The English Cemetery

Our coreblogs at Eibar.org also hit by the great trackback spam assault of yesterday, Feb. 1, 2005. After the exchange of messages at Coreblog-en, the mailing list, we produced our own python script to be run in Zope (updated with a variable factor), create a script and on the parameter list put spammer=xxx,then the code as follows::

  for i in range(1, 300):     try:        ent = context.get_entry(i)        for com in ent.trackback_list():           if com.title.startswith (spammer):              ent.deleteTrackback(int(com.id))              print "deleted %s's comment" % com.title     except:         pass  print "Done."  return printed 

Being this site a community of coreblogs we placed that at the root like www.eibar.org/scriptPLACEDhere and our main blog's evil trackbacks were deleted (as far as you have less than 300 entries...), but it also worked with any blog placed below like www.eibar.org/blogak/teknosexua/scriptPLACEDhere?spammer=texas or www.eibar.org/blogak/sarasua/scriptPLACEDhere?spammer=cybersex or any other name variable that we may introduce depending on the spammer of the day.

scriptPLACEDhere is just a dummy name. We used another ID for the script.

Deeply moved by the story and courage of Ivan Noble. And a striking coincidence: my friend Joxe Aranzabal, also a journalist, began writing in Internet about his newlyfound cancer just two days after Ivan, in september 2002.

Joxe has struggled with the cancer, and has prevailed. He has left a message at Ivan's last post, don't know if the BBC will let it public or not. However, here's what Joxe has written:

On September 11th, 2002, I was found to have a Pholicular Linphoma, a kind of cancer that appears in the blood. A couple of days later, I started writing what was to become a series of articles in Sustatu.com, a collective blog with information in Basque language, where I narrated in 17 chapters all the circumstances surrounding my illness. It took a couple of years to get back to work, at Mondragon University. The 22nd of this month I will publish a book (The Doctor Told Me I Had Cancer), a compilation of all the articles written for Sustatu. When we present the book, I will have you in mind. Be strong.

Besides his writings at Sustatu.com Joxe has a personal blog now, Faroa, the Lighthouse in Basque.

First there was Planet Planet, Python package to aggregate feeds. Now there's Planet Express (just version 0.1 so far), to aggregate feeds and re-load them into a given blog.

In this case, the author, a well known Spanish geek, RVR, has made it so it can feed automatically Typepad blogs. So, you have a metablog there: take feeds from distinct sources, and re-package them as a new site. Working example, Planet Spanglish.

I wonder if it could be adapted to feed a Coreblog, instead of just Typepad blogs... After all, it's made of the same raw material: Python

We have hacked the Squishdot based Basque weblog Sustatu so it now feeds Technorati and its categories appear at blog tags in the tag search application unveiled yesterday.

Results already are visibe, as with this two obvious tags:

• http://www.technorati.com/tag/musika
• http://www.technorati.com/tag/kultura

Other Basque blogs made with WordPress show up, as well as postings in languages in which musika and kultura mean what you know.

As for The English Cemetery, it's too modified, I'm afraid, for the Coreblog tag hack that we deployed yesterday. I will try with manually entered Technorati tags, as they advise in their website.

So, let's try with coreblog basque zope

Technorati has released today a very interesting service. They've developed a tag based search application based on Flickr tags, del.icio.us tags and blog post's categories.

Two examples with tags google or basque

More info about Technorati tags

As for Coreblog, a little hack by Erral, that I post here with his permission:

COREBlog doesn't give info about our posts' categories in RDF files, so we need to change some lines of code in 2 files to show our posts in that service.

Let's go to change them ;)

Open rdf10_xml via ZMI:

Find this line:

  ...  <dc:subject />
 ... 

Delete it and put these lines:

   ...   <dtml-in entry_category_list>     <dc:subject><dtml-var name></dc:subject>   </dtml-in>
  ... 

Save it!

Now, the second step: open rdf91_xml via ZMI:

Find this line (it's the 3rd one):

  ...  <rss version="0.91">  ... 

And change it:

  ...  <rss version="0.91" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">  ... 

Then find these lines:

  <dtml-in "rev_day_entry_items(count=top_days)">  <item>
   <title><dtml-var title></title>    <link><dtml-var blogurl>/<dtml-var id></link>   </item>   </dtml-in>
  

And change them:

  <dtml-in "rev_day_entry_items(count=top_days)">  <item>   <title><dtml-var title></title>   <link><dtml-var blogurl>/<dtml-var id></link>
  <dtml-in entry_category_list>     <dc:subject><dtml-var name></dc:subject>    </dtml-in>   </item>   </dtml-in>
  

Save it!

Now, we've to configure our COREBlog to ping Technorati each time we publish a post. Go to "Settings" tab, and add http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping at "PING Servers".

This actually works. Erral's blog is in Basque and Spanish and his spanish category/tags already show at Technorati as with ajedrez and varios

Brilliant idea: Taggle, an hypothetical search engine of the future, to search into folksonomies.

But Taggle will not work with a traditional webcrawler or robot behind, that's for sure. Del.icio.us has a strict robots.txt file forbidding access to robots...

However I do believe that Taggle will exist, based in web services, the APIs of providers, feed aggregation or other non-crawler method.

The bug I commented the other day, has re-surfaced with the new year. If there's a year "gap" in the archives, a year with no messages in it, the archives module of Coreblog shown at the sidebox will not work. It just happens that if it's a new year, and we haven't posted any entry to our coreblogs, then the bug works, and we are left with no archives apparently.

Look at Trond's "blog."http://www.bek.no/Members/lossius/lostblog He's been early this year, and his sidebox does hove archives. But Tom Lazar's been lazy this year so far (as of this morning) so his blog shows an empty archive...

Provisional solution: post a message every 1st of January.

But, obviously, this is a bug to solve in the product.

Happy new year to all!