Blogging

Cross-Posting from Movable Type to LiveJournal

Posted by Michael Harrison on Apr 23, 2008 in Blogging | 2 comments

Natania told me the other day that some of our friends weren’t getting updates to my blog via their RSS readers, and I realized that it might be due to the fact that they’re still trying to follow my ancient LiveJournal. So I finally got off my ass and set up Movable Type to cross-post.

This was a little harder than I thought, however, because every Google search I did for “cross post movable type livejournal” or “posting movable type livejournal” or any other such combination resulted in a bunch of old and outdated plugins. I didn’t feel like banging my head against a Perl script tonight, so they were right out.

Luckily, on the second Google SERP, I discovered CrossPoster from Movalog.

I’m not one hundred percent sure what Movalog is, but the author, Arvind Satyanarayan, knows his MT. Lots of cool plugins, not the least of which is CrossPoster, which was easy to configure, easy to use, and totally made my evening.

Is Captcha’s Moment Passing? | Compiler from Wired.com

Posted by Michael Harrison on Apr 16, 2008 in Blogging | 1 comment

From Paul Adams’ article at Compiler:

As long as processing power, et cetera, is finite, just slowing down the bots is helpful, even if we can’t block them altogether. But of course the bots will evolve, and so will the tests to stop them. There’s no ideal solution. Would you rather be deluged with spam, or have to take a lengthy IQ test every time you post a comment on a blog?

Another reason I felt somewhat guilty about adding the Captcha to my site. Asking someone to type a rather simplistic six character phrase isn’t along the lines of solving complex algebra, but it is a tiny roadblock in what makes blogs stand out from their dead paper progenitors: instant conversation.
How many roadblocks before it just becomes too much of a pain in the ass to deal with?
Link

Sayonara, Kotaku

Posted by Michael Harrison on Nov 1, 2007 in Blogging, Games, Media | 0 comments

I removed Kotaku from Google Reader this morning. When I opened up the MacBook to check my feeds, there were 156 items. After reading ’til 99 items, I realized that I had skipped every single Kotaku item present. And of the 57 items read, over half were Kotaku authored.

I’m not a hardcore video gamer anymore. While the only “next gen” console I have is the Wii (and some would argue its classification as “next gen”), I’m still interested in news about new games for other systems. On the other hand, I really don’t care about Sales Charts, Australian or otherwise. I’m sure someone does, but it’s not me. On that note, while cute, I typically skip right through clever video-game-themed Jack O’Lanterns and the editors’ daily Night Notes to one another.

And jubblies? Seriously. Couldn’t care less.

I thought a bit about what video game news I actually care about, and I drilled down on the Kotaku site to those categories. And then I tried to add the RSS feed to Google Reader. But that didn’t work. So I searched for feeds, and couldn’t find anything. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place, but I can’t really find a way to only get the posts I care about, and ignore the rest.

So, ’til I can figure that out, I removed the feed. My item count dropped from 99 to 53. Kotaku accounted for almost 50% of my feed reader items.

Which brings me to a point which will require another post later on… there is a happy medium in blogging, between posting a ten page opus once every week, and posting fifty bite-sized snacks every single day.