New Header

Another quick and dirty title bar to commemmorate tonight’s victory. If I get time later, I’ll fix up the donkey – he’s a little rough around the edges.

BTW – why 2000? Because that’s the year I first voted.

Wishlist

I added a link to my Wishlist in the sidebar. So now you have no excuse for not buying me stuff.

Boys of Summer

A quick and dirty redesign to commemorate the Cardinals’ entry into the NLCS.

World Series, here we come!

(Refresh your browser if you don’t see the new red titlebar)

Categories

I went back through my archives and tagged all my posts with categories, and you can now peruse through them over on the right (below the blogroll). The “favorites” category is a good place to start if you’re new to the site.

Hiatus

The blog will be going dark for a while. My qualifying exam due dates are coming up and I need to buckle down for a while. I promise that I’ll be back by October at the latest, when things settle down.

If I may paraphrase

Small people blog about people.
Average people blog about things.
Great people blog about ideas.

I’ll strive to do more of the latter now that I’m back in town and on a semi-regular schedule again.

Odd

This week, one person landed on this site after doing a google search for “chris miller nude”. I’m sure they were horribly disappointed.

Excuse the Mess

Working on some improvements to the site tonight. Will someone please give the comments a try and tell me if they work?

Update:

a) Yes, the comments work.
b) Everything should be valid XHTML/CSS now (it was pretty close before, but I fixed a few lazy bugs.)
c) Yes, by cleaning up the site I’m putting off lots of things I should be doing.
d) What else is new?

Del.icio.us

I’ve been light on posting lately, because other parts of my life take precedence over the blog. I still do lots of reading though, and often bookmark things I find interesting using Del.icio.us, which is a social bookmarking site. To see a few of the things that I’ve found interesting lately, you can view my del.icio.us links here

Things that are tagged with “readlater” are things that I haven’t had a chance to look at, but that I thought looked interesting enough to read when I get more time down the road. Items that are tagged into categories are sites that were helpful or interesting enough that I wanted to save them long-term. Lots of these are sites that I may find useful in future web design projects.

Also feel free to peruse my blogroll on the side of the page. There are lots of good sites there that churn out content daily.

Comments

Comments on the site are hosed right now (and may have been for some time). I’ll look into it soon.

Downtime?

My web hosting package is about to run out, and I’m frantically scrambling to get everything lined up and transferred over to my new package. If there’s any downtime, either on this site or my email, you can contact me at chrisamiller at g m a i l . c o m

False alarm. My package doesn’t expire until next year. All I had to do this year is update my credit card info, since I switched for the frequent flyer miles.

Redesign

For reasons closely related to my desire to put off my homework as long as possible, I’m doing a mini-redesign of the site. Bear with me for a little while until it’s done.

Blogging

I’ve got a whole list of half-finished posts to get up, and I promise, I’ll do so soon. The problem, I think, is twofold. First of all, I’m a perfectionist. I won’t post something until I’ve rewritten it and polished it, at least to some minimum standard (which is probably too high, in all honesty).

The second problem is that I haven’t had much time. I’ve been working a lot lately. Thankfully, I’m done working for two weeks now, and I’ll be taking that time to catch up on a lot of things. Blogging is one of them, as is packing up my life for my move to Houston.

T-minus 9 days…

Spaminated!

I came back from my hiatus, opened up the comments again, and immediately got slammed by comment spam. I’m talking 75 or so per day. Porn, online casinos, viagra – you name it, I was spammed by it. (Apparently there’s a large market for online backgammon too – who knew?) I had been using the MT-blacklist plugin to keep things under control before, but it just wasn’t keeping up anymore.

Spammers have become too versatile. They register domain names like crazy, and even using regular expressions, it’s impossible to build a comprehensive blacklist that works for any extended period of time. Jay Allen’s work on MT-Blacklist was great when it was released, but the time has come to move on.

The new approach I’m using is based on the SpamLookup plugin for Movable Type. It handles the problem in a way that is threefold. First of all, it uses a centralized blacklist, as before. This is really only effective against older, known spammers, and is just a minor part of the defense. Secondly, it requires an additional input field that (ostensibly) checks to see whether you’re a human or not. It also uses a crazy javascript function to generate the code for the question, which makes it much harder for machines to parse the text. (the javascript was generated by the Enkoderform site.)

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I implemented the nofollow tag on all comment links. This attacks spammers where it hurts – their business model.

See, the purpose of spamming blogs like mine isn’t to get the one click per year that will result from people visiting my site and accidentally clicking an online poker link. That’s chump change. They’re interested in raising their rankings in the major search engines, namely Google.

Google’s algorithm is based in part on a system called PageRank, where a site’s ranking is determined by how many other sites link to it. After spamming lots of blogs, that online casino site suddenly has a lot of karma, and it will jump to the top of the listings, garnering their site a lot more traffic.

