Tag Archive for 'blogs'

Mint 2.0 Bird Feeder and WordPress

Published by Tyler on February 3, 2007 at 5:54 pm 0 Comments

Shaun Inman has released version 2.0 of Mint, my favorite website analytics software. Go over to the Mint website and have a look at what’s new in version 2.0.

If you’re a Mint 1.x user, you’ll have to pay another $19 to make the upgrade to 2.0. I purchased the upgrade for version 2.0 earlier this week and finally got around to actually upgrading earlier today. The $19 is well worth the upgrade, Mint 2.0 brings many nice new features, like the Bird Feeder pepper for example:

Your RSS and Atom feeds attract all kinds of colorful wildlife, Bird Feeder is a window onto that activity. It highlights subscription trends across multiple Feeds and clicks on individual Seeds. What’s a seed? That’s bird-ese for an article or link within a feed.

Upgrading from Mint 1 was pretty painless, the only thing I’ve had issues with is the Bird Feeder pepper. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about installing the Bird Feeder pepper. I haven’t really finished installing the Bird Feeder pepper, I don’t want to risk breaking my feeds. I’ve been watching this thread over at the Mint forums for tips. Recently, a forum user linked to a post by Kristin Pishdadi, who has posted a how-to for getting Bird Feeder working with WordPress 2. She spells out step by step what needs to be done to get Bird Feeder working with your WordPress feeds. Looks pretty straight forward, I wonder if it works the same if the WordPress Feedburner plugin is being used. I need to read up some on how exactly that Feedburner plugin works first I guess.

The wp-mint plugin for WordPress should still work fine with Mint 2.0. All the javascript in Mint 2.0 is included in exactly the same fashion it was in Mint 1.x, so that plugin should still work 100%.

So, if you’re having trouble getting the Bird Feeder pepper working with WordPress, go check out Kristin’s post, it’ll probably take care of your problems. It’s a lot more clear about installation than the readme that’s included with the Bird Feeder pepper. The Mint forums are an excellent resource for support issues of all types, check them out if you have problems outside the scope of Kristin’s post.

Categories: Internet and Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

PhishTank Is Here

Published by Tyler on October 2, 2006 at 12:18 pm 1 Comment

PhishTank launched today. PhishTank is a site designed to make keeping tabs on phishing sites easier. If you come across a phishing site while browsing the web, you’re encouraged to submit the URL to PhishTank.

PhishTank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. Also, PhishTank provides an open API for developers and researchers to integrate anti-phishing data into their applications at no charge.

PhishTank is operated by OpenDNS. OpenDNS opened their services to the public earlier this year to much fanfare. David Ulevitch and crew have done an amazing job with OpenDNS, I expect the same from PhishTank.

PhishTank does not provide protection against phishing sites, they simple store phishing related data. OpenDNS does protect against phishing though. OpenDNS and PhishTank go hand in hand. OpenDNS blocks access to phishing sites that are in the PhishTank database. Here’s a little piece from the OpenDNS FAQ about reporting phishing sites:

The fight against phishing isn’t just for the banks and big companies to tackle; you can help. Right now, we encourage submission of possible phishing sites via our contact form. Nothing will be blocked unless it’s verified.

Later this summer, we will introduce PhishTank.com, a free community site, with API, which will serve as a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing and malware on the Internet.


PhishTank will no doubt prove to be a valuable resource for the internet security community. Now, users of OpenDNS can basically control what sites are deemed “phishing” sites by making use of PhishTank. This was one of the main gripes people had with OpenDNS initially. There was no method to show what sites were flagged as phishing sites. Let there be transparency!

