Fingertoe.com

Well, I decided to revamp my blogroll a bit.

"Actually Met" is the category for people who I actually have met in the flesh.

"Electronic Friends" is for frequent commenters or people who I feel like I know even though I have not met them in the flesh.

"Might Meet" is a group of people who are local to my area and circulate in some of the social or blog circles that I visit.

"Hangouts" are community type blogs that I comment on occasionally.

"Smart guys" are gurus of one nature or another. Some of them I just link to because they are interesting to watch. Others I have been accused of having a "man crush" on.

"Blogs" are for blogs I enjoy reading, that don't fit into the other categories.

"New/Untested" is where I put blogs when I first subscribe.

I have always managed this through my bloglines account. I made the rest of my bloglines account private, So it no longer appears on my blogroll. If you want back in, comment!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I just upgraded to the brand spanking new Movable Type 4. This post is going to reveal if the new installation works. It seemed a bit too easy, so I am guessing I will do some template hacking tonight.

The live preview feature is nice. It looks good so far..

Update 1: Got a no technorati handler error when I published, but the post still went up...

Update 2: Looks like I had old tags in my old RSS template.. Removed tag, and I think all will be happy..

Update 3: Comments would not work. My templates had a lot of prehistoric MT tags and the like. Would up switching to a default template. Not super easy.. Probably best to start fresh and import old entries.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Jess revamped his blog, and it is certainly worth checking out.

Jess is a college buddy of mine who has been losing to me in fantasy football for the last several years. ;-) He is a corn farmer, a dad and an uncle, and frequently posts pictures worth 1000 words.

Check it out!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Somebody asked me yesterday what the trick was to becoming regular in blogging. I told him I haven't posted in a few weeks, so I am probably not the best person to ask.

This sermon keeps following me around. After listening to it, I have heard similar messages at my bible study, my church, on the radio etc. Usually when God has a point he wants me to get, He makes that point from all angles. The first half is pretty centered around what has been going on at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. It is a little bit annoying if you don't go there... But once you get to the last half, It is a grand slam.

I have to teach my kids that stuff!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was pretty excited when I got a trackback in my inbox...

[Fingertoe.com] New TrackBack Ping to Entry 590 (Turning tb-spam off -- Way off)

Perhaps somebody found my tip to be helpful? Nope, it was a trackback spammer... To my defense, my hack only prevents trackbacks to old entries, and that one was not old enough to be disabled yet.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Jess and I have been having a pretty lively debate on the viability of Corn Ethanol. My contention is that the demand for ethanol is artificially created by the government political machine. It is something that everyone can pat their selves on the back about, but it does little to solve the problems that it purports to be solving. Some industries benefit greatly from the government subsidies, but the whole of society doesn't see an increase in value.

Jess believes that the American family farmer is finally feeling the benefit of free market economics, and the world is protesting. He also believes that ethanol is more efficient than critics claim. I am sure I am not doing his argument due justice. You can read his comments in their entirety at the above link.

I am likely on dangerous ground here, because Jess, a very good friend of mine is a corn farmer, one of my uncles is in the ethanol plant building business, and my employer is probably significantly vested in the financing of this business in many ways.

Anyway, I just call it as I see it. I am scared that our country is investing so much in a industry that is not going to be sustainable.

This article builds upon my fear: January 4, 2007: Distillery Demand for Grain to Fuel Cars Vastly Understated

For the first time in a long time, I feel myself taking a rather liberal position. Taking 1/4 of the world's grain exports off the market would be a disastrous on a humanitarian level. Burning the world's food supply in our Hummers, Escalades, and Range Rovers seems to border on evil.

I think we should feed people before we feed our cars. There should be a tax on gas guzzling vehicles to even out the regressive effect of the gas prices. What I see now is wealthy people driving around in vehicles that demand a lot of gas, while the poorer folks drive around in more modest vehicles. The richer folks demand a lot of gas, thus raising the price for everyone. The richer folks are not impacted by the increasing prices nearly as much as those who are just getting by, so they continue consuming at whatever cost.

Perhaps we could issue a ration of gasoline per capita that would not be taxed, and everything in excess of your quota you would have to pay a significant premium for. The premium would go to offset the cost of gas sold within the per capita quota. If you have a family of 7 and need a large vehicle to get around, you will have the quota to use it inexpensively. If you have a family of 2 and just dig driving a Hummer, it will cost you.

