VER three years ago I started with a personal site, which was quite profession-inclined. I used it for placement of my CV and was pleased to have had something that was beyond a notorious “blog” — a quickly-growing phenomenon at the time. But nowadays almost everyone has a homepage; everyone including my 9-year-old sister. She has a site/section that comprises a few pages. It was in fact updated with her by my side just a week ago.

Returning to the issue at hand, I felt reluctant to add opinionated opinions on a variety of issues without global consent (e.g. politics, software politics, atheism/religion). The ‘blog’ component of the site bridged a certain gap. Also appealing was the professional layout and base structure of a modern CMS, which required little maintenance other than composition (and of course comment spam purging).

The new blog spot had plenty to offer. Suddenly, rants and raves finally have their deserved place; Any opinion fits under a suitable category, even a new one sometimes; There are no limits in terms of scope; Readers are often those whose interests intersect with the author’s; The blog serves as somewhat of a diary. It is also a gateway to my work, research, my family and it neatly organises thoughts and progress chronologically. Any arbitrary thought and idea can somehow fit without any context, so rich site content can rapidly be added. This is not the case with a contextual, hierarchical site that chooses a theme. It is even the case with a single open forum, where the audience congregates due to common interests.

In blogging, anything goes. This may results in frivolous domains (or subdomains) with incoherent content, but as long as the author is happy, who is to object? With blogging emerges a clique of on-line friends and colleagues. It encourages involvement and mutual support. It also helps you help others, not only receive and digest information. The elements of Web 2.0 (Hype alert! Duck down) involvement promotes all of that.

Here’s to another year of joyful blogging!

Related item: “I Searched the Internet and all I Got was this Lousy Blog”

Akismet cleans up your blog spam,
but false positives sometimes go unnoticed

Akismet is a comment spam prevention mechanism. It can tell apart genuine comments from ‘comment bombing’ and used do so almost flawlessly. The Akismet filter has quickly gained popularity among its origins: WordPress blogs. I set up Akismet in my WordPress 2.0 test blog and mentioned this before in a writeup on ending comment spam using collaborative spam flagging.

Akismet can be used only given a key which establishes some trusted identity. Nevetheless, its performance is said to have degraded recently. I have been wondering for quite a while what would prevent a guild of spammers from downloading and installing WordPress 2, getting an API key and then posting comments to self. They could begin marking comments improperly en masse. Only a trusted few need be able to flag messages. It is is a necessity when one wishes for robustness to fraud to ever prevail. I even mentioned this before, roughly a month before the tool was publicly available.

I have an API key for one blog and another test blog that ran Akismet without a key. That was back in the early days when spam-stopper, as is was named at the time, was actively developed and tested by a set of individuals. Ever since, I believe it has reached many hands and became too easy to gain access to, for malicious purposes as well.

There is hope of successfully reverting the learner back to a more reliable state if backups were made of it on occasions.