Technorati: on the rise!

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Sunday Sep 25 2005

under 9000


A while ago my Technorati ranking moved into the four-figures range. Today I found out I'm even sinking below the 9000 rank. A pretty nice result after one year of . The amount of readers on this site seems to be growing steadily as well so I guess it's time to thank you all for your interest! I will do the best I can to continue writing longer, higher quality articles on interesting issues related to technology and anything else I consider worth writing about.

9 Rules NetworkNot all that long ago I was actually wondering why I was blogging at all but these feelings have completely disappeared now. Goals for the next year: Becoming a three-figures blogger and getting my site accepted for the magnificent 9rules Network. And of course delivering more useful code such as my recent WordPress adventures. There's much more to come, Taggerati for Wordpress being the first upcoming release!

Thank you all very much for your nice comments and your support on this website!
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BETA available: WordPress Spam Quiz

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Wednesday Sep 21 2005
Since no one else is doing it I might as well do it myself. Given the coming demise of centralized blacklist and the fact that no one ever bothered porting my Silly Question a.k.a. SpamQuiz idea from Pivot-Blacklist to other popular blogging systems I figured I might as well do it myself. So if you're a user and you like my low-fi anti-spam solution:

Go to my WP test blog and download the beta !

update: It seems Eric Meyer did something similar to WP-SpamQuiz. I haven't checked out his incarnation of this idea yet but it seems we got the same idea somewhere around the beginning of 2005. Maybe you'll like his version better, maybe mine. Regardless of that, programming this little plugin learned me how the guts of WordPress work which was a nice experience! (continue reading...)
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The Net is Dead, long live the net!

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Tuesday Sep 20 2005
Internet is Dead!Almost a year ago, when I wrote my about page I promised on that page that I would some day explain what the title of this weblog is about. More specifically, I promised to explain why I think the net is dead. I guess it's not dead in a literal sense because you're still able to read this article but things aren't looking all that bright if you ask me. Internet has come a long way but I sometimes feel it's demise has already begun. Let's have a look at what's already happened and what's currently happening with the internet. An essay stating the obvious: The internet is dead. (continue reading...)
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Some updates on the pollution spammers

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Monday Sep 19 2005
Fuck spammersEarlier I wrote about a link spammer who seemed to be targeting me by sending out with links to my website (this particular article). After some emails between me and Ann Elisabeth, a.k.a. SpamHuntress it seems this spammer is not targeting me personally but engaging in a general attempt to pollute centralized anti spam blacklists. At least I can't think of any other purpose. (continue reading...)
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Under attack by a linkspammer

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Saturday Sep 17 2005
Someone is actively trying to ruin my online reputation. This might very well be because I'm the author of anti-blogspam software and because I post various articles and ideas on how to beat comment-spam, referrer-spam and trackback-spam. I hope I'm not going to be banned from Google for this. To be really honest I have no idea what to do against this. If anyone can help me find the source of this sad stuff then by all means let me know. I can use any help you can offer.

Damn this sucks ass....

Spam found listing my site


Spam listing my site found on matrixsynth.com



Update: spamhuntress.com has posted an article related to this spam attack. It may be a generic spam run in order to disturb centralized anti-spam lists such as the MT Blacklist, the core spammers datafile used by Pivot-Blacklist.

tags:

READ THIS UPDATE TOO!
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Pivot: a gem of a publishing system

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Friday Sep 16 2005
PivotNext month this weblog will be shamelessly promoting my personality for one year. Quite a lot of posts have been made and quite some changes have occurred over the year. One thing has remained the same. : the underlying publishing system I'm using to publish my writings on the internet. I've often been wondering how much more 'famous' or 'high profile' I'd be by know if my blogging activities had been happening on a more well-known publishing system such as WordPress or Movable Type. I've released quite some things for free use by the weblog community over the year. Pivot Blacklist and the Taggerati Tags extension are the most well-known ones. Besides that I released some smaller extensions and three free design templates. All of them have one thing in common: They were made for Pivot.