The solution to America's energy and pollution problems are going to have to come from the demand side. We need to provide incentives to reduce our fuel consumption. Otherwise no matter how much fuel is available, we will be happy to consume it.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:09 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Dreamhost just sent me an email letting me know I am on a new server now!

Woo Hoo! It I can tell already that my applications are running a lot faster!

I am a darn happy customer!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

If you are having trouble with Movable type comment spam, Or any other blog spam for that matter, this trick might help you out.

A year or so ago, My very happy webhost, emailed me to notify me they had to turn off my mt-tb.cgi script because it was getting spammed to the point where it was bogging down the server.

There are Movable type settings and plugins that prevent junk trackbacks on old entries, but these work by having the mt-tb.cgi script look at the trackback, analyze it and then discard it. The analysis is costs processing power on the server. I came up with the following solution, which seems to work fairly elegantly

I added the following code to my .htaccess file:

RedirectMatch permanent mt-tb.cgi/([0-4][0-9][0-9])$ /mt/errorfile.html
RedirectMatch permanent mt-tb.cgi/([0-9][0-9])$ /mt/errorfile.html
RedirectMatch permanent mt-tb.cgi/([0-9])$ /mt/errorfile.html

Now, whenever anyone sends a trackback to mt-cgi/1 through mt-cgi/499 It gets redirected to an error page which is rendered. There is no analysis done, so I believe the load on the processor is significantly reduced. If you send a trackback to entry 500 or higher, the trackback goes through the regular script.

I will have to edit this periodically, but I do think this significantly limits the damage that spammers can do.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 2:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Been hit with a lot of trackback spam in the last few days. I am going to try to re-implement my .htaccess hacks to redirect the spammers to a unreal site. This worked on my last MT installation as I pointed out in this post. I don't get many legit trackbacks, but just in case, I have to make sure that they still work!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I recently added the MeeboMe widget on the right. I installed it pretty much as an afterthought. I started using Meebo, and they offered the blog widget as a free add in, so what the heck! I was actually quite surprised that people actually use it.. I have had several people sit at fingertoe.com and have extensive conversations with me right through the chat window.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I added a list of books worth reading to the bottom of my individual entries. It is still a bit clunky, but it works.

I don't read enough. Gotta start reading more. I will try to keep fresh recommendations up.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:43 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I have been a Dreamhost customer since 1999, and I only recall one significant outage over that entire period. Until the last couple of weeks. Things have definately gotten pretty ugly.

DreamHost Blog ｻ Anatomy of a(n ongoing) Disaster..

One of the main reasons I like doing business with Dreamhost is that they are totally honest.

The fact of the matter is that in the world of computers. Things break. There will always be points of failure that are going to have catastrophic effects. (Routers and Power supply in particular)

We can mitigate these risks, but unless we own our own nuclear opwer plant, Urainum mine, Oil refinery, Highway , and dedicated lines to each household, these issues are always going to be beyond our control to one degree or another.

I am certianly going to stick it out! I trust Dreamhost's dilegence in trying to mitigate these risks, and I recongnize that any other provider Ichoose is going to be effected by the same issues at one point or another in their lifecycle.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Spending way too much time hacking on the Blog lately. Today, I upgraded to Movable Type version 3.31, which was just recently released. At first glance, it appears that the big upgrades are the inclusion of the Apps.feeds Lite plugin and a widget manager.

The Apps.feeds Lite allows you to include any RSS feed in your blog. For example, I have included links to Thinking Christians and the upcoming events at my church in the right hand column.

The widgets manager allows you create little chunks of code and include them on your website. Most everything in the the right hand menu on the front page is handled by the widget manager. I have a widget that pulls my bloglines blogroll, one that pulls my bookmarks, one that pulls the feeds from my church's website, etc. If I want to re-arrange that menu, I can go into the widget manager and it is as easy ad dragging and dropping the components into the order I want them and republishing.

All in all, it looks pretty slick. Well worth the trouble!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Still a bit rusty on my CSS skills... This website re-hack has been a chance to get polished up a bit on that.

Also, the banner above is my very poor attempt to be artistic.. Let me know if my toenail fungus is too disgusting to have to look at each time you visit my blog.

I am still hacking away.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, Here I think It worked without too much damage.. I guess this is kinda a test message. Now I get to go in and try to re-add some of my plugins and work on editing all of the templates to my liking. Stay tuned.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have decided to do some rather radical surgery on Fingertoe.com...    Things might get messed up..  Hopefully not... 

