Sunday, November 02, 2008

Yes Virginia, there is a future…

The key to our kind of democracy is participation, not just once every four years but actively, throughout our lives. As these last 8 years has shown, it is our responsibility to constantly engage ourselves and our government, to maintain our right to free speech, freedom of assembly, innocence until proof of guilt, and other inalienable rights as defined in the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.

We’ve been a better country. We can be that again - but we have to remember what we stand for, and we have to constantly strive for it.

Take that first step.
Vote.

Posted by admin on 11/02 at 07:10 PM
Posted in: America  
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Thursday, October 30, 2008

Even the mullet crowd gets it now.

image

Wow.
Please, God.

Posted by admin on 10/30 at 11:02 PM
Posted in: America  
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Come and get me…

Is there an alternative to captchas? I’m hoping so.

It’s not like many people even know about this blog, but I’m going to run a test.

I don’t like Captchas. Don’t like tests of intelligence to respond to a blog. And I really don’t like spam in my post comments. People should be free to respond without having to be known, anonymously, so long as they’re respectful to others and the post in general. You never have to agree, but appreciate that we all live here online cumulatively to the health and future of the internet.

Yet when you see dozens of comment spams like “hey, great post - come here for viagra”, generated principally by rogue robot programs, you can easily see how this pest can paralyse a healthy conversation. Captchas was the first, best line of defence against spambots, but it’s not a natural way to communicate. Comments slowed considerably, to a crawl.

So I’m opening up the site and testing one solution - Askimet, principally for Wordpress, but now an extension for ExpressionEngine. Wordpress’s lack of separation between content and programming and poor caching preclude it from being a serious corporate cms, but the Askimet facility of WP makes sense.

If a member leaves a comment, the comment is sent to the online Akismet service at akismet.com. It’ll quickly be evaluated (microseconds - hardly any delay) and a verdict of either ’spam’ or ‘okay’ is sent back. If a comment is considered ’spam’, its status is set to ‘closed’. If a comment is considered ‘okay’, the comment is posted normally. I can then block IP ranges if I care to or batch delete them, but they never get put online.

In theory - let’s give it a try. 

Posted by admin on 10/30 at 10:01 AM
Posted in: Idle Chatter   IT notes  
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Friday, October 24, 2008

Déja ewww…

image

”Bill Shapiro writes to Romenesko: I’m the former managing editor LIFE (the newspaper supplement version). After The Speech last night, I couldn’t help recall our third cover featuring McCain and…. Take a peek. I think you’ll find it very fun and rather prescient.

When we shot this photo for the third cover of LIFE (the newspaper supplement version) back in September of 2004, we never dreamed we’d actually see it play out….or even anything this close.”

Posted by admin on 10/24 at 11:50 AM
Posted in: America   Malarkey  
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Thursday, October 23, 2008

1

Hit that high note, pipe-boy…

Ever wish songs just sang what was happening in the music video? Well now they do.

Posted by admin on 10/23 at 06:34 PM
Posted in: Malarkey  
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