Staticman Comments Are Go

I’ve re-enabled comments here at The Geekorium, and imported all my old comments, so go nuts!

To import all your old comments, I used a script written by someone else, then parsed them through a dodgy PHP script I made myself to rename everything into the format my site is relying on, so there might be shenanigans with the imported comments. Please let me know if anything seems off.

That leaves me with the next question: how do I ensure I don’t get flooded with spam? I’ve had comments back on for all of 2 days, and I get a steady trickle of Pull Requests from the Staticman bot triggered by spam comments. On the Wordpress site I had Akismet turned on, which all but eliminated bad-faith for me, the way modern email clients almost never let the chaff through.

The simplest answer is the Google reCAPTCHKA1 - the latest version doesn’t even ask you to tick the “I’m not a robot” box let alone click on thirteen boxes of street crossings. It’s a tempting solution, but it’s owned and operated by Google, and everything your users do on your website is captured for analysis. As spelled out in their documentation:

reCAPTCHA works best when it has the most context about interactions with your site, which comes from seeing both legitimate and abusive behavior.

Additionally,

reCAPTCHA learns by seeing real traffic on your site.

In a perfect world, Google would only use this data to improve the service. Maybe that’s all they’re doing, but I take my reader’s privacy seriously - more than my own - and I’m genuinely concerned what Google is doing with this enormous corpus of user data capcha’d by these little blue boxes all over the web. They’re more pervasive than Facebook logins and social buttons, and unlike the earlier version, it’s no longer training robots to recognise trains or traffic lights, it’s training computers how to recognise human behaviour.

There’s also the question of how these work if people choose to disable javascript. The theme I’m using relies on more JS than I’d like already, but at least it degrades elegantly. I’m not so sure about recapcha and I can’t find an answer on their website.

It’s looking likely I’m going to have to palm user data off to someone to determine if they’re a robot or not. I’m not happy about it, but it appears to be the price unless I’m willing to sift through dozens of spam comments a day. It wouldn’t be so bad, except Git’s policy of keeping history means that the spam I receive is attached to my site’s repo forever, even if the comment never makes it here.

My final recourse is to try something that I’m guessing won’t work for long. Staticman has a feature that checks for valid form data. The check is basic enough that the field can be present in the data as long as it’s blank. If it has a value set it immediately fails validation. I’ve set a dummy field in the form that needs to be left blank. If a ‘bot fills it in, it should get picked up and fail to submit. I’m not sure how long it will slow them down, but I’m going to give it a shot.

I’ve also disabled the form on posts older than a month, so if you want to comment, do it now!

Update: 24 hours without a spam comment. Success!


  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnXp6Saa8Y 

Make Tiny Tiny RSS Look and Behave Like Google Reader

Since Google announced they were closing Google Reader down in June, people have been scrambling to find something to use in it’s place. I’m not sure what the rush is, but I was caught up in it too. My replacement of choice is Tiny Tiny RSS because it’s self hosted, meaning I don’t have to rely on any third party for such an important task any more.

This article is not about how to set up TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS). That’s been covered by the official Wiki and Forums. This article is about how to make TTRSS behave somewhat more like Google Reader, so you can jump right back in to reading feeds and not have to learn something new.

First up are the settings you can change straight out of the box. Open Preferences - the link is the first item in the ‘Action’ menu at the top right of the main interface.

What do you prefer?

What do you prefer?

Set up the above options as shown. To access ‘Automatically expand articles in combined mode’ you need ‘Show additional preferences’ ticked. ‘Combined feed display’ switches the view from 3-pane view to two-pane.

While you’re in Preferences, click ‘Customize’ under ‘Customize stylesheet’ and paste in the code found in this Gist by Gregory Rickaby to get TTRSS looking a bit more like Google Reader (if that’s your bag).

Such Style

Such Style

Mark Waters created a Google Reader Shortcut plugin. Developer fox has already merged it into the software, but if like me you downloaded the version before the plugin was incorporated, you can create a directory called ‘googlereaderkeys’ in the plugin directory, and in that create a file called init.php. Paste the code from Mark’s plugin in that file and save it to your installation. This will enable the familiar j/k keystrokes to navigate feeds and ‘v’ to open them. Alternatively you could get used to the native keystrokes n/p for next/previous. Don’t forget to visit the plugin page and enable this new plugin.

Might as well enable some other plugins while you're there

Might as well enable some other plugins while you're there

Next up is collapsing expanded articles by clicking on the headings again. Based on fox’s patch, open up the file ‘js/viewfeed.js’ in a text editor.

Beginning at line 1320, replace:

[snippet id=“862”]

with

[snippet id=“863”]

And save it back to your installation.

Things should now look like this:

Pretty ain't she?

Pretty ain't she?

There are a few more tips around including how to import starred and shared items into TTRSS. Tiny Tiny RSS is a fantastic product that fills the void left by Google Reader. I highly recommend donating too - Andrew Dolgov has been working tirelessly, since the Google Reader announcement, to keep on top of endless support requests.

Got any other tips you’re using?

June 2013: I am no longer using this software myself. This post was written in support of an independent developer who I believe has built a terrific product and released it for free for anyone to use. You’re still free of course to use Tiny Tiny RSS, but I can no longer recommend it. While the developer works hard and is constantly updating and fixing his software, I find his customer service manner to be beyond rude. He’s never been rude to me personally so this isn’t sour grapes, but his forum and other interractions are littered with examples of unnecessary rudeness. If you want good software, and will never need assistance please go ahead and use TTRSS. Personally, I switched from Google Reader to a self-hosted solution so that I wouldn’t need to switch again. However, I’m not convinced that I will able to get help with the product in future without following the developers unwritten rules for support. I’m certain the developer will not miss me. TL;DR Developer is unnecessarily rude and I don’t want to support rude people.

