Handy WordPress plugins

here are some wordpress plugins that look handy: [...] MORE...

VamPus

Through an interview in Dagbladet I just discovered a whole new piece of the Norwegian blog-o-sphere. Political blogs with a twist, the article (in Norwegian only, unfortunately) introduces Heidi Nordby Lunde, writing as VamPus. [...] MORE...

Egyptian blogger finds proof the whole cartoon discussion may be politically fuelled

"[...] while the arab islamic population was going crazy over the outrage created by their government's media over these cartoons, their governments was benifitting from its people's distraction. The Saudi royal Family used it to distract its people from the outrage over the Hajj stampede. The Jordanian government used it to distract its people from their new minimum wage law demanded by their labor unions. The Syrian Government used it to create secterian division in Lebanon and change the focus on the Harriri murder. And, finally, the Egyptian government is using it to distract us while it passes through the new Judiciary reforms and Social Security Bill- which will cut over $300 million dollars in benefits to some of Egypt's poorest families. [...]" MORE...

Browsing

I'm browsing for inspiration for a bit of a clean up of my blog layout. It's remained largely the same for 4 years, so it's time to look into what new goodness can be incorporated. MORE...

Hebig.org industrial photo calendar available

Fellow blogger and photographer Haiko Hebig has selected some of his amazing industrial photos and published a calendar for 2006: MORE...

ABCNews

Just got a call from ABC News in US who will use my photo of the Evening Standard today in their news coverage as of immediately. Cool when traditional news organizations tap the blog-o-sphere. MORE...

UK Blog-o-sphere kicking into action

Check the UK Blogs aggregator for first hand reports from people stuck in offices around London (like me) MORE...

Google SiteMaps for Movable Type - now with correct Last Modified dates

The two other stabs at creating Sitemap templates for Movable Type don't take into account that you might want to assign different priorities and scan frequencies to your entries (as described here), as well as correcting 'Last Modified date' to include comment submissions. MORE...

Apple nicking bloggers' code snippets?

Whoa. Check this out: Norwegian blogger Arve published funky CSS tutorials, Apple picks up and includes in their software distributions, Arve discovers and does not get anywhere: [...] MORE...

Mass-scale open proxy blocking: MT Blacklist 3?

We all know it: straightforward IP banning does not stop comment spam. What DOES work to a certain extent, however, is locking out known spammers / open proxies, at least flagging comments from known sources of garbage as 'To Be Moderated'. [...] MORE...

Fighting back on comment spam: nofollow

Google, MSN, Yahoo, Movable Type and others have announced a common approach to try to kill comment spam: by applying a 'nofollow' tag to links, search engines will simply ignore them for the purposes of calculating rank and search engine results: [...] Genius! MORE...

14 days, 196 bloggers, US$ 656

After a quick deduplication, the final participant count in the blogger charity challenge after 14 days is 196. MORE...

Other blogger-driven charity initiatives

The Tsunami charity link challenge is by far not the only blogger-initiated charity scheme currently in progress; bloggers eager to give more than links (and my money) feel free to check out these: [...] MORE...

Upping the ante

Now every link to the charity websites listed on the Tsunami challenge webpage is generating ~US$ 3.28!! How? Eliot Landrum has generously committed to matching my final donation, as has my employer (through a program where they match employees' contributions dollar by dollar). In addition, since I'm a UK tax payer, the British Red Cross can recoup approximately an additional 28% on my donation. [...] It should be a no-brainer to get 370 additional blogger in on the deal; the total donation will now be US$ 1640 if we meet our goal! Go on! Get your fellow bloggers blogging for charity! MORE...

74 bloggers raise a buck each in 48 hours

Go on! If you haven't done it yet: Blog for charity now! It doesn't hurt if you donate a bit on your own (write about it!) nor if you add some links to charities of your choice (just make sure they're legit - apparently there are a lot of hoaxers out there soi-disant 'collecting some money to help 'my family'' or pretending to represent this or that charity but giving out personal mobile numbers - yet another reason to donate to solid, known charities)... MORE...

Great response!

So far so good, below are the charity-links-for-dollars 'Tsunami fundraiser challenge' entries I have counted so far. To be updated as the challenge progresses: [...] MORE...

Webloggers: Give to tsunami victims and I'll give too!

I want to challenge other webloggers: Whether you give money, time or whether you decide to share your link-power; if you create a post on your weblog front page or create permanent links in your blogroll and link to the below organizations, then link to my blog and this posting, I will pay US$ 1 to the British Red Cross. MORE...

Auto-blocking open proxies' access to Movable Type

In the category of sheer genius contributions to the fight against spam, let me point you in the direction of Brad Choate's newest plugin for the Movable Type content management system: mt-dsbl MORE...

Wikispammers

After the weblogging world started to get to grips with the comment-spammers, wikispam was the next natural arena for the spammers to embrace: I don't see why not we can't figure out a way for wiki software to auto-block spam; even integrating with the URL lists/patterns in MT Blacklist. MORE...

