Hello patient readers. I'm back. Finally.
Yes, it seems that after nearly four months of lock-out, the powers that be have adjusted the settings on the server and I'm back in. Will it last? Who knows. I'm grateful to be here (and might take advantage of this opportunity to secure a back-up).
So, just a few quick notes on the state of play. Actually, at the moment I'm in Thailand with the family on vacation. We've been visiting in Hong Kong and now are spending a week on the beach before we return to Hong Kong for a few more days, then home to sunny...England.
I have to say I'm very taken with Thailand. I suppose at some level I knew I would be. I know a lot of people who have come here and never returned. I just love the laid-back lifestyle, the sun...it's hard to compare with the English winter. This one, especially, which is the coldest since I moved over to the UK. Better a £3 massage on the beach than £300 to fill the fuel oil tank.
I still have news I hope I can share soon. The prudent side of me says not to curse it by reporting it before time.
I also will repeat my intention, several months deferred, to be a better correspondent in future.
Until then, I must go. Make hay while the sun shines, as they say.
I've finally been bitten by the RSS bug.
First it was podcasts. I think they're brilliant; they're on the way to totally reviving my walk to the station in the morning. My iTunes fills up and I synchronise in seconds. I'm particularly enjoying Grape Radio, KCRW's Good Food and Eat Feed. I can't wait for the BBC to offer more feeds, like the Food Programme - their trial is pretty limited.
And now it's RSS feeds. My new job means I need to sift through a lot of news, and I've found a newsreader to be really useful. As an upside, it also lets me keep track of what's been posted in the blogosphere. I've got it set to update every 30 minutes.
Anyway, I didn't understand the utility of this before, so I turned off the syndication feature of this blog, but, well, it's really always been there. I've added a link on the left side now, or you can grab the feed here. In my case, every 30 minutes is overkill.
I'm just back from spending two weeks in Romania. What's the reward for that? I'm headed straight back again this afternoon. Thankfully only for a couple of days this time.
Anyway, looks like I won't be back before next week. In the mean time, here's an interesting link about free land in the US Midwest, courtesy of Megnut.
Advance warning - light blogging ahead. I'm going to be away on business travel for a few weeks. I may get some time to write a few posts, but I doubt I'll have access to the site. If I do, I'll stick up some entries, but otherwise don't expect much news until mid-March.
After spending half an hour removing over 500 spam comments (2 per page) this morning, I've decided to close down the older comments on this site. I've found a plug-in that makes this simple, MTCloseComments.
I still welcome comment on older posts. There's an e-mail address on the left side of this page, and you can leave a comment on a newer post if you're so inclined. I just don't want to spend so much time policing the back-content of the site, and I find that most comments (although not the ones today) tend to target older posts.
I'm trialling this software, but after a site rebuild, it seems to work as advertised.
I remain a committed advocate of mt-blacklist to keep my comments clean. I get far more spam commenting than I do from legitimate sources. Starting from the list published by Jay Allen (mt-blacklist's author), I'd grown my own list to 2500 entries. But Allen has rules to keep his list from becoming inadvertently malicious. You can send him links, but only one link per e-mail, and who's going to do all that screening? Allen himself shies away from the task. Even though it only takes a short while to police your own site with blacklist, I reckoned there have to be better ways out there.
Sure enough. Some good samaritans are doing our work for us, and sharing it with others. Google on blacklist.txt. Remember - other programs use a blacklist and not everything you find may be compatible with mt-blacklist.
I found my first lists at Hollowcube. He linked to a couple of others. I copied them in. I found more spam lurking deep in my comments. I've added them in. And now my blacklist is up to 4752 entries. Remember - some of those block LOTS of sites with one regex.
There are some drawbacks to this. Some people may add key words that you wouldn't (the word 'sex', plain old 'sex', was blocked by several lists that presumably will never drift to that subject; one list blocked 'blogspot.com' and 'msn.com'; one blocked 'www.fda.gov' for some reason). You need to go back and re-edit the list, and with 4700 entries, this is a pain and there you are, looking at lots of the most demented ideas out there on the web. Okay, I find it kind of amusing...
One shortcut - by no means infallible - is to despam your clean comments and see if it picks up anything you wouldn't otherwise have banned. You don't actually have to delete these comments - just note down the expression matches and delete them from your blacklist using the 'List' page. If your blacklist is eliminating or preventing your legitimate dialogue, you need to reconfigure it.
