magpiebrain

Finally someone has written a “tool(redemption in a blog – MT-Blacklist Updater)”:http://blog.codefront.net/archives/2003/12/14/mtblacklist_updater.php#comments to dynamically update your MT blacklist. As some of you may be aware, Jay Allen’s excellent “MT Blacklist(MT-Blacklist – A Movable Type plugin to eradicate comment and trackback spam)”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ plugin allows you to blacklist comments based on URLs, to stop spammers attempting to use your blog to inflate their Google pageranks. Entries for your blacklist can easily be added yourself, however Jay is maintaining an RSS feed with new changes to his master list.
Cheah Chu Yeow has created a “PHP program(
MT-Blacklist Updater – Keep your blacklist updated
)”:http://blog.codefront.net/scripts/blacklistupdater/ run via Cron which can update your blacklist based on this master list. Now as Jay himself has stated, in the long term a master list of blacklisted sites is not necessarily the answer (Jay has proposed a peer to peer solution) but in the meantime this will do. As soon as I’ve updated to the new version of MT Blacklist, I’ll be giving this plugin a whirl…

For a while now I have been singing the praises of “FeedDemon”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp, Nick Bradbury’s very good RSS reader. I still think its a great product, however a couple of niggles caused me to look elsewhere. Firstly, with FeedDemon its a bit of a pain to synchronise my blogroll between sites. I browse both at work and at home, and whilst FeedDemon does allow you to synchronise your feeds with an online OPML file, this is a manual process. Also it cannot write to the file (meaning an export->ftp upload before leaving work). The lack of blog synchronisation between sites also means I’m not sure what I’ve read and what I haven’t, so keeping up can be a pain. Secondly, I can’t use Firebird (well, Gecko) to render the sites. Not a major gripe I’d admit, but IE blows.

“blo.gs”:http://blo.gs/ is an online service that stores a list of your favourite blogs. When you log into the service, you can see your favourites, and when they were last updated. In of itself this isn’t too useful. What is useful however is the sidebar they provide for NS6/Firebird. It sits quite nicely in my Firebird sidebar. When at home or the office, I can use the time stamp of my favourites to work out what I would of read. Even better is the fact that my favourites get automatically exported as an OPML file thereby making the construction of a online blogroll very easy (expect one soon). FeedDemon hasn’t been started since I got all of my favourites loaded into blo.gs.

FeedDemon 1.0 Release Candidate 3 is now available – as always check release notes before installing. It looks like this will be the last release candidate before the full release – guess I’ll finally have to pay for this excellent product!

I have decided to deprecate support for the “older RSS 1.0 feed”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/index.rdf, in preference for a newer “2.0 feed”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/index.xml. If your reading this via an aggregator it might be an idea to swap over now. I’ll probably still generate the old feed, for a while longer, but won’t be doing much with it.

Finally got around to adding a search to the site – I’ll be adding an advanced search feature as soon as I get my head around the tags. Yell if there are any problems!

So there I was, trying to create an XSLT style sheet for my RSS 2.0 feed, when I managed to overwrite the main index.html template for my blog with the RSS 2.0 template. Thankfully a friend pointed out than I’d made a right asshat of myself – I’ve restored and earlier version of the template in the meantime, as I won’t have time to fix it properly until tomorrow, as I’m off to see the Flaming Lips tonight…

Jay Allen has just “released the latest version(Jay Allen – MTBlacklist Version 1.5 Released)”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_version_15_released of his “MTBlacklist(MTBlacklist homepage)”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ plugin – currently my favourite stick-with-a-nail-in to smack spammers with. I’ll install it tonight.