haslo.ch - Guido's Blog » blog

New Commenting Policy?

haslo — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:12:56 +0000

In the recent weeks, I have gotten quite a bit of not-quite-but-nearly-totally-spam-that-duisguises-really-well. As a result, I removed my DoFollow plugin.

But I don’t really like that solution.

I think I might change my approach and make a new commenting policy rule. A quite simple one at that: Every comment that uses some kind of product name as their “name” will be deleted (also those who were made before today), no questions asked, and I re-establish the DoFollow plugin.

I can always delete the links that lead to sites I don’t want to support afterwards, although I’d of course need to introduce an explicit disclaimer for that as well. (Luckily, my current disclaimer reads “I reserve the right to delete spam as I see fit, even if it’s handcrafted”, so I won’t break any promises if I delete things that are spammier than I like retroactively).

On the other hand, I really love your contributions, and I really don’t want to make contributing with comments harder than it apparently already is…

What do you think? How do you handle that kind of thing in your own blog(s)?

Creating my own little Portal Site

haslo — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:43:15 +0000

As you may or may not have noticed, I now have a second blog: haslos Politblog. I decided I’d want to blog about Swiss politics from time to time as well, and with this blog being English only and having a global rather than Swiss target audience, these subjects didn’t really fit in here.

Politblog

So I went and started a second blog. Finding a theme and installing WordPress was one thing, but how do you tie those things together? And while we’re at it, why not add stuff like the Twitter feed or Delicious bookmarks? And why not make a mini-tutorial out of it? (That idea actually wasn’t mine, thanks @knowLED!)

When looking at easy ways to create such a mashup for a portal site, I stumbled upon the Google AJAX Feed API, and was amazed. Essentially, it does everything we need, in a format that’s incredibly easy to style with CSS. The higher-level FeedControl class is easy to use, and does exactly what I need: display a collection of feeds in

elements.

If you want to use it as well, I suggest you sign up for an API key (although it’s not mandatory). The code that actually fetches the feeds then is simple. Add this to your HTML element…

 src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript">>

…and then include bits of JavaScript that load the feeds. Since I wanted to be able to style the blog feeds a bit differently from the other feeds, I created two empty

elements that they’ll go into in the HTML body, with the ids “blogfeeds” and “otherfeeds”. Empty because they’ll be populated with the AJAX JavaScript goodness.

 id="blogfeeds">>
 id="otherfeeds">>

This is the JavaScript code, populating two FeedControl objects in an array and then rendering them to their respective

s. The feed URLs don’t have to be escaped, the escaped bits you see are what the Google API puts in as titles; I wanted those to be links to the respective feed source. Make sure you put it between tags, best in the page header:

google.load("feeds", "1");
function initialize() {
  var feedControl = new Array(new google.feeds.FeedControl(), new google.feeds.FeedControl());
 
  feedControl[0].addFeed("http://www.haslo.ch/blog/feed/", "<a href=\"http://www.haslo.ch/blog/\">Blog</a>");
  feedControl[0].addFeed("http://www.haslo.ch/politblog/feed/", "<a href=\"http://www.haslo.ch/politblog/\">Politblog</a>");
  feedControl[1].addFeed("http://feeds.backtype.com/haslo", "<a href=\"http://www.backtype.com/haslo/\">BackType</a>");
  feedControl[1].addFeed("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14274896.rss", "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/haslo/\">Twitter</a>");
  feedControl[1].addFeed("http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/haslo?count=15", "<a href=\"http://delicious.com/haslo/\">Delicious</a>");
 
  feedControl[0].setNumEntries(6);
  feedControl[1].setNumEntries(6);
 
  feedControl[0].draw(document.getElementById("blogfeeds"));
  feedControl[1].draw(document.getElementById("otherfeeds"));
}
google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize);

That’s it, that will populate the

elements with the feed data. Unstyled, this does look a bit ugly though, a mere list. So I added some CSS, and used this nice tutorial here for making the footer stick to the bottom. Go and have a look, it’s all explained nicely there. Inside that footer, I styled the elements (with Google’s classes, found easily with Firebug) like this:

.gfc-results {
  height: 460px;
  overflow: auto;
  padding-left: 3px;
}
.gfc-resultsRoot {
  height: 500px;
  float: left;
  position: inline;
}
 
#blogfeeds * .gfc-resultsRoot {
  width: 23%;
}
#otherfeeds * .gfc-resultsRoot {
  width: 18%;
}

Finally, for the title, I made an absolutely positioned

at the top, et voilà.

