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Playing around with Trackback

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.

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Export from Mozilla to Oulook (part 2)

After a few suggestions from a friend I eventually found the solution to importing mail from Mozilla into Outlook. It’s a grotesque and hacky travesty of application compatibility, but there you go.

The full instructions are on Google NewsGroups here. In summary, you have to install Eudora 5.x. Eudora can import from Mozilla. Then you use Outlook Express (6) to import from Eudora. (OE says it can only import from versions up to 3, but it lies. 5 works fine, too.) Finally, you use Outlook to import from Outlook Express. (Outlook says that it can import directly from Eudora up to version 4, but it seems to make an incorrect assumption about the location of your Eudora mail store, and won’t allow you to change the import directory.)

You also have to watch the import from Mozilla to Eudora closely, because it seems to occasionally merge huge bundles of messages into a single one. (Open up each folder in Eudora, and look for messages with unusually large file sizes.) At least the bug seems to be consistent: running the import twice in a row will consistently merge the same messages. To get around this, I spent some time shuffling the affected messages around in Mozilla (putting them into different folders), and then re-importing.

Note that you also have to tell Mozilla to Compress its folders (from the File menu). It seems that when you move messages between folders in Mozilla, it just updates the mailbox indexes, not the mailbox files themselves. And it’s the mailbox files that Eudora imports. Compressing the folders forces Mozilla to physically move the messages, and re-index everything.

End-to-end time: about two hours this evening, plus an hour or so scouring the net to find out how to do it in the first place. Thanks, Mozilla. Don’t expect to see me back again.

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Export from Mozilla to Oulook

Okay, so having decided that I would like to change my mail program from Mozilla to Outlook, I now find that it’s not possible to migrate my mail messages. It works fine the other way round, but apparently Mozilla developers/advocates seem offended at the very thought that anyone would want to switch away from their program, while at the same time Microsoft must think it’s beneath them to import from the lizard.

Duh.

In my last post I pointed to Joel Spolsky’s article about this very matter:

“The mature approach to strategy is not to try to force things on potential customers. If somebody isn’t even your customer yet, trying to lock them in just isn’t a good idea. When you have 100% market share, come talk to me about lock-in. Until then, if you try to lock them in now, it’s too early, and if any customer catches you in the act, you’ll just wind up locking them out. Nobody wants to switch to a product that is going to eliminate their freedom in the future.”

Email has been around for decades. Email is the only application that everyone on the internet uses. How stupid is it for two of the biggest email software developers not to be able to read each other’s files?

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NewsGator

With all of the weird stuff happening last week, I almost missed a good thing I found in the sunpig server logs: NewsGator. NewsGator is an RSS aggregator that integrates with Outlook.

If you’re not familiar with RSS aggregators, they are basically programs that allow you to check web sites for updates without having to visit the sites themselves in your browser. RSS is especially popular with people who read and write weblogs, because it’s very easy to get interested in a lot of weblogs, and they often change several times a day. Checking dozens of weblogs just to find out if they have changed gets old really fast. But an aggregator program takes all of the hassle out of it.

There are a bundle of RSS aggregators out there: Radio Userland (which is also a blogging tool), AmphetaDesk, NetNewsWire, Aggie, and Syndirella are just a tiny selection of the most popular ones. Radio Userland and AmphetaDesk have a program that runs in the background on your machine, while the actual RSS newsreader interface appears in your browser. NetNewsWire, Aggie, and Syndirella are programs you have to fire up separately. With all of them, you say how often you want to check on your news sources, and then they scan them for you automatically.

I’ve been mostly using AmphetaDesk for my RSS newsreading purposes, but now that I’ve come across NewsGator, I may well switch. NewsGator acts as a plug-in for Outlook. When it scans your RSS news sources, it converts new articles into Outlook items, and sorts them into a set of folder for you–just like mail items. After that, you can treat the article/headlines just like anything else in Outlook. You can delete them, move them around, or drag and drop the most interesting ones into a public folder so others can see them.

