Category: blogging

Posts about blogging (rather self referential don’t you think)

Nofollow followup

Posted on by david

Well, folks plenty smarter than me are beginning to wade in on the rel=”nofollow” debate with a greater depth of insight than: Hmm, something new to install. Cool!

It turns out that wide spread use of rel=”nofollow” may have unintended consequences that are not particularly good. Not good at all. Pretty bad in fact. Horribly world crushingly soul destroyingly bad actually. Well, not really that bad. But pretty bad anyway.

But, not knowing one way or the other, I’m gonna utilize the fence sitters salvation. That being the wait and see approach. I hope those smart people get their act together soon though. This fence is uncomfortable.

nofollow, php, and Jaguar

Posted on by david

Google, Yahoo and MSN have the blogsphere abuzz with the news that they will ignore links containing rel=”nofollow” when calculating page ranks. The hope is that (when used on links in blog comments) this will diminish the incentive for comment spam. I’m not terribly optimistic, but it is worth a shot.

New WordPress plugin – old PHP

Clint Ecker dissected the MovableType plugin and re-implemented it as a WordPress plugin. I downloaded it, activated it and received this error:

Warning: Wrong parameter count for preg_grep() in /srv/www/siriux.net/html-data/wp-content/plugins/wpNofollow.php on line 29<br />
Warning: Bad arguments to join() in /srv/www/siriux.net/html-data/wp-content/plugins/wpNofollow.php on line 30

It turns out that the plugin requires PHP 4.2 or greater, unfortunately the box that hosts this blog is running Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2.x) and it’s version of PHP is hopelessly obsolete. I’ve been meaning to update but haven’t quite got around to it, this seemed like as good a time as any.

Upgrading is easy! 😐

I found clear instructions for upgrading PHP to 4.3 here. I grabbed the PHP 4.3.10 archive from php.net and commenced with the install. Sadly, make died on the Zend/zend_strtod.c file. A little searching showed that PHP 4.3.10 cannot be built on OS X, instead I had to grab the latest stable snapshot from the CVS.

Still needs tweaking…

I’ve tested the WordPress plugin, and it seems to work, but it will only recognize URL’s in the body of the comment (without hacking the wp-comment file) and only if the link is fully formated: <a href=”www.url.domain”>like this<a> and it ignores unadorned links: http://www.url.domain or www.url.domain. Though, I’m sure the last issue will be addressed soon.

Update:

Clint posts: “Hey I just found out the solution, I think I can lower the priority of the filter so that it gets applied last. A priority of 10 should accomplish that.”

So, change the last two lines in wpNofollow.php to:

add_filter('comment_text', 'nofollowfy', 10);
add_filter('comment_excerpt', 'nofollowfy',10);

New Layout

Posted on by david

Oh yeah, that’s me at it again, pretending I’m a designer. 🙂

The old one was a little too grey. ‘Figured I needed a little brighter look to get me through the winter.

Let me know what you think.

First post with MarsEdit

Posted on by david

This is my first blog entry composed in MarsEdit.

Up to now I’ve been using HyperEdit to compose the entries and the WordPress web interface to post.

I miss the html Code Snippet pallet in HyperEdit but I don’t miss the WordPress web interface at all. 🙂

I did have a problem getting MarsEdit to access my blog archives. I discovered (thanks to Brent Simmons) that there is a problem with OS X Server that truncates the XML-RPC methodResponse to 32k if the web Performance Cache is enabled for any site on the box. This particular server is running Jaguar, I don’t know if this problem afflicts Panther as well. When I have a chance I’ll investigate that.