So why isn't this guy using WordPress, Movable Type, Textpattern or any other more much more common system, you may wonder. I've looked into many of them but I've never even thought about switching. Therefore, after a year of I figured it would be nice to dedicate a posting to Pivot, a gem of a publishing system. (continue reading...)
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Yahoo Instant Search

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Friday Sep 16 2005

Yahoo Instant Search knows best


has launched a beta version of it's Instant Search, an powered search that fetches results as you type. It's different from Google Suggest because it actually performs a search as you type instead of suggesting keywords to send to the engine. I loved it immediately. The above picture shows why!

via Ajaxian
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Eduvision PHP Conference 2005

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Friday Sep 16 2005
EduvisionThis article is probably only relevant to my Dutch visitors. Nevertheless I wanted to let anyone interested know about the fact that Eduvision* is organizing a mini PHP Conference on November 10. Last year I delivered a presentation on PHP5's new features on this . This year I'll be one of the keynote speakers again and deliver a presentation on (you guessed it) using technology with . So if you are Dutch and you feel like a nice day about all things PHP you should definitely attend the conference. It's not very expensive and very interesting. Wouter Tengeler, fellow developer with whom I wrote the Superboek PHP5 last year will deliver a presentation as well.

The full programme and all other relevant information can be found on the conference's webpage.

* Eduvision is a company delivering excellent training programmes on a broad range of topics related to internet and internet development. I myself teach Linux and PHP courses for them.
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Ajaxifying Pivot: How did I do it? part II

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Friday Sep 16 2005
In the previous part I explained how I created the nice instant preview functionality in my comment forms. Some people have asked me why I did this with and a server side script. The reason for this is Textile. There's a javascript Textile implementation out there on the net but it doesn't quite support everything Textile offers. Since a preview is nonsense if it shows something that isn't exactly like it's going to be before posting a comment I figured it had to be 'all or nothing' and I implemented an Ajax preview. Theoretically it could be made to be 'real-time' by updating it every couple of seconds. I'm not sure about that yet because it can cause quite some stress on the server when someone's writing a long posting.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's move on to something even more exciting: implementing a real 'live search' for Pivot with Ajax and PHP. (continue reading...)
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Ajaxifying Pivot: How did I do it? part I

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Wednesday Sep 14 2005
I guess most people will like the new stuff I posted over the last two days. Some will probably want this stuff on their own site as well which is why I thought it would be nice to write a little article on how I did it. A warning in advance is in place. It requires some simple and hacking, some and some knowledge. You can't just copy/paste what I did because most code may differ quite a lot from site to site. Still, if you've got what it takes you might learn something to get going! I'll discuss the Instant Preview in this first article. The live search comes later this week. (continue reading...)
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Gimme more Ajax!

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Wednesday Sep 14 2005
Ajax... yummy!I guess I'm officially going crazy over and the wonderful prototype.js javascript library! I just added in full Ajax glory to this website. Works like a charm in MSIE, Firefox and Safari. It uses a hacked version of Pivot's search.php in order to search my site, some and some . This is getting extremely addictive I'm afraid! I might not be able to control myself and come up with some more nice things in the future. I can really highly recommend prototype.js, it kicks a llama's ass!

Wanna try the new live search? Just enter something in the search box on the top right, 'google' for example, and you'll see the magic.
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Bush's demise?

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Wednesday Sep 14 2005
According to the blogosphere there definitely seems to be something going on...

The most popular search



It's quite interesting to see the most popular Technorati search AND the most discussed article of the moment are both about . And it's not looking very bright for him. Maybe after 5 years the people in the USA are finally realizing what they've done by giving this idiot his power? Let's pray he'll be either ed or his term will be over before he puts his REALLY scary ideas to practice.

The most discussed article



The most discussed article is here. Good read...
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Pesky Firefox rendering bug

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Tuesday Sep 13 2005
Don't get the wrong idea after reading this posting: I love . However it has one nasty problem which is really getting on my nerves lately. On various occasions, the layout of this site is garbled in Firefox while it's perfectly valid XHTML. The latest incarnation of this problem occurs with my new Ajax instant preview functionality in the comment form. When you hit 'Instant Preview' after typing a comment, a styled comment bubble will appear to show what your final comment is going to look like after you've submitted it. Firefox will garble the layout until you resize the browser window. This problem can be experienced every once in a while on this site. After months I still haven't found a workaround. Anyone with some good advice?

Another example of the problem is visible in moblog postings.