I love it. It’s like saying to all your favourite sites, “send me an email when a new article appears”, only without the twin disadvantages of ending up on dozens of email lists (which you then have to manage, or remember about) and having your inbox flooded with dozens of non-critical emails each day. It’s a perfect match for the way I think about RSS news.

The only possible problem is that it runs on Outlook. I’ve been reluctant to run Outlook as my mail client at home, because of vulnerabilities like these. I don’t think that Outlook is necessarily much less secure than other mail programs, but because of its ubiquity (and Microsoftness) vulnerabilities are much more likely to actually be exploited.

After trying the new M2 mail client in Opera 7 for a while, I’ve temporarily settled on Mozilla mail reader, but it’s horribly slow. Diego Doval’s Spaces email client also includes an RSS newsreader, but the software is still alpha quality. I tried it yesterday, and while it showed promise, it didn’t quite click with me. (Also, with switching between mail programs, there’s always the question of how easy it is to switch back if you don’t like it.) Spaces is certainly promising, but I’m not ready for it right now.

So Outlook it is. By taking proper care (make sure you have the security settings right, don’t open dodgy attachments, view messages as text-only, etc.), it can be made pretty safe. I have a virus checker on our home firewall, and one running on my PC as well, all of which help. (Still, security is a process rather than a product, though, so no complacency will be allowed here chez Sutherland 😉

I have to say that I’m actually quite excited about starting to use NewsGator. There are dozens of sites that I want to track, but which haven’t made it into my AmphetaDesk subscriptions file. NewsGator is going to bring me up-to-date with all of them–and much faster than I could have tracked them before.

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Spoiled?

Alex and I did some shopping while we were in town on Wednesday. We’ve finished Ratchet and Clank for the Playstation2 (actually, we’ve finished it twice so far, and are on our third run through, trying to get hold of all the secrets and extras), and I was feeling in the mood for something new.

I was tempted by Devil May Cry, but ended up buying Maximo instead. I should have gone with my first impulse, because Maximo is severely disappointing. Level design is dull, combat is repetitive and lacks any kind of intensity or threat, and the camera does its own funky thing, mostly in order to stop you from seeing where you’re going or who you’re fighting.

I think I’ve been spoiled by Ratchet and Clank. I have got so used to being able to control the camera with the right analog stick that playing a game without this freedom to look around feels incredibly restrictive. On the other hand, I slapped on Vice City yesterday evening, and even though it has no analog camera control, it is never a problem. So maybe it is just Maximo that’s rubbish.

I stuck with Maximo for about an hour or so, but on top of the camera frustrations and annoying lack of save points, it just wasn’t entertaining me, either. That’s the real fatal flaw. If it had a more interesting story line, or if I felt involved with the characters in any way, I’d be inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. But it doesn’t. So it gets part-exchanged next time I feel like buying something at GAME. (Or maybe I’ll list it on Trodo?)

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Identity Theft (part 3)

Earlier today I got an email back from the web host where the site resided that was linking to pictures of Alex (“Site A”). They have blocked all access to this site until the author removes the hyperlinks. One of the other parents involved also emailed me to let me know that she had received a similar email.

Even though I had removed the picture of Alex the site was linking to, it would still attempt to retrieve the photo from our web site every time someone visited the page. According to the sunpig server logs, the last time someone tried to access the image was at about 12:40 this afternoon.

The logs show that the page was put up on Saturday 25th January. It got accessed 10 times before Sunday evening, which is when I took Alex’s photo down. Since then, it has been hit 91 times, from 38 distinct IP addresses. (Two of those hits, and one of those IP addresses is mine, while I was checking up on the state of the site.)

So I’m relieved, but only a little. I can take action when someone links to my image, but if they had taken copies and put them on their own site, I would never have found out about them. Is there anything else out there? I may never know. I’m going to try not to let it bother me too much.