Of course, if you're lazy, there's nothing to stop you from linking to someone else's blacklist (I suppose). But then you're relying on them to keep you clean, rather than shooting down the universe of spambots that have already found your comments.
So, having done a bit of heavy lifting, I'd like to add myself to the list of people who are sharing the wealth by posting a link to my own blacklist. I'm sure 4752 isn't the longest list out there (try this search to see), and I intend to keep mine growing. I hope you find it useful.
My 100-day "sabbatical" has ended and I'm back to work from today. I found it really difficult to blog while travelling - lack of access, lack of time, keeping track of two kids. I reckon I might manage to post a little more often. I hope I've not lost my already small readership.
So, back to work!
Paul Rohde has a blog!
Since most of my influences over there (===>) on the right sidebar are dead, and since Wendell Berry is unlikely to start a blog, I'm really thrilled to have the chance to hear Paul's thoughts as he carries on (or not) his wanderings. With life as a pilgrimage, it's not really necessary or disappointing that he's not heading out on the road this summer.
I'm "co-branding" my blog from today as I move over to my new name, We Bought The Farm. The bandiera link will work for a long time yet, but I want to make sure I claim namespace for We Bought The Farm, since I bought the domain name.
I've been remiss lately, and I reckon it's going to last a while longer. We're off on a long-anticipated holiday to Chile next week. And with my Lenten devotions, I find myself lacking much spare time of late and not much of any import to comment upon.
I have spent some time over the holidays making the move from my old hosting company and domain to a new one (although I've parked the bandiera.org.uk here and will leave it active for another couple of years at least (coz I like the name)). I've also moved from Blogger Pro to Movable Type. It was a big transition and a little bit messy.
First, some of the entries have had titles added or changed. CSS is not a friend of links in your title fields. I will have to remember that, although in one place I've left it be. Also, MT CSS does not respond well to entries without titles. Something else to remember. I've found a few places with dead links or links that have moved into site archives. In some cases, I've added updates to a new source for the content. In others, regrettably, I've not been able to find a replacement. And speaking of regrets, I've lost all my comments.
I've moved to a small hosting company called f2o.org, which seems to me to do a lot of things right. They are there for the user to learn and experiment. Their founder, Dan Cody, has personally helped me out with a lot of my moving issues. I felt so burned by my previous host,
Next, there's something buggy about the way that MT handles paragraph breaks and formatting in things like <blockquote>. Apparently MT sticks in <p> tags after each paragraph, and this somehow throws the stylesheet's values out of whack. I have found an add-in that seems to address the problem, but I've not yet had time to figure out how it works or actually add it in. I will post when I do, since it seems a useful hack.
Finally, I still don't have all of the bandiera functionality up and working at my new site, so please be patient. I am taking a cue from Matt Haughey and especially Brad Choate on using MT to run the entire site, including static content pages (so, I might finally get around to my 'about' page). Among other things, this lets you update your static content without an ftp client, so helpful to me.
I've recently accepted an invitation to begin contributing to a new group weblog covering Latin American topics, Southern Exposure, which is up and running from today. I won't post everything I put there here, or vice versa, but some overlap can be expected from time to time.
So, I was one of the Blogger Pro subscribers who got the e-mail from Ev about the end of the subscription model. Apparently the Google folks have decided to roll out all of the Pro-level features (or most of them, at least) for free.
I signed up for Pro in, I guess, its earliest days. I think bandiera was about a week old at that point, and I found free Blogger to be painfully slow and unreliable. I signed up more for the promise of reliable service than for its features (although I liked the idea of being able to e-mail post at some point in the future).
Anyway, these days I am pretty geeked by Typepad (although it's costly for what I want it for) and was giving some thought to moving to MT and a new host when my current subs run out. But at least for now my blogging costs are a little lower, and heck, I get a "hoodie" for my troubles.
Obrigado, Blogger Pro.
Has anyone else had this experience? Blogger eats your template. You innocently republish and suddenly you've lost everything...I just had a brief section of header in my "view|source".
I was lucky enough to be able to dig back through my Explorer archive and rebuild the template from a reasonably recent version. But, Wow! What a heart-stopping moment to realise that it's not Blogger refusing to publish, but that it has published and suddenly you've lost your site layout.
Learnt me a lesson...keep a back-up of the template (and I should also bother to get a back-up of my content) somewhere on my own machine.
This would not happen if I had the time, know-how and host config to run MT or some other system. I have been following the TypePad demo with interest over at Randy's Beautiful Horizons. It makes a real difference: see his BlogSpot site for comparison.