The last step was making Facebook aware of the fact that I now have two blogs. As you may know, you can only add one source of the type Feed/RSS for automatic updates (nice tutorial for adding RSS feeds to Facebook). Which is silly.

But anyway, the way around this involved Yahoo Pipes, or rather, just one rather simple pipe that involves a union of the two feeds, and then a descending sort by date. I made a copy of it public, have a look. They’re nice like that, you can just drag-and-drop elements that you want to use, and connect their outlets (lower end) with other element’s inputs (upper end) until you reach the “pipe output” element, creating a flow diagram that works out of the box.

Portal

That’s it already, and here’s the result. I hope you can use an element or two out of this post for your own projects

WordPress 2.7.1

haslo — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:02:27 +0000

Thanks to MySQLDumper, I got around the timeout issue that my database backup had. And with a database backup, I dared upgrade my WordPress. So here goes nothing, with a shiny and new haslo.ch that looks just like the old one

If you notice any issues, I’d be glad about a comment here. The FTP upload had some hickups and corrupt files that I fixed, and might well have had some that I didn’t.

(Oh, and nope, the diploma thesis is not done yet )

Blog: Not Dead Yet

haslo — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:25:43 +0000

I’m currently really busy writing my diploma thesis. It should be complete in roughly a week -- hopefully, by this weekend, although I don’t know if that is a wishful delusion.

I’ll get back to blogging after that. So the blog is not quite dead yet

In unrelated news, I’m sure you know this video.

Still Alive

haslo — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:57:36 +0000

I’m still alive – the reason why I’m not blogging much lately is a combination of me working more for Uni and less for the job, many new shiny board games (Last Night on Earth, most notably, but also Humans!!!, Munchkin Quest and MidEvil), Left 4 Dead having come out, seeing more friends, and in all honesty the lack of things that motivate me to write about.

Although, there is one thing, maybe I’ll post that soon – maybe my self-imposed requirement to write original content puts too much pressure on me and I should not stop myself from doing the odd silly link post from time to time? Input appreciated!

Anyway, I’ll be back

Ste’s Self-Defense Blog

haslo — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:44:06 +0000

If there is one of my friends that deserves the title “martial arts guru”, it’s Ste – nearing his black belt in Jiujitsu, after he trained Shaolin Kung Fu for five years, with excourses in various other martial arts (Judo when he was a kid, Kickboxing, Vovinam, Capoeira, training with police instructors and some Wing Chun) and decades of experience, he knows what he’s talking about – in particular, he knows what he’s talking about when the subject is self-defense.

So, he made a blog. From his post about what self-defense actually is:

Self-defense is the ability to come out of violent situations alive and if possible unhurt and with all of your possessions. For most persons, self-defense is learning how to beat someone up (or use any other suitable technique like throws, locks,…). This is the stuff you will learn in most martial-arts or self-defense classes. Unfortunately this is only a part of the whole self-defense business.

Learn more on Ste’s self-defense Blog!

Bye Slug.ch

As a rather important sidenote: There I was, thinking I’d have done a great service for Ste when I told him that the best thing he could do to promote his shiny new blog was sign it up for all those blog directories (link German) we have in Switzerland. I guess the advice wasn’t all bad (despite the fact that this blog here isn’t really old either), after all I do get some visits from those as well…

But today, I looked at one of them, Slug.ch, and was greeted with a short “bye” message. Well, uhm … bye, I guess I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it was that made Benny Rüegg stop?