Skribit - Piss off Formspring, Skribit was here first

Skribit.png

There’s this new craze on Twitter1 to get people to ask you questions anonymously and answer them on Twitter or your website. It uses this little site (run by FormSpring.com) called formspring.me to solicit questions, and people derive some amusement from it.

BUT

The day I heard about it, I thought immedaitely of skribit.com which I had only JUST installed on my site a week earlier and does exactly what formspring.me does only prettier, usefull-er and integrated-into-your-site-ier which for me are all important things.

See that little blue tab over there -> ??

That’s the Skribit tab. It says “Suggestions”, but if you hover over it, it says Skribit too! Click it. I dare you. I’ll wait. You can come back by clicking the little (x) in the top right… Go on…

See that form? It lets you ask questions, just like Formspring. It even lets you do it anonimously, just like Formspring. Unlike Formspring, Skribit lets you add tags, follow questions until they’re turned into posts, and generally interract more with the person you’re asking. But it’s not just for anonymous questions. Paul Stamatiou (one of the creators) has been using it on his site since he started building it, and his readers suggest posts then vote on the topics that they want to see him write about, which was the whole reason he made it in the first place. It’s all about curing Writers Block, which I own up to having about 99% of the time2 .

Well Skribit launched at the end of last year! They’ve been open for business for a while now, but they’re pushing to get the word out for twenty-ten3 , and I had to write a post about it so I could tick that off my Skribit to-do list. So if you’re already using Formspring.me (bleh) or just want some feedback from your readers in a way that makes you accountable and helps you keep track of it then you should probably go install it. It keeps out of the way, and it’s kinda pretty. It’s easy to install (there’s a Skribit widget for Wordpress too) and integrates with Twitter and Facebook so your lazy readers don’t even have to log in! If you’re interested try the tour to get a feel for it (or just test it out here), or read about the people who made it

And to my reader(s)4 you can leave me suggestions on what you’d like me to write about, or ask anonymous questions, just like all the cool kids are doing! Try it5!

Of course this post’s disparaging remarks against formspring were not endorsed or condoned by Skribit6 .


  1. I say new but it’s been going a couple’ months now 

  2. the other 1% is when I’m in the shower and don’t have a pen 

  3. that’s right, I’m a twenty-tenner 

  4. hi Andrew, Dad, Mum 

  5. Please! 

  6. and I have nothing against them either 

Tools for Schools: add notes and share a page with Jump Knowledge

Jump Knowledge
        example

Here’s an easy to use little app for both staff and students. It’s called Jump Knowledge (jkn for short) and it allows you to grab a copy of any webpage you’re reading and write whatever you want all over it (called annotating).

That’s not the cool part - once you’ve left your mark you can share the page with anyone else in a variety of ways: via email, your own blog, print it out, or bookmark it to come back to later. You can come back even after the original has changed because Jump Knowledge keeps a copy of it on its own servers, meaning you’ll never lose the extra info you’ve added.

You don’t need an account, but if you do create one, jkn keeps a list of every page you’ve written over so you can keep track from one handy location.

You can check out the simple page I’ve annotated and shared at http://jkn.com/View?j=805037.873488227171 (ugly URL, but nevermind). Jump Knowledge is the simplest tool of this sort that I’ve found so far as it doesn’t require you to sign up or install extra software, and it makes the page available to anyone anywhere on the web (although you can set your pages to private).

Next time you want to share something you’ve read, instead of just emailing or posting a plain link consider using Jump Knowledge to write your own thoughts or highlight the important parts.

Update: 2008-10-02 Jump Knowledge has closed down:

Information on the closure of Jump Knowledge Since we can no longer guarantee the long-term availability of your data, we have made the difficult decision to shut JKN down gracefully.

Jump Knowledge (via Lifehacker.com)

Another Blog? Really?

This was my first thought when Al said he’d created an EduBlogs blog for me. I already blog infrequently on two of my own blogs, and it seems every website that ever tried to be ‘two point oh’ offers a free blog. I have an unused blogger account, a wordpress blog that I had to sign up for to use Akismet (an antispam plugin), and if I’d ever been suckered in to using MySpace, Facebook, or any other social site I’d be drowning in the guilt of too many unused blogs.

But I’m not going to feel guilty about this one. I recently made a vow to myself to do something creative daily, and one of the options I gave myself was to blog. Maybe it wont be here, but I should be blogging more regularly. About the same time, Al and a couple of other bloggers he linked to have been inspiring me to have a bit of a say about education. I hesitated because my perspective is not unique - there are hundreds of other IT people in the South Australian education system. I also hesitated because I fear that there is not much I can say that hasn’t been said already by people who can write betterer.

But Al’s pushed it and forced my hand, now despite your protests I will not stay silent. Forgive me.

Come back here occasionally to hear my thoughts on education from the perspective of a non-teaching tech guy. I work in two schools where technology in education is highly valued, but often not fully appreciated.

I can understand WHY teachers find it difficult to see the benefit of the latest technologies - teachers are bombarded from every direction with the promises of easier teaching, more engaging programs, wonderful new paradigms that will forever alter… you’ve heard it all before.

If you are a student you’ll have heard your teacher tell you about amazing new things that you and your friends have been doing for years already. But students are making this stuff up themselves. They’re using technology in ways that the creators never even imagined. It’s up to teachers and the tech people they work with to find ways to use the technology to engage students, rather than trying to remove it forcibly from their lives.

I don’t presume to know what the technology of tomorrow will look like or how it will be used (although I know what I want it to look like, and how I think it should be used), but I want to be there to see how it evolves.