Main

February 28, 2010

So apparently spambots consider a blog abandoned after six months. At that point, they increase the flow of comment spam tenfold, hoping the blog’s owner is asleep at the keyboard and has kindly left the floodgates open.

What a refreshing nap. And what a wonderful way to return to the blogosphere: awaiting me were thousands of comments pending approval. As usual, there were plenty of entry-to-entry salesmen peddling See One Alice and other fine products. But the spambots have been getting increasingly desperate, burying their hyperlinks within gushing compliments. They hail the entries from my high school days as “good”, “great”, and “pretty great”, fully expecting to shove their way onto my blog with deafening courtesy. Moral of the story: never trust a robot to recognize good writing. Or to produce any.

I did get some old-fashioned, hand-typed feedback during my absence. A decidedly human commenter called me, to paraphrase orthographically, a “———kin virgin”, whatever that means. A thoughtful reader announced the obsolescence of some software I released years ago. But not to worry: soon, they too will be assimilated by the vast army of spambots roaming this blogosphere.

In six months, I’d forgotten what fun it is to drag my readers through hundreds of words of pointless drivel, seasoned generously with outbound hyperlinks. My sincere thanks to the spambots for reminding me.

January 15, 2009

From the I-should-have-blogged-about-this-literally-a-month-ago department, AIM OpenID Login has been released as part of Six Apart’s Motion package. That was a mouthful, so allow me to unpack the sentence.

AIM OpenID Login is a small plugin I wrote in 2007 that lets anyone with an AOL account – including AIM users – easily log into your Movable Type blog to post a comment. Motion is a plugin for Movable Type that turns the blogging software into a social networking platform. It’s currently a public beta, so you can download it for free while Six Apart works to smooth out the edges. According to the FAQ, its features – including, presumably, AIM OpenID Login – will be folded into the standard Movable Type application by version 4.25.

Early last month, a product manager at Six Apart e-mailed to notify me that my plugin would be incorporated into a future Movable Type release. He did not ask my permission. As it happens, I’d already given explicit permission by licensing the plugin under the GNU General Public License, as I was required to. So this e-mail was simply a courteous heads-up. As you might imagine, I’m quite pleased that one late night of coding has led to such visibility for my code. If only I got such a high ROI with this week’s complement of problem sets.

Even if you have no inclination to turn your blog into a full-fledged social networking service, AIM OpenID Login lowers a barrier that keeps your readers from becoming commenters.

August 25, 2007

Running Man

Source: AOL Canada

You might’ve noticed that I’ve been giving my website a bit more updating love than usual. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve resurrected my blog, upgraded the site’s blogging software to Movable Type 4.0 – which, by the way, is awesome – and updated Planet Xavier for the new school year. Now, as part of my ongoing, futile effort at garnering more comments from the blog-reading populace, my blog allows you to log in using your AIM or AOL screen name, meaning you no longer have to manually enter your name, e-mail address, and blog URL every time you post a comment here. At the bottom of any entry, click the “sign in” link, click the AIM tab, and this is what you’ll see:

AIM OpenID Login adds a tab to Movable Type’s login screen.

This feature is made possible by AIM OpenID Login, my first Movable Type plugin. It’s based on a similar plugin that MT product manager Byrne Reese just released for WordPress.com, and just like Byrne’s plugin, mine uses the OpenID protocol: basically, when you log on using your AIM screen name, my website talks to AOL’s to verify that you are indeed LoLcAtLoVeR31415. (You are, aren’t you?)

Note that this login screen, used when submitting comments, is different from the main MT login screen, so you don’t have to worry about random AIM users posting blog entries or anything. It’s similar to the LiveJournal login feature I had enabled on this blog before upgrading to MT 4; now LiveJournal support is built-in, as are all of Six Apart’s properties.

Continue reading "AIM OpenID Login 1.0 for Movable Type" »


  1. A triumphant return… to spam
  2. AIM OpenID Login in Motion
  3. AIM OpenID Login 1.0 for Movable Type
  4. Mundane milestones
  5. Going your own way with spam
  6. Reasons
  7. Four years ago…
  8. So that’s what that was.
  9. lanruoJeviL
  10. Scooped
  11. Ten things that irk me
  12. Making your life easier
  13. Losing a little personality
  14. In brief
  15. Old habits
  16. Chronology
  17. Oohs and ahhs
  18. Information overload
  19. Going Out: Making a point
  20. Thinkers’ Club
  21. Twenty thousand
  22. GeoURL 2.0 coming soon
  23. Unminor upgrade
  24. Six Apart purchases Danga
  25. Surveying the populace
  26. A little early
  27. Planet Xavier
  28. No comment
  29. Serving others
  30. Public Enemy № 1: In defense
  31. In the third person
  32. Delete
  33. Coded
  34. Saying something
  35. International Webloggers’ Day
  36. Comments?
  37. Moblogging
  38. Blogging: Third Wave
  39. ZineBlogs
  40. MT-LJ Bridge