Category: colophon

2011.03.09 & Buttons gone… why? Well, XHTML is dead, The CSS is not valid as per the validator, it’s out-of-date and jQuery does crazy things, blah blah blah. I updated the footers ‘disclaimer’ to link to the Creative Commons as all my words is still free…

2008.12.24 & I have updated to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported [creativecommons.org] license. The link(s) below are to the older 2.0 version.

You may have noticed there are a bunch of buttons at the bottom of the pages here at confusion.cc. What does it all mean? Let me tell you…

This button links to WordPress [wordpress.org] because I use their software to run the blog [wikipedia.org] on confusion. And basically all the content on the sight is uploaded as an entry in the blog (which I call my ‘journal’ a holdover from when I was doing this manually before the glory days of blogging!)

Next is the Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] license button. This button is intended to show that you can copy anything you want from this website and use it (with a small number of restrictions) how you want. Read this post [confusion.cc] for more info.

Ah the power of standards! This button means that the pages on this site are designed using valid CSS [wikipedia.org]—which stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a way to separate the layout and visual style of a webpage from the HTML code and content. We love standards! And we’d love them even more if they worked in IE! Damn Micro$oft and their non-conformist ways!

This one says that confusion is coded in valid XHTML [wikipedia.org]. What does that mean? It’s another standard that along with CSS is designed to make coding and maintaining web pages easier. All of the basic pages here at confusion should validate but some of the older journal entries may not. Click the button to see if this page validates!

Want too keep up with my latest dribble? Feeds are just the thing! Using a feed aggregator like those you can find here [blogspace.com] and here [wikipedia.org] you can add the links these buttons and you will be able to keep up-to-date with all my pointless ranting. The ‘entries’ link will will give you all the new entries I post and the ‘comments’ link will provide a feed of all the comments other leave.

WTF? This one takes you to this post, because an odd number of buttons was not cool. I made this button to match the other second row buttons using this handy utility [kalsey.com] created to support the “steal these buttons” craze which you can read about here [antipixel.com] and if you need a bazillion buttons go here [gtmckignt.com].

For a long time my little corner of cyberspace was quite, the neighbors didn’t make much noise and there were not a lot of strangers around.

Life was good…

Then reality came crashing in. For sometime now I have been getting comment spam. It has been confined to a single post [confusion.cc] from a single spam bot for the past few months. To manage this I added Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist [jayallen.org] plugin to my Movable Type installation. This allowed me to remove the offending post easily and for the most part automatically.

And life was good… for a time…

Today I had 136 comments posted to my journal. Comments posted by people with names like; cmxmqr, yreaiile, kaiewh, turjey, hkqoaq, etc. They have been coming in fairly regularly all day, about every 15 minutes. MT-Blacklist is still working, blocking a number of these posts, but spammers are persistent and my in box is getting full.

By lunchtime I was a bit annoyed about this and was trying to figure out what could be done. I went through a lot of heart ache when my email address first made the rounds with the spammers. I was a long hard struggle, but I am fairly spam free now thanks to spamassasin [apache.org]. I didn’t want to go through that painfully long process again to make my journal spam free. Then I remembered that over at Jonathan delacour’s [delacour.net] weblog there is a little tag line at the bottom of the comments on old posts. It reads This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed. This is a good idea, especially since most comments come within the first week or so that the entry is posted and most of these spam comments are being posted to achieved entries.

Now Jonathan doesn’t say how he does this, but a quick search of mt-plugins [mt-plugins.org] turned up this nice little plugin called CloseComments [mt-plugins.org] which does exactly what I want. It took only a few minutes of fiddling around with the plugin to get what I wanted.

And life is good… for now

I have set the CloseComments plugin to remove the ‘post a comment’ form from any journal entry over 14 days old which has not had a comment posted to it in 7 days. Now you will see in place of the ‘post a comment’ form a short note saying that comments are not allowed and pointing any lost soul, who may happen to wonder in from the cold and decide to participate in old discussions, to this post. So now, this discussion is over. Have a nice day.

The works on the site are released under the Creative Commons “Attribution 2.0” [ creativecommons.org ] license (unless otherwise explicitly stated).

What?

From the Creative Commons webisite [creativecommons.org]:

Attribution 2.0

You are free:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to make derivative works
• to make commercial use of the work

Under the following conditions:

• For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
• Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license).

Why?

Because I’m a nice guy and because of things like this [ wikipedia.org ]! I think copyright is a good thing in general. But the insatiable desires of the capitalist enterprises chasing the all mighty dollar (or Euro, or Yen, or Pound, or Renminbi, or whatever) has pushed copyright so far beyond what is reasonable that they are in fact destroying the vary basis of what makes free markets and capitalism work. I don’t agree with the Copyright Term Extension Act (aka the Sunny Bono Act or the Mickey Mouse Act) which extended copyright but neither will I resort to piracy of copyrighted material. I choose to fight the system from within the framework of the law. I do not believe that we have come to a point where breaking the law is the only effective way of changing the law [ eldred.cc ].

Confusion.cc has been online since late in 2001—before that there was another older will-not-be-mentioned-here site which has been lost in the fog and shadow of the early internet. This site originally started as a way to keep my close friends up-to-date with my wanderings in Europe as I went to school in London.

Admittedly confusion is filled with what Jeffery Zeldman [ zeldman.com ] would refer to as “dull personal commentary with a side order of self-importance” [ zeldman.com ] but perhaps one day my writing skills will improve and I might approach the depth of writing that Jonathon Delacour [ weblog.delacour.net ] has, or the beauty of opinion that Richard Geib [ rjgeib.com ] illuminated to the web before the ‘blogging phenomenon’ started.

In the meantime I will continue my dull personal commentary and occasionally update my photos and writing. All for my own benefit but then again this is my personal corner of cyberspace. I make no excuses for hideous grammar, asinine statements, blissfully ignorant worldviews or verbal diarrhea on this site. It is by me, for me and of me.

So I spent all day (and most of the night!) installing and moving all my journal entries over to Movable Type. There are still some flaws in the design and layout, like why my span tags work in some places but not in other, but it is all usable now. I should point out that I used a Perl script called lj2mt.pl and direction which I found in this journal entry over at amanita.net. Much thanks! The only issue I had was getting the past comments into the system. There is no way to get them out of LiveJournal at present, so I went back and manually posted all the past comments into the new journal. Took a while and all the comments have October nine as their date but c’est la vie—it’ll do.

I hope the having a “comments” posting box right on the page will make it more enticing for people to comment on stuff. I really like the ability to browse back to past issues and such through the navigation on the bottom of the screen. And re-posting all the old entries and comments gave me a chance to read my old post. I really like some of them and others scare me. I also corrected some of the spelling. Looking back there are a few entries in which I promise that I will finish a story or something and then I never got around to it (things like the T█████ saga ( here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc] and here [confusion.cc]) and my misadventures in Europe ( here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc] and here [confusion.cc]) and maybe now I will get around to finishing them… but probably not. The thing that struck me the most is that my entry for September 7, 2001 [confusion.cc] which was about the Taliban. Strange coincidence that they where in the news just days before everything happened.

Anyway, if you look around the site in the next few days and something is just not right don’t worry. I am working on fixing everything, if your are feeling in an especially helpful mood send me an email of what looks wrong. Ciao.