Categories: Internet, OpenDNS, Personal and Security Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Permalink Structure Update

Published by Tyler on August 18, 2006 at 9:42 am 0 Comments

I’ve updated the permalink structure on this blog. What’s this mean for you? Nothing really, unless you had some pages bookmarked. If you did have some pages at this blog bookmarked, they’ll no longer load to the right page. My permalinks used to look like this: http://longren.org/archives/2182

Now, they look something like this:

http://www.longren.org/2006/07/28/the-pc-de-crapifier/

There’s no real benefit gained from this change, I just like the look of the new permalink structure better. Now, the only problem with making this change is search engines still see the old permalink structure, as expected. So, when someone searches google for Slackware 11, they will see a link to http://www.longren.org/archives/2156.

Well, the /archives/2156 page no longer exists here. However, there is an /archives/ page. I’ve added a slight bit of intelligence to the /archives/ page. If a user ends up at www.longren.org/archives/2156/, the archives page will try to find the post they’re really looking for.

Now, this works very well for people coming in from search engines or other blogs that have linked here. Any time the archives page sees a number at the end, /archives/2156, for example, it assumes the number is a postid, which is usually is. So, after that, the PHP code fetches the new URL for the post id and then grabs the post title and provides a link to the new URL.

Here’s the PHP I used to make this happen:

<?php
$uri = $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI];
$uri = explode("/",$uri);
$postid = $uri[2];
if (strlen($postid) <= "4") {
	$permalink = get_permalink($postid);
	$post = get_post($postid);
	$title = $post->post_title;
	print "<h3><a href='$permalink'>$title</a></h3><br />";
}
?>

Not very pretty, I know, but it gets the job done. Oh, and I really like this Code Autoescape plugin.

Categories: Internet, Personal and WordPress Tags: , , , , , , , .

Windows Live Writer Review

Published by Tyler on August 14, 2006 at 2:47 pm 0 Comments

Microsoft released a fresh and shiny WYSIWYG blogging tool today. It’s called Windows Live Writer. Microsoft needs to hire some new people to choose names for these new products. The name alone makes me not want to use it.

Now, the stupid name aside, the tool actually looks like it could be very useful. Paul Stamatiou has a very lengthy review, from installation to actually publishing a blog post.

Windows Live Writer is still in beta, so expect some issues if you’re going to be using it. Apparently it’ll play nicely with pretty much any blogging platform. Rather than me writing more, just go read Paul’s review.

Want more reviews? Head over to to Elliot Back’s blog or Pro Blogger.

Categories: Internet and Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Lots Of Spam

Published by Tyler on August 10, 2006 at 8:37 pm 11 Comments

I think this blog gets way more spam than your average blog. For instance, over the lifetime of this blog (a little over 4 years), it averages about 95 unique visitors per day. Pretty poor average, I know, but this blog existed for 2+ years being read only by my family. Over the last year and a half or so, my averages have been up around 150 – 200 uniques per day.

Now, comment spam wasn’t a huge deal here until about a year ago or so. When it became a real problem, I installed Spam Karma, which has stopped pretty much all of it. How many pieces of comment spam does “all of it” equal? Right about 60,000 comment spams, in nearly one year. See the little black bar at the bottom of this page? It counts the number of comment spams that Spam Karma has stopped. It currently reads “This blog is protected by Spam Karma 2: 62528 Spams eaten and counting…”.

It’ll be at 62700 or so by tomorrow morning probably. Maybe I’m way off, but I just think this is an awful lot of comment spam compared to the relatively low amount of “real” traffic this site sees. But whatever, I’m just glad to have Spam Karma.

Categories: Internet, Personal and WordPress Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Performancing For Firefox 1.3

Published by Tyler on August 9, 2006 at 11:48 am 0 Comments

Performancing For Firefox 1.3 has been released. Lots and lots of changes are included in this release. There’s now support for themes and addons. The performancing team has also open sourced Performancing For Firefox, which means anyone can get the source code and modify it as they please.

Some of the new features are listed below:

I’m writing this post with this new version of Performancing. So far nothing unusual. The addons and themes API additions are sweet, hopefully some worthy developers will hack together some neat addons. I’m excited about this new version, it’s opened a lot more doors for Performancing.

Categories: Internet, Open Source and Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

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