I decided to start over fresh with new templates.   I also am moving my installation over to the fingertoe.com domain so that the silly I.E. Commenting issue goes away.

 Cross your fingers for me...

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Well,  if you are not using an RSS feed reader, you will notice the view has changed a bit.   I have been using some hacked together MT 2.3 era templates.  They worked fine from the end user perspective, but whenever I try to hack them, they are totally different than anything else that is out there, so I have had to engineer everything myself.

Tonight I refreshed all of my templates.   I am not thrilled with how it looks, but it will do for now.  I still haven't figured out how to get the cocomment integration working.  I have made the hacks recommended by the cocomment site, but It is not flowing through to the cocomment site when I use the firefox plugin or the bookmarklet.  I think it probably has something to do with the typekey authentication, but I am not sure.  If Cocomment works as well as it seems like it should it will not be long until the someone figures it out.

 I am also having trouble with their firefox plugin interfering with my movable type posting capabilities.   Perhaps it is a conflict between the Ajaxified enhanced editing software I installed a few months ago.  If it works like it says it does, I think it will be well worth the trouble.

Also, I am having quite a bit of trouble with the StyleCatcher plugin for movable type.  It looks like it is going to work fine, but then the stylesheet links don't point to the correct location.  I can correct them, but every time I select a different style, I have to re-edit.  I would guess it is due to me hosting my MT installation on a different domain than my blog.  That is just an initial guess.  Anyway, nothing ever seems to be easy does it?

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I am giving CoComment a try.   It seems like a very good idea to me.  Basically it is a system to track all of the comments that you leave all over the Blogsphere..    I got an account, and installed the firefox extension.  We will see how it works.  I have been scouring the net trying to find something to comment on, but alas, most of my favorite blogs have been nearly as quiet as mine lately.

 Once I have found a blog or two to comment on, I may add a section on my sidebar listing my comments on other folks sites.  If I found it interesting enough to comment on, there is a good chance that some of the regulars might take interest in it too.  (All three of you?)  

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I found out today, that folks who use IE 6, are not able to comment here.   Apparently IE 6 only allows cookies on a per domain level.   Since my movable type installation is on one domain, and my blog is on another, typekey won't let folks sign in.

 Of course everyone knows that they shouldn't use IE anyway, but since some of our employers haven't wised up yet here is the workaround.

1. Go to Tools > Internet Options, then select the Privacy tab.
2. In the Settings area of the tab, click Sites.
3. In the Address of website field, type liferoads.reighley.net and click Allow.
4. Click OK at the bottom of that dialogue box.
5. Click OK on the Privacy tab.

This should take care of it.   Someday I might consider moving the MT installation to fingertoe.com,  but I am sure that is easier said than done...  With typekey, I get zero comment spam.  Of course perhaps that is because I get zero comments.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I would say that my trackback hack has been a resounding success.   So far I have prevented 673 trackbacks from wasting CPU time.

A few are still sneaking into my junk filter, but it is a huge improvement!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Well, I think I finally defeated the spam bandits.   At least for a while. 

 The basic problem stems from the complexity of Movable Type's anti-spam technology.  The system does an excellent job of identifying and junking the trackback spam.  Each one is analyzed in 4 or 5 different ways before it is published.  When the system receives a huge volume of trackbacks at the same time, however, it can slow your server to a crawl.

 Even when I turned off the "Allow Trackbacks" switch on my posts, the spammers where still able to get their trackbacks into my junk filter.  This means that my server was still cranking away doing analysis.

My final solution was to edit the .htaccess file with  RedirectMatch and some regular expressions to identify my old posts and point them to a plain old .html document.   This bypasses my Movable type scripts all together, and should be much easier on dreamhost's server. 

 We will see!  If you would like details of my hack, let me know.  I don't really want to post it here for the enemy to see.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Well,  Trying to get all of these trackback issues under control.  It looks like I broke my Movable type installation pretty good...

 My individual archives are not publishing correctly.   Hopefully I will get it straightened out tonight.   Right now I a bit too tired to think straight...  

Bear with me! 

Update--  I think I got it somewhat fixed...   I think I will try to start fresh tonight.   I think a lot of the problem is that I have upgraded too many times, and I have lots of legacy type code in my templates.
 

