mono

Watch Weblogs

Lars Holst — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:25:37 +0000

To the best of my knowledge, this should be a fairly complete list of watch weblogs published in English:

Most of these also offer their content as xml feeds. Let me know if your favorite watch weblog is missing, and I will add it to the list. Weblogs in other languages would be most welcome too.

Seat Belts

Lars Holst — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:57:26 +0000

A thoughtful reminder for those devil-may-care seat belt wearing days:

It’s a very sobering thing to every day look into the eyes of a person who is slowly beginning to understand that he will never walk again. He will never sit up without help again. He will never tie his own shoes again. Hell, he may not ever wear shoes again. He will never pick up his 8 month old daughter again. He will never make love to his wife again. He will never get himself a drink of water again. He saw me come and go to my normal life every day, but it will be months and months, if not years, before he ever leaves the very building he entered the day of his accident. And then, when he does leave the hospital, it will be to go to a nursing home.

From Wear your stupid seat belt at Irregular Times via IO ERROR.

Tour de France

Lars Holst — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 13:11:52 +0000

Le Tour kicked off yesterday with an incredible time trial performance by Lance Armstrong, one of the all-time great athletes. With Jan Ullrich once again in questionable shape, the only real contenders for the overall victory seem to be Ivan Basso, Alexandre Vinokourov, and possibly Andreas Klöden, in that order. Despite the fact that Armstrong already looks to have secured his seventh title, lots of things can and will change before the finish on July 24, and I am very much looking forward to the coming stages. May the best rider win.

Recommended resources:

Although I absolutely love Eurosport and their Swedish cycling commentators, Anders Adamsson and Roberto Vacchi, I cannot say the same for their overly busy and confusing website, or their horrible URLs.

MIT Weblog Survey

Lars Holst — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 17:24:44 +0000

If you have a weblog, you may wish to take the MIT Weblog Survey:

This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete, and we are asking anyone with a weblog to participate. The larger the sample of individuals we can get, the better our picture of the community will be.

It took me 10 minutes, and the results promise to be really interesting.

Introducing the Gatekeeper

Lars Holst — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 11:21:13 +0000

One of the reasons for mono’s quarter-long hiatus has been the ridiculous amounts of comment spam that has kept flushing in like a burst sewer gone berserk. I tried various countermeasures, but they were either sadly unsuccessful at stopping said spam, or involved too much hassle to make it worth the while. About to give up and simply do away with comments entirely, I remembered reading about Eric Meyer’s WP-Gatekeeper sometime last year. It was a good idea, but neither fully developed nor available as a plugin at the time. Well, now it is a plugin, and although a release candidate, it seems ready enough to rock and roll:

WP-Gatekeeper is a comment-spam defense plugin for WordPress 1.5. Upon installing it, a challenge will automatically be added to comment forms: “What color is an orange?”. In order to post, the commenter must enter the correct answer. The strength of Gatekeeper is that it allows you to create any number of challenges you like, and picks one at random to insert into the comment form. You can also define your own markup template as well as manually place the challenge in your comment forms, should you so desire.

It would have been nice if questions were showed to new commenters only, but as long as it keeps the spam away I am happy. Besides, my secret plan is to let Mr. Hudson fix this, then blatantly steal his code. I am also toying with the idea to up the difficulty level of the questions, to something along the lines of “What is the difference between the special and the general theory of relativity?”, just to keep the riffraff away. We will see what happens. Of course, the problem of trackback spam will remain unsolved, but for some reason I haven’t seen much of that. Yet.

Update: Gatekeeper 1.5 rc3 fixes an issue with trackbacks/pingbacks.