Uncooked

Site changeover

Ok, I'm going to have a go at serving from the new host - redirecting everything from dannyayers.com to start, see how that goes. Apologies if it's broken. It might be slow, it seems slow to me but I'm no sure yet whether that's just my line or the limited memory on the virtual host.
Ok, this post is going *only* on the TypePad version, so should disappear very soon.

Temporary Uncoolness

I've now got the virtual host onto which I'm going to move this blog, but the most recent WordPress database dump I can find is a month or so old (I'm sure I've taken one much more recently, but can't find it). So I'm going to wipe a load of stuff off the old site in the hope that that'll allow me to get back into MySQL again there and get the latest data. I'll continue using TypePad until everything's ready on the new server, and I'll try and redirect as much as possible, but links to some of the static stuff on dannyayers.com may 404 in the interim.

Preventing comment spam (at Google)

Described on the Google blog and already supported by many toolmakers, basically a link suitably marked won't be followed by the Google spider:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

Great stuff. Probably take a while to have an effect on the spammers, and then they're bound to come up with some new unpleasantness. But this certainly shouldn't hurt.

A solution using metadata, who'd have thought it?

PS. Phil has a link round-up.

QOTD

If you put steak into a grinder, you can't complain when you get hamburger...

(Bob Wyman commenting on the rights/expectations of feed publishers)

Hold the Front Page!

This forthcoming conference on Blogging, Journalism & Credibility is the talk of the blogosphere, at least the A-list segment.

mounting high horse...

Just for the record, as a blogger I would like to say: I am not a journalist!

Ok, this writing may appear in a (reverse-chrono) journal style, but the medium, content and purpose of this, and a very large proportion of other blogs, generally bears little relation to mainstream print/TV journalism. I haven't the time, energy or motivation to explain what should be obvious.

Ok, here's an analogy. This computer contains state-of-the-art digital technology (circa 2000), a lot of the time it's hooked up to the Internet. It has a keyboard and I use it to write things - mail, stuff like this, plans, code, notes, books, even shopping lists. But...that does not mean it's a typewriter.

What's more, one or two of the louder voices amongst this Kredibility Krusade Klan are the least trustworthy people I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Laughing all the way to their bank.

dismounting high horse...

See also: "webcred"

Share and share alike

Martin Schwimmer has asked Bloglines to remove his feed from their service, as he believes their use of it one their site is commercial, and goes beyond what his CC license allows. His reasoning all seems reasonable in itself, but why bother having a feed in the first place?

Ok, if I were in his position and felt strongly about it I'd have been tempted to do one of two things, depending on my mood. In a good mood then I'd insert additional references back to my blog, gain a bit of commercial flow. In a bad mood I'd put something in my robots.txt along these lines:

User-agent: UltraLiberalRSSParser
Disallow: /rss.xml

(from http://scripting.com/robots.txt)

PS. Similar situation noted by Russell Beattie a while ago.
PPS. Russ picked up on the issue again (with panache!), and Scoble's collected links.

Sooner Than I Thought

The host I've been using for dannyayers.com have been useless at sorting out the MySQL problems I've been having (I believe it's space related, but don't have enough access to fix myself). So I've gone ahead and ordered a virtual host account with bytemark.co.uk. I've also registered the domain danny.ayers.name to help with the transition. I'll put .htaccess redirects over to this Typepad account until that's all working.

Sorry for any inconvenience, cat photos will be resumed as soon as possible.