This blog proudly runs on Blosxom , the simple CGI script created by Rael Dornfest at the beginning of the 21st century.   I use a number of Blosxom plugins, many of which are highly customized, and a couple that were written by me.  I'm happy to see http://muli.cc/ building a collectio... read more →

Like many blogs, I used Feedburner for subscriptions.  But it is clearly being neglected and/or killed by Google, so I'm no longer using it.  Unfortunately, I was foolishly redirecting subscribers directly to a Feedburner URL instead of a local URL rewrite.  Going forward, you can sub... read more →

I just added dynamic source code syntax highlighting to this blog. I opted to use highlight.js instead of the more popular syntaxhighlighter. Both are nice, but I liked the simplicity of highlight.js.  It uses a single JavaScript file, and the formatting is pure CSS.  It’s compatible wit... read more →

When I added the Google Reader Widget to this site, I chose the style "none", which inherits the site's style and layout. However, it did some odd things with margins, so I wanted to style it manually. Google doesn't provide any styling documentation, but a quick inspection using Opera's "Show Struc... read more →

As much as I enjoyed creating the Rock/Paper/Scissors captcha [rpscaptchasandwich, morerpscaptcha, rpscaptcha] scheme for comments on this blog, the commenting system has otherwise been fairly primitive. I've been exploring ideas for enhancing the system and including some kind of global authenticat... read more →

10 years is a pretty good run for a webcam. Especially one that shows nothing but a gradually aging picture of me working at my desk. It was fun! ... read more →

Ever since I created a Rock Paper Scissors [rpscaptchasandwich, morerpscaptcha, rpscaptcha] validation game to combat comment spam, the amount of comment spam on this blog has dropped quite a bit. The exceptions have been little flurries that happen every 8 hours or so. The spams always choose the... read more →

So far, my experiment with a Rock Paper Scissors game for writeback spam reduction [rpscaptchasandwich, morerpscaptcha, rpscaptcha] has been pretty successful. Until today, I've had zero successful writeback spams. Today, I had seven attempted spam posts, all for different blog entries, and fiv... read more →

Sure enough, as soon as I began pinging weblogs.com and Technorati.com, I started receiving comment spam on this blog. I figured it was time for me to implement captcha authentication or maybe an email verification scheme, but I became curious: are the spammers humans or robots (automated compute... read more →

I made some slight modifications to Jason Silver's smilefie plugin to support emoticons in writebacks. ozean asked me to post my mods, so here they are. smilefie You can get the modified smilefie by clicking here. (I left credit to Jason, as my mods aren't really that significant.) writeba... read more →

This Blosxom config uses the TikiText formatting plugin. Tiki is a wiki-like formatting markup. It is still in development, but is sufficiently useful as-is. Block-Level Formatting Block-Level formatting is set by one or more characters at the start of line followed by a space. Multiple consecutiv... read more →