Weblog Tools Collection

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What Makes A Great Weblog? from UrbanMainframe.com: Peoples’ perceptions of what makes a good weblog are very interesting to read especially if you disagree with some of them. Here Jonathan claims that weblogs are not about Standards Compliance, Accessibility, Tables (or the lack thereof), design, posting frequency or features.

Contrary to his claims, I would say that all of the above are quite important though to a varying degree. His examples of simply designed, good blogs says to me that he is comparing simplicity of aesthetics with complication in a design. A design can be as simple as just text on a page, and still be a very elegant and semantic page that is well designed.

Tables are yucky unless their use is extremely well justified. Period.

Posting frequency is important. A stale blog, is a slow blog which creates a snowball effect. You post less, less people visit your site, you have less interest in writing more stuff in your blog and so on.

Accessibility and Standards compliance, in my opinion, do not need any explanation.

I agree with most of the “It is About…” section but have to say that his turnoffs are turning off. A blog is first and foremost a personal journal. If you want to write about your pet cat, your depression, your wishlist whoring etc, thats your call and since I have been flamed a couple of times and I am still here, I have to say that they are not all that bad either.

In addition, since he mentions baiting as one of his turn offs, I had to write a critique of his post! (All in good fun, please, no flame wars)

Can there be any such thing without the fear of poison and/or interception from spammers? I fear not but would like to at least take a look at the possibility.

A simple method of doing this would be to provide a feed of spam words from every blog. Provide a page inside your blogging tool that allows a user to add “Spam Word Sharing” sites and then update manually when needed. The recipient blog will grab the feed, check for time updated, and if new words are found, add them to its own list of words. The inherent problem of this distributed method is that spammers will be able to look at the list and then modify the information they use in their spams. The upside of this method is that spammers cannot POSSIBLY look at the spam words of each and every blog unless they write some sort of intelligent spammer tool (which is NOT beyond them by any means)

Another means is to have a few centralized sources for the spam words. This would reduce the number of places that people have to go to get the information. This would, however, bring up the age old problem of announcing the presence of other such sources for synchronization. There are hundreds of different ways thats these neighbors can be programmatically announced etc, but they are all very cumbersome to code and easy to break into. This method also makes it easier for spammers to get a hold of the list and poison it or go around it.

I have also thought of the bayesian concept since I did develop a Perceptron based Bayesian Spam filter for real email which worked pretty well (it was an educational venture). Traditionally, in weblog comment spam, we tend to concentrate on a large number of words, phrases, IPs etc (at least I have) without trying to store any intelligence about them. A simple example are the words texas and holdem. Seperately they are innocent, but together they are a surefire spam combination unless your site is about poker and in which case, you have a difficult spam problem anyways. So, if spam systems were developed which stored word intelligence that got modified with each spam comment, this intelligence would be smaller in size, easier to transport and much easier to share. The drawback of this schema is poison from spammers and rapid changes in content.

So, to summarize, we need a “spam information sharing scheme” that is selectively public, is relatively small in size and can easily to integerated into present infrastructures.

What do you think?

Flickr Gallery 0.4: Plugin for WordPress. This one should be really cool. From what I can tell from the plugin, you post to Flickr and the plugin will get the photographs from Flickr, cache them locally and then post them on your blog. REST is used to make the API calls to Flickr to get the information. The coolest part of this plugin is that it incorporates the “Notes” of Flickr. This code can be used outside of WordPress as well since it really does not use any of the WordPress code.
Thanks Ray!