Tag: blogging

September 28, 2012
Although not a great user of twitter, I have used it as a way of conveniently getting messages from devices like my Kindle through to my blog. Yes, I was doing it to post to the blog, but twitter gained the traffic as well.

Except that has now stopped, with changes to twitter’s API policy. They want anything posted to twitter to stay with twitter, and not be exported or cross-posted to any other system. As a result the IFTTT website has had to remove all of its twitter triggers effective today.

January 29, 2012
November 7, 2011
For just over a week now, my script to import comments from LJ into Wordpress has failed. The failure has been silent – i.e. it appears to work, but simply doesn’t import the comments.

Posting of articles from Wordpress to LJ is still working, it is just grabbing the comments back that is failing

April 8, 2011
I signed up for a Twitter account, and maybe I should have been more anonymous than I was (didn’t occur to me), as already I have had people trying to sign up. The fact of the matter is that I wasn’t intending to use it to tweet, as such. The reason I opened the account is that my Kindle has the ability to share my book-reading habits with either Twitter or Facebook. So by connecting it to a Twitter account, I can then pipe the resulting messages through to Wordpress, and then LiveJournal.

So the Twitter account hasn’t got anything of interest on it, other than “Test” messages, and remains protected. Once I get the Kindle link to Wordpress/LJ working, I may consider enabling traffic the other way – so that new blog posts get tweeted – but I don’t actually need another social network/time drain at the moment!

April 4, 2011
August 10, 2010
My last post contained a large picture which was not hidden behind a cut, and so it inflicted itself across my LJ friend’s friends list.

Apologies for this, but it was not intentional – as a result I have just unearthed a bug in my bespoke Wordpress code. I haven’t fixed it, but knowing it is there should prevent this happening again.

July 28, 2010
July 3, 2010
I have been doing stuff around the house today – essentially packing all my books away, so the kitchen cupboards and shelves can be transferred onto the lounge bookshelves, in preparation for the great kitchen tear-down. However, I then need to put the books (and other junk) somewhere, which necessitated a major rearrangement of my box room to Tardis-like capacity. (Regular readers will know that I now have storage space in the loft, but that is for *organised* storage.

The only problem with this plan is that I have been at it all day, solidly. Despite a couple of attempts to be distracted, it turns out that almost everyone else is too busy today to blog (thanks to Paul, though!).

June 26, 2010
I use forum software (phpBB) to run my Board Game group’s website. One of the problems with doing this is spammers trying to sign up to the forum so they can spam it. Although I have safety precautions in place – no-one’s posts are made public until I am sure they are a real person – the sheer numbers of spamming attempts used to make this a chore.

The spammers use automated software to detect the type of forum software a site uses, and act appropriately in signing up. The demonstration of this that I saw was amazingly sophisticated – the spamming software first signs up for a new hotmail/gmail/whatever email account, then goes through a submitted list of likely forums, registering with each one, using that address. It then tests to see if it has posting access – if it does, it posts spam, if not, it then waits for (and responds to) any security/registration emails the forum software sends, all automatically – then having been approved, it posts spam.

January 30, 2010
Using this little tip, I now have an rss feed of LiveJournal Friends posts appearing on my iGoogle page. I found the instructions easy to follow, except I didn’t realise the significance of the “&checkcookies=1” parameter, which is required if you either want protected entries to appear on the list, or to use “Default View” to display just a selection of your Friends.

January 23, 2010
I am in the midst of moving my various websites from their individual websites, to bring them altogether on a Virtual Private Server.

I’ve been hosting with Xcalibre for several years, and I am not exactly abandoning them – they have sold off their hosting operation to Webfusion, who just happened to have some decent deals on VPS, so I am transferring it all across.

January 19, 2010
Overnight, my Wordpress blog appears to have been hit by comment spam, and lots of it. Fortunately, none of it got through to the publicly viewed part of the website.

I’ve now enabled a couple of features I hadn’t previously bothered with, which should put paid to this little game.