The nofollow tag was created to combat this practice. It adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute automatically to all links in my comments and trackbacks. This more or less tells google to ignore that link when calculating a site’s PageRank. If lots of people implement this (as Moveable Type and Blogger have) then suddenly, comment spam won’t affect PageRank, and it will hopefully help eradicate the problem.

Another method that I considered, and have implemented on other sites, is by using a CAPTCHA to prevent automated spam. This is similar to the question challenge that I implemented because it offers a problem that is easy for a human to solve, but difficult for automated bots to do. As of right now, it doesn’t appear to be necessary. In the last 24 hours, I’ve had zero comment spams, and I’m hoping it stays this way.

If you have any problems leaving comments with the new system (i.e. they don’t show up), let me know.

Hiatus

I haven’t felt much like blogging lately, so I’m going on hiatus from the site. Comments will be turned off so that I don’t have to deal with spam in the meantime. Feel free to email me if you’d like to chat. My email is chris at this domain name.

I’ll still be following politics, religion, technology, and science, as always. I just don’t have the energy or inclination to write about them right now. It might be a week, it might be a month, but I’ll be back eventually.

Right now, I have 25 days left until graduation and a ton to do. A little bit of homework, a little bit of planning, but mostly, a whole lot of living.

I’ll be leaving a lot of friends behind next year, and I don’t want to regret not spending more time with them. I’ll be moving away from a place that I’ve grown to love, and I want to visit all my favorite places. I need to spend some time at the lake, have a few beers at the Dukum, and drop into the Shitty for some late night grub.

It’s finally starting to dawn on me that I’ll be moving 1000 miles away in about 3 months, and I’m determined to leave the midwest with no regrets.

Remodeling

My conceptual design is being difficult, and I’m short on time. So what you get for now is this bland, but perfectly functional template. I prefer to let my words speak for themselves anyway.

Speaking of which… I’ve been lazy lately and have just been posting a lot of links and quotes. Yes, I know it’s a cop-out, and yes, I know that you know that it’s a cop-out too. So the plan is to do a more substantial entry every other day or so. We’ll see how that works out once this school year starts though.

Design

Site redesign in progress. Things may get a bit screwy over the next few days. Bear with me.

Ignorance

In response to a question asking for people’s “outrage of the year”, Dailykos poster PC had this to say:

To me the outrage of every year is the American public’s lack of interest in knowing the issues and what our government is and isn’t doing here and abroad.
As a democracy all of us are responsible for the anti-democratic and immoral activities of our government. Shame on us all.

I couldn’t agree more. When will people quit watching reruns of Friends and living in their bubble of banality? If you do one thing this election season, be informed. I don’t care which side of the political spectrum you’re on, but if you don’t know what’s going on, how can you possibly cast an informed vote?

Jim Chapman weighed in on uninformed voters before the recent Canadian election

If you don’t understand the issues, please stay home on Monday. An uninformed vote is just as dangerous as a blindly partisan one, and neither is much use to governments trying to gauge which issues the public thinks are important.

When voters lose the motivation to effect change in their government, democracies degenerate into corruption and tyrannies emerge.

So take a few minutes, read up on the issues that matter to you, discuss them with your friends, and then vote in November. About 400 votes gave Bush Florida, and thus the election, last year. This year is likely to be just as close.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
— Martin Luther King Jr.

Long Time, No Blog

So I’ve been gone for a while, and I suppose you want an explanation. So I’ll give you a list of things I’ve gotten done over the last few weeks:

1. I moved into a new house. Yes, after four years of crappy campus housing, I now have an off-campus residence. This also means that I have my own room for the first time in four years. I cannot begin to describe how happy this makes me.
2. Attended graduation to watch the members of my original class graduate. This group included some of my best friends over the last few years. Andrea, Jon, Cale, Creed, and all the rest of the crew – I’ll miss you guys.
3. Came home to St. Louis for two weeks. Spent the vast majority of the time doing one of three things: Sleeping until noon or later, working at CompUSA, or sitting on my ass. Two of the three were great.

Tomorrow, I’m heading back up to Kirksville, and Tuesday, I start work on my aforementioned summer research project. There are a bunch of cool people hanging out in Kirksville this summer, so it should be a good time. I plan on spending most of my evenings on my back deck, barbequing and watching the world pass by. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Hiatus

Blogging will be slow to non-existant over the next few days. I’m moving to a new place, and won’t have the cable modem set up until later this week, at the earliest. I’ll pop into campus to check my email about once a day, but I’m sure I’ll be busy unpacking, running errands, and celebrating with my friends who were lucky enough to graduate this year.

Check back in next week for more on my summer plans, and the usual political punditry.