Posted by Josh Reighley at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I noticed that some of my websites went down today for a little while.   After a little while, I noticed that it was back up.  Later, I got a note from Dreamhost,  my web host indicating that one of my movable type files was being attacked, and had to be disabled.

 Looking at my logs, it looks like I went through a trackback spam attack.  The trackback system is a terrific idea, but it sure is implemented poorly.  Since I have been using Movable Type, I have received 5 legitamate trackback pings and probably tens of thousands of spam pings.   While the 3.2 version does a great job of identifying these pings as spam and does not publish them,  all of the CPU cycles that are used examining these can be taxing.  Especially when you are recieving a large volume all at once. 

I looked for a patch to resolve the issue, but I really couldn't find that there where any known issues with the MT 3.2 trackback script.  I did find a pretty cool plugin, that may help somewhat.   AutoBan edits the .htaccess file on the web server to deny service to the IP address that is sending junk spams.  With this system,  the webhost's CPU will only have to examine the first Ping to determine it's validity.  After that, any pings that are sent from the same IP address are totally ignored.

What would be really nice is to see the a simular technology that imports recent entries from the blacklists and pre-emptively blocks them. 

 It sure is a waste or resources.  I don't understand why the spammers keep at it.   Movable type doesn't publish many trackbacks anyway.  Even if it does publish one, it includes instructions for the search engines that the link is not to be followed.  I don't think many website visitors are stupid enough to click through and buy products from a company that has to resort to such weasely advertizing techniques anyway.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 2:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For one reason or another my Movable type stopped working properly, and in my troubleshooting I wound up postng the same entry 7 or 8 times... Grrrr....

Sorry if your RSS readers went nutty!

Josh

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Let me know if you notice anything astonishingly annoying. I am adding technorati tags to my individual archives and to my RSS feed. I am hoping that this will help improve traffic as well as adsense relevance...

I am always experimenting with something.

Josh

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nathan had to stay at least one more night in the hospital. He just went to bed, and his O2 is staying up. He has been bouncing off the walls all day. I don't think anyone would know that this kid is sick if they saw him on the street. Usually when he has been sleeping, however the Oxygen saturation has been sinking a bit low. He just went to bed, and so far so good. Lets keep our fingers crossed.

I am spending the night with him, as I did yesterday. Sleep disturbances are a non-event for me. I experence them all of the time as a graveyard guy. So I give Andee the night off. It isn't too bad, as I am in range of the Spokane Hotzone, so I get 2 hours of internet connectivity for free. I also brought my Sporty's video so I can learn to fly airplanes again.. The bed is pretty lousy, and gettng woken up by nurses every couple hours isn't too much fun, but I will survive!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

This post should show up at 8:00 AM Pacific time.

We will see!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I plan to start a new "Regular feature" on this website. I am a weird guy, and I like a lot of weird stuff. I am going to work on writing short reviews about once a week about off-the-wall things I have tried.

I started out today, bantering about my experience sleeping on a buckwheat pillow for the last 9 years.

Cash is short, I have hosting bills, and my experience tells me that chatting about niche interests is the best way to generate revenue. People looking for really specific items tend to wander across my blog, and the ads tend to be exactly what they are looking for. I think these topics will be fairly entertaining for most folks. I used to make 50-100 dollars per quarter off of my Bat House website. It still earns about 10 dollars per quarter, and I haven't updated it in 5 or 6 years. It really wasn't much more complicated than a blog entry with a few pictures.

We started Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University last week. We have been struggling pretty hard for the last 9 months or so, as my software business has had its volume drop substantially. Hopefully things will pick up soon. In the mean time, we are going to start watching the flow of each dollar.

My wife and kids are traveling tommorow. They will be gone for a week. I should be busy. I have 2 software projects to wrap up, taxes to file, and a couple of bible studies I am doing right now. Oh, also my car badly needs an oil change. Hopefully I will remember to eat. Oops, that reminds me, I have to lose a bunch more wieght.

Enjoy my weirdness!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the amusing things about having a blog is looking at your stats, and seeing what people are searching for when they find you..

MSN Search: traditional churches and wife spanking Off the top of my head, the answer is NO!

enjoyed watching childhood spankings - Google Search Yikes! Some of the links on that page scare me!

intp schizoid - Google 搜索 The great firewall committee must have determined that It's citizens will not be corrupted by the fact that I am crazy.

Sado Masachist I am afraid to even open this one.

