Posts from July 10, 2007

Didnt take long. Please welcome Roland, err, Bianchi.

My son, Norman Junior III, plays competitive junior tennis. When I watch him play, I tend to stand at a distance and remain completely silent. Outwardly at least. I always try to offer positive encouragement - congratulations if he wins and commiserations after a defeat.

My son wins some matches and loses a handful more. However, he always enjoys playing, he doesn't scream and shout or thrash his racket into the ground. He wins and loses with the same good grace which makes me just as proud as his sporting prowess.

However, recently, he was given a real hiding by a lad of a similar age, ranking and ability. When he came off, I said 'Jesus. If you're going to play and serve like that, I think even I could take a set off you.' I always call him 'Jesus' when I am cross with him.

This lunchtime, work and school commitments finally allowed the great Brightside veteran-junior invitational challenge to take place.

He thrashed me 6-0. I took him to a couple of deuces but only because he made a couple of unforced errors and threw in a few double faults. When Sue Barker interviewed me, in a sweaty and breathless state (me not Sue) immediately afterwards, she made the preposterous claim that I only made two outright winners during the whole 24 minutes.

When I asked my son for tips to improve my all-round game, he graciously replied

'You actually weren't as bad I thought. You did get some serves in.'

I may have lost but I can tell you, I really looked the part as I strolled out onto court 14, immaculately attired in cream flannels, cream blazer with a cream holdall embossed in gold lettering with 'NB'.

We then adjourned to Asda for an emergency purchase (toilet rolls) and I cheered myself up with the purchase of Editors 'An End Has a Start'.

This CD has been on my wishlist for a whole but I have been poised on tenterhooks, waiting for Doug Burns to divulge his innermost thoughts on this indie band but, sorry, Doug, I simply can not bear the suspense any longer.

I see Interpol's third album ('Our Love To Admire') is also out which has received negative reviews for being too similar to the previous two with vivid echoes of Joy Division so that has also been ordered.

A minor irritant with uninteresting email cluttering up my Inbox has resulted in some minor changes to my Web 2.0 first-team squad.

Akismet, the popular and widely used anti-spam solution, was letting an increasing trickle of irritating comment and trackback spam through. As I had configured email notification for all blog comments, this was generating pointless, tedious, worthless emails that simply had to be deleted. A complete waste of time and energy.

Initially, I toyed with the option to simply disable comments on articles older than 90 days which accounted for 95% of the spam but would block authors with valid contributions.

A little research revealed a possible alternative - Spam Karma. I was loosely aware of Spam Karma from the footer in Tim Hall's excellent blog

This blog is protected by dr Dave's Spam Karma 2: 23182 Spams eaten and counting...

as well as Andy Beard's positive review and useful tutorial on configuring Spam Karma. Initially, the Spam Karma interface was a little confusing. With Akismet, you literally set and forget whereas Spam Karma has a configuration page with a plethora of different options. Anyway, after deciding to start out with the default, out of the box settings, I just activated Spam Karma and waited.

Sure enough, the never ending barrage of spam trickled in and the vast majority were correctly marked as such, valid comments were allowed through and I couldn't detect any false positives.

The moderation mechanism wasn't quite as obvious as Akismet which emailed me whenever a comment was held for moderation. However, Spam Karma was actually better as moderated comments are held in the Spam list and can be quickly moderated from there. In addition, Spam Karma can email a daily/weekly digest summarising recent activity.

I have been running Spam Karma for almost a week now and not a single comment/trackback spam has got past the barriers yet. A truly impressive and valuable piece of software.

A few features in Spam Karma I really like:

• All comments are assigned a score depending on various criteria.
• Comments on older articles get penalised...
• ...but older articles with recent (valid) comment activity score higher.
• Instant comments within seconds of viewing get penalised.
• First-time commenters are presented with a captcha.
• Established commenters are recognised and scored accordingly.
• Trackbacks without a valid reference URL are penalised.
• My comments score higher than anyone elses :-)
• A detailed breakdown of the score assigned to any comment is available.

-12.5
0: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching.
-2: Browser doesn't support Javascript
0.5: Comment has no URL in content (but one author URL)
-2: Flash Gordon was here (comment posted 8 seconds after page load)
-9: Entry posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago. 0 comments in the past 15 days
Current Karma: -3

I was so impressed I donated $20 to the author and that doesn't happen very often. Another source of unnecessary email was valid blog comments (albeit much fewer). The solution for this was obvious. Subscribe to my own comments feed and read them in Google Reader.

Another source of Web 2.0 irritation was that the Firefox extension for coComment broke some of the drilldowns in the revamped Google Analytics reports so I reluctantly stopped using it. This was a real shame as coComment was one of these Web 2.0 applications, I actually used on a daily basis.

Again, I looked for an alternative and installed co.comments (yeah I know - it's a Web 2.0 domain with an embedded period) which works fine. There is a Firefox bookmarklet (not an extension) so the author has to remember to mark any comments posted whereas coComment automatically tracked these 'conversations'.

The other advantage of the coComment extension was automatic notification whenever a comment was added to a tracked conversation.

Again, the solution for this issue was obvious. I simply subscribed to the RSS feed for my tracked conversations and read them in Google Reader.