because new wiki engine has more features or old one is not supported anymore.

Many people recognize the importance of standard wiki syntax and standard wiki interchange format. Take, for example, TikiWiki standartization effort or wiki markup standard and wiki interchange formatpages at Meatball wiki.

I favour the idea of microformats. Microformat is a lightweight format based on XHTML. Folks behind microformats discuss non-XHTML wiki format, but in fact they are talking about standard wiki syntax, not wiki interchange format. In my opinion XHTML would be very good choice of interchange format - at the end of the day all wiki texts are translated into HTML or XHTML.

And I would really like to see standard interchange format developed for blogs too. That would simplify transition to other blogging systems, even to newer versions of the same blogging system.

Site has moved to a new provider

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 21:28:38 -0600

Today I moved this site from my previous provider - Rusonyx to my new provider - WestHost. Actually, Rusonyx is a very good hosting provider, and I would readily recommend it to anyone in Russia. The only problem is that time lag is too big for me, so I moved to US hosting. Now site feels much more snappy.

At the same time I upgraded Drupal (CMS used for this site) to version 4.6.2.

Furl and del.icio.us and market research

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 20:44:17 -0600

Hans van Deum writes on his blog about my comparison of online bookmark managers:

I found this blog which has an interesting comparison between different bookmarking services. This guy is obviously sold on furl. Perhaps I should check it out.

The problem with these sites is that they are only useful for market research when they are the de facto standard, because e-businesses will never pay each site separately to do the same research.

If Hans wants to do market research he is probably better with del.icio.us. It seems to be trendier and user base appears to be bigger. I use Furl, because I need a place to store my bookmarks and easily find them afterwards. It has features that I need, and del.ici.ous does not have them. It is that simple.

Spurl.net has pretty much the same functionality as Furl (at least with regard to functionality I am interested in). If I knew about Spurl before, I would probably have chosen it. So far, I have not seen a "killer feature" that will make me switch.

Where Google is heading?

Wed, 04 May 2005 16:49:01 -0600

Recently, Google introduced introduced its new product: Webaccelerator. Webaccelerator is a local web proxy that fetches web pages from Google cache instead of website itself, it also does prefetching (i.e. tries to preventively download pages that you are likely to jump to).

That made me think: why G00gle would release yet another "Web accelerator" while there are literally hords of free and commercial products that do more or less the same, but in a different way? I guess the reason behind this may be a little bit scary for web site owners.
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Microsoft evangelist cannot sing this gospel anymore

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 08:24:52 -0600

Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, is leaving his current job to move on to Skype (I found that via Mini-Microsoft).

Well, I knew there is something wrong, long before.

Yahoo 360

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 17:30:39 -0600

Thanks to Jeremy Wright I got an invite to much-buzzed Yahoo! 360 service beta. Frankly, I was not impressed. Right now there are just three applications: blog, photo sharing, and social networking platform. None of these is of interest for me. I host my own blog (that one you are reading). I also have my own photo site on my home computer which gives me unlimited storage space, unrestricted image sizes, lightspeed uploads.

And I have never been a big fan of social networking. These friends-of-friends and accessible-via-chain-of-four things sound too complicated. It's not that I am stupid, just do not want to dive into that. For now, my social networking is my address book and list of IM contacts. Not too far from good old Rolodex.
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Microsoft evangelist is a Mac owner

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 16:24:20 -0700

Scoble's boss, Lenn Pryor, Microsoft Employee, has a title "Director, Platform Evangelism". Funny though, he has a homepage at mac.com. That implies he is an owner of a Mac with OS X, I guess. Now that's interesting.

Travel Wiki

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:59:46 -0700

I am a big fan of Wikimedia foundation and its wikis. I also always liked sites like Lonely planet. One day I thought: wiki for travellers by travellers would be a great thing!

Quick search revealed that a couple in Montreal started a Wikitravel project almost two years ago. You may also wnat to checkout another project of a smaller scale.

Quick overview of Spurl.net

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 12:57:41 -0700

One of my blog readers epxressed interest in seeing Spurl.net compared against other bookmarking services in my overview.

It usually takes a while for me to get to know all ins and outs. However here is my quick impression.

Spurl.net is rather similar to Furl.net in functionality - it also saves cached copies of pages. However it has some nice features that others do not. For example Spurl.net may give you quick statistical overview of your library and may report broken links. It also attaches small web page thumbnails - for people that tend to remember visual impressions, rather than abstract text. Another feature is 18+ filter - useless for me, so go figure out yourself what it does :).
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Test of new bookmarking service: Filangy roundup, invites

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 20:39:49 -0700

Recently I've got a Filangy invite and I spent some playing with that. Summary: great start but there aree many things to do.

First of all, I updated my bookmarking service comparison table. Now, down to the details.

The most important feature that distinguishes Filangy from other bookmarking services is that it indexes almost everything you browse. By "almost" I mean all web pages that are not under password. Filangy also does not do anything about pages on SSL servers (urls that start with https://).

This is most wonderful and most scary feature of Filangy (and most touted by its creators, too). If you know Slogger, you may think of Filangy as a Slogger that is constantly in record mode but saves results on the Net instead of local drive.
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Comment spam

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 19:30:11 -0700

It seems finally comment spammers found me. Not long after I enabled trackbacks, every single post in my blog was followed up by stupid spam. I guess there is some sophisticated query to a database to delete them, but for now I've just deleted by hand.

These comments are really trackbaks. Simple comments are protected by captcha. I wonder if it is possible to deploy captcha for trackbacks somehow...

New kid on the block - Filangy

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:13:43 -0700

From Jeremy Zawodny's blog entry I discovered Filangy - new advanced bookmarking and "Personal web" service.

I already wrote a comparison of several advanced bookmark managers. I will add Filangy to that comparison as soon as I have enough play with it.

I asked for an invitation in the comment to Jeremy's blog entry, and guess what! - Filangy CEO himself sent me an invite! Someone under nick 99zeros was kind enough to send me an invite too - Thank you!
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Перва�? попытка ру�?�?кого тек�?та

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 13:36:14 -0700

Съешь еще �?тих м�?гких француз�?ких булок.