Update: Thank God, it seems they've fixed it in Firefox 1.5. Still I'd like to find a workaround for 1.0.x though....
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Playing with Ajax

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Tuesday Sep 13 2005
I started playing around with for a change. A friend of mine told me about prototype.js, a pretty cool Javascript library for dead easy cross-browser Ajax development. I gave it a swirl last night and came up with the following calculator demo. It works like a normal calculator. Calculations are done server side with a small PHP script. It took less than an hour do both understand and produce a working example with it. Pretty nifty! UPDATED... (continue reading...)
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Behold: Web 2.0

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Saturday Sep 10 2005
It seems is the new on the block. But what's the fuss really about, I wonder? As with many buzzwords there's often little meaning in them. I have the nagging feeling this is also true for Web 2.0. Let's see what we've got.

Basically, Web 2.0 consists of the following stuff:

  • CSS, semantically valid XHTML markup, and Microformats
  • Unobtrusive Rich Application techniques (such as Ajax
  • Syndication of data in RSS/ATOM
  • Aggregation of RSS/ATOM data
  • Clean and meaningful URLs
  • Support posting to a weblog
  • REST or XML Webservice APIs
  • Some social networking aspects
Web 2.0 in the Wikipedia


Now let's look at these points on one hand and this site (or any other more or less advanced weblog) on the other hand... (continue reading...)
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Removed

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Wednesday Sep 7 2005
This entry (and all associated comments) has been removed because it's no longer relevant. Because I noticed incoming requests to this page causing problems I decided to replace it with this message in order to prevent funny results on those requests.
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A Mint review with a different flavour

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Tuesday Sep 6 2005

My pathetic stats...



It's the buzz of the day in the blogosphere. Some say it's overhyped, some say it's too expensive, others say it's the best thing since sliced bread while yet other people have no idea what all the fuss is about. There have been many (p)reviews on by a whole gang of (semi) famous webloggers that have seriously heated up the about Mint over the last couple of days. Then why the hell am I writing this review? Who am I anyway compared to these celebrities? (continue reading...)
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Mint - a review with a different flavour

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Tuesday Sep 6 2005
Spamvertised link
This article has absolutely NOTHING to do with Shaun Inman's Mint. It's a placeholder for everyone arriving here through a link placed by some asshole who's spamming the world with links to innocent weblogs like mine. I'm sick and tired of this asshole which is why I renamed the original Mint Review and entered this post bearing the old name. For more info about the ongoing activities of the spamming asshole(s) please read the following posts:
I'm sorry for the inconvenience of your blog having been spammed by this f*cker. You're not alone...


If you did come for my Mint review, go HERE to read the original posting.
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Mint and the excellent marketing of Shaun Inman

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Saturday Sep 3 2005
Mint logoAs some of you may know I'm a user of ShortStat created by a designer I really admire: Shaun Inman. It's not the most advanced or comprehensive stats package out there but it's definitely the prettiest one on the block. Also, it's really good at the few things it does. I liked it so much that I slightly improved it in order to work in situations in which you can't run PHP code in realtime, killing some spammers in the process as well. Then came the silence.... And then there was... Mint. (continue reading...)
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Ehm... WTF?

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Friday Sep 2 2005
New Orleans chaosCan someone explain to me how on earth it's possible that George W. Bush is perfectly able to engage in a full scale war that nobody asked for while people INSIDE the USA are still deprived from even the most elemental human needs after the disaster? I must admit that I was disgusted with the images I saw on the news this morning. I still hope it's not true but what I've seen and read so far looks an awful lot like black (and poor) people aren't considered very important, even though they're Americans. At least, a lot less important than the Tsunami disaster or foreign warfare. People are actually dying on live TV... Someone please tell me this isn't true?

The stuff the mayor of New Orleans is saying in this interview sure isn't helping me to believe it isn't...
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THE GUITAR GOD!!!!

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Thursday Sep 1 2005
Guitar GodThey call me "The Guitar God". My real name is actualy Todd, but I don't go buy it anymore. Even my mom has started calling me by that name because I stopped answering to TODD. What ever you do don't call me Turd (I had enuf of that in school!!!).

That's me on the left. My favorite color is PURPLE (can you tell??), and I'm a Taurus. I'm 6'0" tall and weigh 112 pounds. I made this web site so people could laern more about me and the types of things that I am interested in and the stuff that I do. THE GUITAR GOD HOME PAGE!!!!

Party like it's 1994! Also check out the hilarious Ebay auctions.
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