I sure am glad I mispelled sudoku... I get about 80% of my traffic from people who spell it my way.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:27 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I have been gradually becoming more and more annoyed by Dreamhost's Dreambook product. Back in 1998 or so, I was looking for a Guestbook application for my Bat House webpage. Dreambook fit the bill exactly, and so I installed it.

Later I decided I wanted to get my own domain name, and I saw that the folks who hosted my dreambook where offering hosting. I signed up for Dreamhost and have never been disappointed. I have been their happy customer for 7 years now.

I am no longer a happy dreambook customer though.. My dreambook gets about 20-1 spam messages, and there is no out of box solution to cut down on the spam. I have submitted a suggestion, but I can imagine that dreambook constitutes .0000000095 % of Dreamhost's revenue stream, so I can't imagine that it is high on their priority list.

But if you have a product that creates the most annoyance to your customers, I think it warrents attention whether it is cost effective or not..

In the mean time, I added a mandatory feild. Are you a Spammer?? It has a dropdown, and requires them to select yes or no. Hopefully that will stop most of the robots..

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Upgraded my weblogging software to Moveable type 3.2 last week. It was pretty darn painless. I had been getting a whole bunch of trackback spam that was getting through the filters. The newest version of MT has pretty good Spam Filtering built in. It has been working like a champ, and has blocked about 300 Spam trackbacks in the last week alone.

Also added a plugin that pulls favicons from commenter's websites and post them next to their names.. Pretty nice touch, but there are some issues that I would like to see ironed out with the implementation.

Other than that, I have been pretty sick. Had a sinus infection and tonsilitis... Antibiotics seem to be taming the bug pretty well.

I lost the final match in my fantasy football league... It was tough to figure out what to do, because most all of my best players are on teams that had nothing to gain or lose this week, and most of my players didn't get much playing time. I could have won if I had pulled one of my starting running backs and put in a backup, but that was a risky move..

Second place is nothing to be too upset about. I have been playing with the same group of guys for about 8 years now. It is a pretty competitive league.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bit the bullet and upgraded to MT 3.2 today. It will be interesting to see what works and what doesn't... I got about 50 trackback spams today, and figured upgrading would be easier than deleting. Let me know if you notice anything that isn't working or looking right.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am back. Have been in Portland for the last week, and have not had much time to blog.

Made the playoffs in fantasy football. I play in a "bragging rights only" league of my college buddies from University of Idaho. We have been playing for 7 or so years now, and I am usually in the hunt for the playoffs each year. When I make the playoffs, I have rarely done very well. I am hoping that my luck changes this year. Basically I have to hope that Carolina and Chicago keep winning so that the Seahawks can't rest their starters in the final weeks of the season.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Of course I had to run out and try the Google Analytics the instant I read about it.

It is pretty darn cool. I think it is very cool for E-commerce sites. You can let it know what your website's goal is, and it will monitor each customer, and let you know what referal source is generating most of your income.

At first Glance, it is not nearly as useful for content producers, For example this blog. My goal is not to get you to buy something, but to get you interested in coming back later. While it does monitor visitor loyalty, that is not the main function, and so it may take some tinkering to get really usefull reports on that.

I plan to add this to my church website. There are some things that would be good to know that the Statcounter that we have doesn't provide.. I.E. How many folks download our audio files, or pulling up the mapquest link. You can add some code to your outgoing link, and it will track how many folks us it.

It looks to me, that I have just barely scratched the surface. I bet some books are going to be written about this program. It appears to have a lot of features that are going to take some know how to make the most of.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:31 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I got rid of the calendar feature on the left hand sidebar, and replaced it with a listing of the most recent comments.

I know, it is a pretty boring change, but a change none the less

Does anyone really use those calendar navigation features? I see them on a lot of blogs, they look cool, but I don't think I have every seriously seen any functional advantage to navigating with them.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few weeks ago, I asked what if anyone could guess the origin of fingertoe.com. I got a few good guesses, but the truth is. Nobody knows.

One day I was tinkering with Debian Linux, and I wanted to get a domain name to use with Dynamic DNS so I could connect remotely to my linux box. The only criteria was it needed to be something easy to remember. Fingertoe.com was not taken, and so I registered it.

Later I was playing with SWISH, and I made a cool flash Splash page. After a few seconds of displaying fingertoe.com, it dropped in the explaination "I don't know what it means either."

