Category: Blogging

I’ve been playing around with Trackbacks this evening, trying to get them set up here in my blog. Trackbacks are an alternative way of commenting on blog entries. Instead of posting an actual comment on the entry, you write an entry on your own blog. Then you tell your blog software to send a “trackback ping” to my server. My server then automatically adds a reference to your entry on my pages. Nifty, eh?

Well, I’ve got it mostly working. Movable Type normally considers comments and trackbacks to be completely different things, but Adam Kalsey has written a new plugin called “SimpleComments“, which allows you to merge them into a single display.

There is only one slight problem. When someone posts a comment on a blog entry, Movable Type automatically rebuilds that entry. If you’re displaying comments in-line with the entry, this ensures that the comments actually show up immediately. But trackbacks don’t trigger a rebuild. (This is intentional behaviour, not a bug in MT. It does make sense: if your rebuild process takes a long time, then a person trying to send you a trackback ping may get a time-out before the rebuild is complete.)

If you’re using the standard MT popup dialog for showing comments and trackbacks, the rebuild issue is not a problem, because the popup dialog dynamically extracts comments and trackbacks from the MT database when it shows up. But I don’t like popups. I much prefer to see comments and trackbacks on the same single page as the original entry.

I’m reluctant to change all of my archive pages from static .html to dynamic script pages (e.g. PHP). I use slashforward URLs for all my permalinks internally, but unfortunately Movable Type doesn’t realize that, and whenever I’ve been leaving trackbacks behind on other people’s sites, the trackback URLs point to the actual page.

Other alternatives include installing a script that will automatically rebuild my MT archive pages every so often, or doing a manual rebuild whenever I get a notification email that someone has sent me a trackback ping.

I’m going to have to think about this one for a while. I suspect I’ll end up going to an automatic rebuild solution, but I’d like to find one that only rebuilds selected entries (i.e. only the ones with new trackbacks since the last rebuild) rather than the whole archive. We’ll see how it goes.

James Lileks: I don’t agree with everything he says (for example, see his opinion on the Le Carré piece), but he says it intelligently and with (biting) humour. The rest of his writing is just wickedly ascerbic. And he has a two-and-a-half year daughter that he loves very much. Always nice to read daddy-baby stories 🙂

Brad Choate has a great list of things (design, accessibility, etc.) he is planning to do for his blog in 2003. I don’t need to do all of these here on my own site, but it’s a nice heuristic checklist to scan for stuff that I do need to do, but keep forgetting about. (E.g. adittional RSS feeds, a proper “About Me” page. I’ve been meaning to do these for ages now, but they keep slipping off my radar.)

I saw my first instance of blogspam on Webword at the start of October. Someone had used a “comments” form to place an ad at the bottom of one of John’s postings. At the time, I commented on how easy this would be to do in bulk. Given how simple this is, I expressed a small measure of surprise that it isn’t done more often.

Well, it is now.

Yesterday I found an article at The Laboratorium (via BoingBoing) which talked about how spammers are starting to manipulate blog comments. This in turn pointed me to Mark Pilgrim’s site, where he discusses the problem in further detail.

This “comment spam” comes in addition to “referer spam” (see also here), which I have started noticing here on Sunpig already. I had been playing around with a referer script the other week, thinking that it might be cool to show what other pages link to this site, but what seemed cool last week seems slightly worrying now.

Basically, the problem is that you are allowing other people to update the content on your site. Comments, trackbacks, and referer listings all allow other people to manipulate your web site. This is a cool feature because it makes for a more dynamic ecosystem of discussion, but it’s a risk because you might not always like what the other people make your web site say.

And it might not even just be a risk of annoyance (spam) or a security risk (autodiscovery of your mt.cgi script, followed by a dictionary attack). What happens when someone uses your web site to post libellous comments about someone else, or pornographic pictures, or even gasp the DeCSS source code? Other people may have written it, but it’s on your web site. Could you be legally liable? Is a disclaimer message enough to divert responsibility?

Fortunately, Mark’s article shows that we have some really clever people on the case already. Unfortunately, given the success (or lack thereof) that anti-spam solutions have had with email, it seems likely that blogspam is here to stay. We can try to minimize it, but it isn’t going to go away any time soon.

Okay, this is the RSS aggregator I want: NetNewsWire. But it’s only available for the Mac. Damn.

So who’s out there doing a similar three-paned thing for Windows or Linux? Am I going to have to write my own?