Get it from the Source: Quentin Tarantino is blogging

Quentin Tarantino is NOT blogging, and answers fan mail and hate-mail alike... MORE...

Nigeria blogspam

How low will they sink? Nigeria-scammers have now started hitting blog comments... MORE...

xlogs - executive blogs

''Executive blogs, what we should perhaps called xlogs, could eventually grab a lion's share of the Internet audience, BW quotes Chris Charron of tech consultancy Forrester Research as saying. '' MORE...

Getting a lot for the price of a little

For the price of a CD, OldFunRadio are getting inbound links some people would pay top dollar for. A smart idea; blog spammers take note! MORE...

The world's smallest art gallery?

Hugh Macleod's business card doodles! MORE...

Hello my name is / Hello my domain is

Photos from Wednesday's London Blogger dinner. MORE...

Official Google Blog

Evan Williams is writing the official Google Blog (that's a blog hosted on www.google.com, not Aaron's authorative yet non-official Google blog): MORE...

London blog dinner 12 May 2004

I can just cross my fingers that this trackback will count as a last minute RSVP... :-) MORE...

Mosaikk Gruppen's hollow threats

A week ago, owner of a small business and blogger Jarle wrote a blog entry about a company called Mosaikk Gruppen about how they had spammed him and how numerous requests to be taken off their mailinglists had not yielded any results. As any blogger would do, he wrote an entry about his complaints, thereby also making sure other business owners would be aware of the business practices of the company. Now [...] MORE...

Ah the irony...

Some moron from 69.133.140.94 pulled down 36633 copies of my article on bandwidth saving tips for movable type sites yesterday using "Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8169". All I can say is: hello, goodbye... MORE...

Nokia's Lifeblog software

Nokia's new software will let people publish some or all of the information they collect on their phones to the web to let them create their own biographical blog. MORE...

The ''Power Creators'' online

Blogging about blogs in the news is ... old news... This article caught my eye, however, as it is a survey of how people (Americans only) use the Internet to contribute their own thoughts, writings, photos etc. to all sorts of websites, not only blogs: [...] MORE...

MT request: The BIG, RED button

Here's a request to the MT team: a big, red button on the main page allowing a dump-all backup including authors, categories, entry-IDs, templates etc... MORE...

Deutche Boerse's "Competitive Intelligence" system

The previously reported Deutche Börse-originating spider has visited other bloggers as well, and could potentially be a part of their competitive intelligence system ''EXOTIC''. One of Martin Roell's commenters has more info. MORE...

Weblogs-scanning robot at Deutche Boerse?

The last 8 days someone or something running from the IP address 193.29.77.220, disguising as a user of multiple browsers has been pulling down more than 80 Mb of data from my site in more than 5000 hits. The weird thing is they seem to be using 3 OSes and 6-7 different browsers within 10 second intervals. Not very likely. (please read full story for more details) MORE...

London Mobile bloggers / camera phone users?

[...] The survey will consist of the successful respondents keeping a log over four days, including this weekend, whereby they list details regarding the pictures taken (eg for fun, for work related tasks, for research) – there is a payment of £50 for taking part in the survey and completing the log. [...] MORE...

Optimizing Movable Type - Keyword links

In theory, at least, this approach should enable searching for the keywords and still hitting the archived page despite the word not necessarily being written at (or conjugated in the same way) at the page itself. MORE...

Mobile blogging

A list of some pieces of software and some services that allow mobile phone blogging; additions most welcome! [...] MORE...

Sourze - in Sweden, some people pay a lot to blog...

Apparently the 'netzine sourze.se lets ordinary people write their own thoughts and publish them online for US$13 a pop or for US$40 per month. Huh? [...] MORE...

Blacklisting spammers

Funny screenshot of a blog-spammer caught red-handed... MORE...

Internet - a journalist's friend or foe?

Norwegian newspaper VG has an online competition about REM. Unfortunately their journalists haven't done all the research (or so it seems from REM fan pages online)... MORE...

The end of photoblogging?

''Referring to various persons on an internet page and identifying them either by name or by other means constitutes processing of personal data by automatic means within the meaning of Community law'' [new court ruling in Europe may limit what can be published in blogs, both photography and writing] (Additionally, lots of street photography / puhlishing links in the post) MORE...

Norwegian weblog-spammers

Bliss. Only hours after installing the beta of MT-Blacklist (now out in v1.5), the first chancers trying to pollute the comments sections of my blogs were trapped. MORE...

Referer spam

If you're a seller of viagra, casino services, p0rn or any other product, don't bother posting your comments here; I will delete them (sometimes I'll get real angry and come to your house and post your mailbox full of AOL CDs too). MORE...

BlogLines - a takeaway aggregator

BlogLines works well for me and its main benefit is of course that you need no software installation on your PC to read your blogs; making this a very feasible solution for frequent travellers as well as people using multiple PCs (home, work, other...) MORE...

Journalist = bad blogger?