The name serves me well. It seems that Google likes webpages that have their own domian names. I have had thousands of people visit this website after googling "Indian Larry" or "Blake Pitching Tents"

Occasionally I get somebody looking for Fingertoe Therapy, which is apparently an indian accupressure technique that I know nothing about.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I have been playing a lot with Feedburner lately. RSS is an amazingly powerful tool.

I have been noticing a lot more traffic coming to the church website from blogs. I figured my blog is a great place to tell my friends and co-workers what is happening at my church. I set up some "BuzzBoost" scripts on feedburner, and now I have exerpts of the church website displayed on my page.

Any Liferoaders out there who want to add the content to your website let me know. It is as easy as pasting a few lines of code into your blog's template.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I am looking at this calendar to integrate into some websites that I run. It looks really neat, and is a free service.

AirSet - Shared Calendars, Reminders, Community for Groups and Family

I like that they offer RSS feeds for the calendar. this will make it easy to incorporate into the other websites.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Nobody has ever asked me what fingertoe.com means. Does anyone have any idea?

Comment with your guess... I will reveal answer in a few days.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tonight at work, I suggested that a coworker start a blog, I invested 2 or 3 minutes setting up a blogger account for her.

5 minutes later, I checked her website out, and Linda is a blogger.

Little Linda blog

If you want a blog, I would be happy to help you out. Let me know. It is easy. (Really)

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:37 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I installed SpamLookup yesterday, and I am quite impressed. It has elimiated all of the Trackback spam that I have been getting.

About 4 times a day I have been getting 5-20 trackback pings for poker sites and various other immoral enterprizes. I have had to log in, and use the MT blacklist plugin to remove and blacklist these websites.

Spam lookup blocks all of those automatically. When it recieves a trackback, it verifies the IP of the transmitter, and makes sure that they match the IP of the website. If not, it discards the Trackback. Pretty slick. Saves me quite a bit of time and annoyance.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I added a couple of plugs for some companies I do business with on the "Shameless plugs" section of this website.

The first link is for Broadvoice. I have been using broadvoice for 6 months now, and I have been quite happy with their service. I have a phone number in the Portland area, where a lot of my family lives. Now my family can make a local call, and talk to us whenever they want for free. I can call most anywhere for no additional cost. It is also nice to have all of the features available for such a low price. If I where to get Voicemail, Caller ID, Call forwarding Distinctive ringing, Simultanious ringing and the like on my Qwest phone, it would cost me a small fortune. With Broadvoice, that is all included in the base price.

I also added a link to Dreamhost. I have been a customer of theirs since 1999, and I have been quite satisfied with their service. I rarely see any outages on my website. They keep adding features without raising my price. Most importantly (To me) when there is a problem they are open and honest about it.

Anyway, if you are in the market for these VoIP or web hosting, please give these guys a look. I think you will probably be satisfied if you choose to do business with them.

Posted by at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Well, I am really racking up the hits today. I think that the Wendy's Chili additive is the hottest blog topic since Indian Larry passed away.

Last I checked,They still hadn't found the source. Weird... You would think that somebody who lost a finger would be looking for it, but apparently not:

MSNBC - Search continues for owner of missing digit

"All of our employees have ten digits," said Denny Lynch, a spokesman for Wendy's International Inc., based in Dublin, Ohio. He said there have been no reports to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of injuries at any supplier of chili ingredients to Wendy's.

I guess I should set up google news topics for Fingers and toes. I am fairly certain that the name of this silly blog is why I am ranking so high on the search engines. Welcome visitors. (I don't know what the name means either)

Posted by at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

A friend sent me the following Netdisaster link. I am not sure if that is commentary on my blog or what...
;-)

Posted by at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Principal apologizes for smoking at school

Johnson said that she ordered Central High officials to remove the suspension from Velasquez's record and that Almagno had apologized over the intercom for smoking on school grounds.

The internet is a amazing device. One voice quickly becomes a powerful media outlet. It is pretty hard to punish somebody for telling the truth. It doesn't sound like this kid is going to get an apology regarding his suspension however.

Posted by at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

So, All of that work this weekend half paid off. I have had next to no comment Spam to deal with. I am still having to deal with Trackback pings, but I think that will get better over time. I think that they should develop a whitelist system for trackbacks. Perhaps based on a Technorati or Blogstreet score. If you have a legitimate blog, and have established yourself in the blogging community, your pings go right through. Otherwise You get moderated or blocked.