BloggingTom doesn’t know much more (link German), but he has plenty of nice links for web history nuts (like me), and way more of them can be found at tou.ch.

Update 08-09-19 13:01: Meh, Slug.ch is back online. I agree with BloggingTom when he writes:

Hey, Benny, immer dieses Hin und Her mit Slug. Da kommt man ja kaum noch hinterher!

Unlike him though, I do think that such aggregators do serve an important function in the blogosphere: They allow you to find blogs you might like, they allow new bloggers to introduce their blog to a wider audience, and they allow searches through a particular subset of the global blogosphere.

All of those are important functionalities that hold us all together – so if Slug is not it, because of all those “sell-keep” and “stop-restart” inconsistencies, it’d have to be something else. I guess the fact that nothing else is as technically refined as Slug is then also the reason for the big backlash the too short “bye” message provoked.

WordPress Updated, Plugin List

haslo — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:09:47 +0000

So I just did my first WordPress update to 2.6.2, 2.6.1 had a security hole. It went remarkably smooth, considering the horror stores I read (link German, click the links in that post for more) – as a matter of fact, everything seems to work as it should again.

I’ll take this opportunity to list all the plugins I found useful in my quest for a highly useable and convenient blogging experience for my readers, search engines, and me.

Akismet – utterly awesome anti-spam plugin
All in one SEO pack – for things like meta tags, rewriting titles, specifying which archives robots should search
Breadcrumb NavXT – because I like breadcrumbs
Google XML Sitemaps – more candy for search engines
Lightbox 2 – because lightboxes look nice
Admin Drop Down Menu – makes life easier for me when doing admin stuff
Robots Meta – to avoid indexing of unnecessary stuff
Search Unleashed – because it sucks less (still not perfect though)
SEO Friendly Images – not sure if that’d still be necessary, but whatever, alt and title are good
Simple Tags – easier tagging, nice tag cloud
StatPress – you got me, I’m tracking you…
Subscribe To Comments – nobody’s using this yet
WP-PostRatings – those little stars below the posts removed
WP-Syntax – syntax highlighting for my coding posts, really handy
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – aah, more gadgets

That’s it, my extensive collection (I removed the Ajax edit one, it slowed down the site horribly)

Update 08-09-10 12:00: I couldn’t stand having invalid CSS, so I changed some plugin CSS code and adapted the theme a bit further as well. The bad news: Rounded corners for image frames are gone. The good news:

Hooray

It Starts…

haslo — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:00:22 +0000

OK, we’re all set I’m quite happy with the way the site turned out now. Setting up WordPress was a breeze, I found a theme that I quite liked in Elements of SEO, adapting it wasn’t a big problem – the header image is a screenshot from that UT3 map I made, VCTF-Harbour.

The WordPress plugins collection is extensive and had tons of things I like – starting with the Widgets you see to the right, showing my latest stuff from del.icio.us and Twitter, continuing with changes under the hood like a better search engine and a spam filter, and not stopping with AJAX image popups and automatic code highlighting for future programming posts (or even your comments). Gee was I silly coding my last blog myself.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with these narcistic ramblings anymore – at least until I change something really big

Hello World Indeed!

haslo — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:37:51 +0000

So I have a blog again, after what must have been years without. Gonna set up themes and whatnot first, before I start writing for real. The current design is not mine and therefore just temporary, although I must admit it looks quite nice.

I’ll do very irregular updates, mainly longer posts about things that bug or interest me. No pure link posts, as that’s what del.icio.us is for, and no pure ramblings, as that’s what Twitter is for (albeit German in my case) – and exceptions to every rule of course. I hope to be able to include the occasional (board or computer) game review. With pictures.

I’ll keep the static front page with links and stuff, too – it might slim down a bit over time though.

Oh, I’ll write in English And the current tagline is from Steve Jobs, in shorts. In context it’s actually about Apple:

Apple at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe.

Funny enough, I don’t even have a Mac, but I think the principle applies to everybody. If we really want it, and believe in it, we can make a difference.