A while back I gave a journalist some information on a topic he was writing about. Today he published a first page story, but unlike what we've come to expect in the weblogging world, the journalist offered no links back, not even an email with a thanks... Do real journalists have less netiquette than webloggers? MORE...

Newbie FAQ 101 - How to make a blog

A quick list of the main blogging-tools for beginning bloggers. MORE...

Cool CEOs read blogs

The Managing director of a company I recently criticized in my blog took the opportunity to write a comment... More CEOs should. MORE...

Frequently Travelling Bloggers?

Are there any bloggers out there that are reasonably frequent travellers? When travelling - do you write about your experiences (in a weblog, a discussion forum or similar?) before/during/after your trip(s)? MORE...

Adding Google AdSense to your blog

Overall, adding Google-powered ads to a blog is a painless experience and hopefully not too disturbing for readers... Feedback welcome... MORE...

Experimenting with Google Adsense & Weblogs

I wouldn't mind adding some ads to, say, archived entries a month old or older... This way all the inbound hits from search engines could pay back a bit of their bandwith, while I'd continue to provide free fresh content to regular readers? MORE...

Adding a "Sideblog" in MT

I've added a "side blog", and following this brief tutorial; so can you... MORE...

"26 Things" - Photographic scavenger hunt

on tuesday july 1st 2003, 26 things to hunt for will be posted to the 26 things website and the participants will have month to find and photograph the objects/themes... Cool! MORE...

Redesign in progress

If things look a bit screwy in your browser with the current layout; please post a comment. If you liked it better before, let me know too :-) MORE...

Why bloggers write so much about blogging

What was the first thing people talked about when car phones came out? ''Hey, guess where I am? I'm in the car!''. When the phones became draggable, then later portable and handheld, people's attitude towards the devices became less that of a novelty but more focusing on its utility; the social implications and so on. [...] MORE...

SharpMT - offline blog authoring

This post was meant to be my first post using SharpMT, a new, off-line blog authoring tool. Unfortunately it didn't work for me (yet). MORE...

''You can make money blogging!''

I'm a little sceptical to this: ''What seemed like inconsequential chatter a few short years ago has developed into a cutting edge phenomenon that will provide the internet used with a new wave of income generating opportunity! [...]'' MORE...

Blogs in business: watercooler-chat or knowledge management?

''I don't think blogging in businesses will be capturing the water-cooler buzz... On the other hand blogs definitely have potential to smoothen out the intranet / knowledge database sumbission process.'' MORE...

Random browsing: Roland Piquepaille

Seems to be an interesting weblog with a daily post about new/interesting/weird tech... MORE...

Blog name change

I've been thinking about it for a while; whether I should keep calling the blog ''andersja's blog'' or change it... MORE...

Are weblogs the new Fanzines?

[...] fanzines as well as weblogs contain content added at the whim of a single or a small group of authors, not necessarily always sticking to a particular subject (e.g. by comparison there are no editors selecting / cutting / solliciting articles like there would be in a ''proper'' magazine/newspaper) [...] MORE...

"Paying" ""shareholders"" back

Metapost on blogshare-players... MORE...

Playing with "Blogshares"

''Blogshares'' is the Next New Thing (tm) in the Blog-o-sphere (tm) :-) MORE...

Anonymity vs blogging vs ''Knowing'' a blogger

If someone, even after reading every blog entry in the archives, would call/meet me and think they know me, I'm sorry: You don't. You know what I like to rant about in writing; you know what I have chosen to reveal. You don't know whether or not I have a girlfriend, you don't know what I currently work with, ... MORE...

Why I blog

Who do you blog? ''Bringing order into the Chaos of the Internet'', expressing your opinons or something completely different? MORE...

Pop me, baby!

For no apparent reason, I'm on Popdex. Check out this post how you can ''vote'' with your blogroll! MORE...

Handing out weblog addresses on business cards

... have you ever pur your weblog address in a business email signature or along with your email address on your business card? Me not. Will I in the future? Depends... MORE...

Blogging hits critical mass

One thing seems clear; Blogging, having long time been a kind of egaliterian, independent-style form of publishing is going mainstream. Big time! (Update: not only Google but also AOL may be adding blogs to their set of offerings) MORE...

Posting routine

I like to go to the MT homepage and browse the other blogs that just posted, just to add a ''random seed'' in my reading. Sometimes there are treasure troves to be found, sometimes completely new blogs, sometimes people writing about stuff I didn't even know interested me. I like. MORE...

Creating an RSS-powered "dashboard"

I'm experimenting with creating a one-webpage-solves-all for my regular information fix. MORE...

Who the f... is Dave Barry?

Tons of people have casually mentioned this dude the last few days. Googlism tells it as it is... MORE...

Blogs vs Message Boards

Yahoo employee Jeremy Zawodny is having a semi-public discussion with colleagues about the future of centralized message boards versus weblogs. I am a strong believer in blogs, but some things are best left to an open forum as long as the forum has strict topic-scoping and in some cases moderation or at least some editor who removes completely off-topic postings. MORE...