Posted by at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Fought with getting Moveable type to play nice with my bloglines blogroll. Got it working moderately well using an Include Plus plugin. Still fighting with the stylesheet.

The more I work with Movable type the more I dig WordPress. Wordpress seems to have more plugins, more themes, and more support the Movable Type does. I think that Movably type's backend interface is superior, and I like having static pages for the most part. Dynamically generating the same pages over and over again seems like overkill to me. (See the Goldfish analogy below) Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

Posted by at 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I am updating the look and feel of Fingertoe.com due to the MT 3.15 upgrade. The old stylesheets don't work with the new templates.

Anyway, I will be enlarging the fonts on this page soon. I am having trouble getting the Bloglines Blogroll to match the rest of the stylesheet.

Posted by at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Been doing quite a bit of work today! Got Fingertoe.com all of the way up on Movable Type 3.15, and did a lot of Wordpress work on Sean's website:

Overall, my impression is that both platforms are a hassle to get working correctly at first. Hacking templates is not a lot of fun. I think I have a better feel for what is going on in the Wordpress installation. PHP is much easier to understand than Perl. The open source community behind WP is a little more forthcoming with Information than the proprietary folks behind MT. I probably should go ahead and buy Movable type, and perhaps I will be happier.

The Movable type installation was a hassle because the new version of MT-Blacklist was difficult to get installed until I totally nuked the old version. Also I had to replace most of my default templates to get MT's new modern commenting system to work. Always looks easy to do, but there is always something that doesn't get updated quite right.

Working on getitng a "What I am reading" section working for Sean. He would like that on a totally separate webpage. I am sure it will be easy once we got it figured out. Installed a weather plugin on his system. Looks nice.

Posted by at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I think I got everything upgraded. Decided to allow typekey authenticated comments only. I am hopeful that this will eliminate most of the comment spam that I have been battleing for the last few weeks. Let me know if you notice any quirkyness.

Posted by at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Well, I have decided to stick with Movable type.

I have been playing with Wordpress quite a bit, and I am impressed, It is easier to stay with Movable type for the time being however as all of the archive pages and stuff would be difficult to convert without changing the path names.

Upgrading was pretty simple so far. I had a little bug where the admin page didn't read its stylesheet Changed permissions on the stylesheet and it seems to work okay now.

I have been having terrible trouble with Spammers lately. I decided to upgrade so that I could utilize some of the more powerful tools to combat the spammers. I have been getting 25-50 spam comments and pingbacks a day. Hopefully that will end soon.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Obsidian Order: A Very Special Effect

I wonder if Al Queda has a journalism school??

Posted by at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I have been playing with Wordpress as a replacement for Moveable type. I did a practice migration a few weeks ago, but never told anyone anywhere where I saved the wordpress website on my server. I never published anything from that website, so I don't think any of the techicari type websites would have recieved pings or anything...

Today, I began getting comment spam on my wordpress installation. How did they find it??? Very strange...

The nice thing about this installation is all comments must be approved by me.. So the spammers efforts are pretty futile, but it is still annoying.

Posted by at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Here are some of the things people have been searching for when they found my humble weblog:

lid tack welder
indian larry (Tons of hits on this one)
sipura pbx problem
antisocial intp
monogomy
thermocron
voicepulse coupons
old testement legos
al quada
kerry campaign lies (My second Favorite)
ewu newspaper dan perdue (My Favorite)

My hits will probably go way down once my spellchecker starts working.

Posted by at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

So far, my website tweaks

I think moving the comments script was just as effective as the blacklist plugin. I have no blacklist rejections in my activity log.

Still haven't been successful at getting the spellchecker plugin to work. I am sure that those of you who read frequently have noticed. Pays off nicely though if you write a long post and spell Al Qaeda incorrectly all throughout, you get a whole bunch of hits from people who are equally inept spellers.

Posted by at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Meme Propagation Test

This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate—the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4

(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers):

1. I found this experiment at URL: http://nathanworld.blogspot.com/2004/08/meme-propagation-test.html

2. I found it via “Newsreader Software�� or “Browsing or Searching the Web�� or “An E-Mail Message��: Browsing or Searching the Web – Bloglines.com
3. I posted this experiment at URL:
http://www.fingertoe.com

4. I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02 August 2004

5. I posted this at time (24 hour time): 9:37:00 PST

6. My posting location is (city, state, country): Spokane, WA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: Dreamhost.com

(8) My age is: 32

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Tech support, Software entrepeneur
(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Movable Type

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 06/15/2002

(14) My web browser is: Firefox

(15) My operating system is: Linux

Posted by at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I just installed StatCounter on all of my websites. A good tracking program is a very handy tool for anyone who is serious about building traffic to their website.

The Statcounter can be installed so that it is totally invisible on the website. You just paste a bit of code into each of your HTML documents, and every visitor to your website is tracked.

Statcounter includes a very useful path report that shows what each visitor looked at while touring your website. You can see where customers are entering your website, and what pages are intriging your visitors enough that they stick around and check out the rest of your content.

Another useful feature is the referer report which shows how people are finding your website. For example, I noticed today that I was getting hits from here: Basecamp

It is also good to know what screen resolutions and browsers your visitors are using so that you can test and optimize your site to keep your visitors happy.

Sitecounter is free for casual users. It is supported by ads that appear on your reporting pages. If you don't have another counter you are using, it is worth checking out.

Posted by at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Looks like I made somebody's day yesterday. Nathan World: I got a comment!!!

I have been randomly subscribing to a Blog or 2 out of Bloglines new blogs section every week or so and adding them to my "New/Untested" Blogroll.

There are a lot interesting people out there, and I figure they will only keep writing for a short time if nobody bothers to check them out.

Posted by at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, I got pounded today with Viagra comments. I think I got about 10 of them. I am fairly vigilant about cleaning that stuff out.

So I figured it was a good chance to hack on MT a bit to see what could be done to prevent the comment spam problem.

First I renamed the comments file so that the robots would actually have to look at my page to figure out how to post a comment. I hear that works pretty well, but not perfectly.

Second, I downloaded and installed my first MT plugin, the mt-blacklist. It was quick and easy install. We will see how effective it is! It looks like it should do a pretty good job of blocking both trackback spam and comment spam. Anything we can do to frustrate spammer.

Posted by at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I think it is funny to see Blogging's effect on the mainstream media. There have been several blogger type news items that I have noticed in the top 9 Reuter's stories on Yahoo.

Example:

Yahoo! News - Odor May Be Clue to Missing Airport Fish

Some guy loses some fish, and it becomes a Top Headline? People lose luggage ever day.

I also remember seeing the guy in olympia who's ffriends wrapped the contents of his house in Aluminum foil in the lead headlines. That one I remember seeing on a most poplar blog link list.. Then a few hours later, the mainstream news sites started carrying the story nationally.

Posted by at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

So, today I looked over at my Blogroll, and I have decided it is a mess.. The Blogroll is the What I am reading section on the right margin of the website. I wonder what the best method is to present that part of the website. Bloglines is pretty helpful in automatically creating it based on the Blogs that I am subscribed to. But they do not automatically present them in a nice format.

I like to read a lot of stuff that I don't agree with. Usually the stuff that I read is well written (unlike this blog). I would be happy to share these good writers with the blog world, but I don't want my link to be an endorsment of them. I enjoyed reading about the impending end of the world the other week for example. I didn't believe that it was true, but it was entertaining.

Also, I figure it is my duty to subscribe to at least one intersting start up blogger per day. Some may be worth reading, and some may not. Some may be gone in a week.

Anyway. Leave a comment if you have a suggestion on the best way to organize the links.

Posted by at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Wow, Now that I finally switched to Movable type, It looks like Blogger just added most all of the features that where missing! Check it out!

If anyone is thinking of creating their own blog page, I would highly recomend Blogger as a place to start. They can get you up and running with a pretty full featured blog in just minutes!

Posted by at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I had an outage on all of my websites yesterday. This was the first time, in a very long time that I have had any substantial outage.

I have been using Dreamhost as my web host since 1999. I have been very happy with them. I bought a pretty full fledged account with them back in 1999, and they keep improving it without increasing the cost at all.

Apparently one of the sites that they host had a Denial of Service attack launched against it, and it took them most of the day to get their upstream providers to turn it off. One of the things that I really enjoy about doing business with them is that they have always been honest about their problems. When something goes wrong, they let you know that it went wrong, and they let you know what they are doing to prevent it from going wrong next time. I like that, and you don't find that with most businesses these days.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Welcome to Fingertoe.com (I don't know what it means either) I plan to use this website to share all of the things I am finding interesting. We will see what materializes.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments ()