mattwalters.net » Site News

Feed wonkiness

Matt — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:08:58 +0000

Sorry about the feed wonkiness. I was trying something out and decided to not do it. But trying it out let some stuff slip into my feed for a bit. Anyhow, don’t worry, not going to start bombarding my feed with tweets, etc.

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Comments and trackbacks

Matt — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:43:26 +0000

I’ve turned comments and trackbacks back on. We’ll see how it goes. Posts made previously to today still have them turned off. If I start getting a spike in spam, I’ll probably turn them back off.

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Comments Off

Matt — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:00:53 +0000

Well, I didn’t come to the decision easily, but this morning, I read an article about turning off comments over at Joel on Software. Shortly after that, 3 or 4 spam comments made it through my spam filtering. Honestly, I’m just tired of having to fight spam at all. It’s pretty rare that one makes it through my filtering, but whenever one does, it just annoys me immensely.

This blog is mainly for me to share my thoughts, post pictures, maybe put up a funny video or two. It’s not meant to in any fashion be “work.” Dealing with comment spam is unfortunately, “work.” I don’t get tons of comments anyhow, which I’m fine with, my close friends leave notes on my posts sometimes, and they can just as easily tell me what they thought in person or on their blogs.

To anyone that might stumble across this blog and want to make a comment, I encourage you to write a post on your blog and link to me. I’ll be watching inbound links and trackbacks which for now are still open but that too might change if trackback spam comes back in style, and I will make sure to read what you have to say.

If you don’t already have a blog, then I recommend you set up a blog on WordPress.com. It will take you all of 5 minutes probably, and you’ll have a great blog and you’ll be able to ridicule my posts to your hearts content ;)

Anyhow, take care :)

More feed wonkiness

Matt — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:32:38 +0000

I’m moving forward some with my previously mentioned feed updates. So if you’re a subscriber you might get blasted with all of the items in my feed suddenly being unread. I apologize, but this is more in the direction that I was wanting to go, and gives me more power. Basically I moved over to Yahoo! Pipes. This is especially good for the del.icio.us items that get put into my feed because I can filter out the “toread” items until I’ve had time to read them and decide if I want to keep them tagged or not.

Anyhow, just wanted to give a quick explanation in case anyone was wondering what happened to my feed.

Comment Spam

Matt — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:45:46 +0000

Ugh, comment/trackback spam has really been going crazy the past 2-3 months for me. Up until that point, Akismet counted around 1,000 for me (for awhile it kept resetting its counter). Anyhow, once the flood doors opened for me, which was around 2 months ago, that count has quickly gone up:

Akismet has caught 17,491 spam for you since you first installed it.

That number is growing at an increasing rate too. For instance, about 1 month ago, it was only around 4-5,000. It’s just sort of sickening. It’s to the point where some of the comments/trackbacks are getting through. Given how many it’s killing, I’m not overly upset about it though I guess. That’s a pretty good ratio.

I just wish it wasn’t a problem at all.

Feed Updates

Matt — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:46:58 +0000

I’ve decided to consolidate my feeds since I only post here on the blog every once in awhile, but I’m actually still actively sharing content in other ways. So I decided this change would be the best way. So what does this mean if you’re currently subscribed? You don’t need to change to a new feed or anything if you were on my main blog feed. I just adjusted that feed to now grab content from other places that I post things. If you were subscribed to my link blog feed, that feed is now dead. If you were subscribed to my photo feed, that feed will be dead soon as well. Anyhow, you can check out my Syndication Page if you need the links to the 2 feeds I now offer.

If you’re curious what WILL be showing up in my feed now, it is a combination of multiple sources: Blog, flickr, Delicious, Google Reader Shared Items, YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr. The heaviest sources of material are my blog and Delicious/Reader links. So don’t worry about getting flooded with tweets from Twitter or anything.

Anyhow, I hope you find it useful. I will most likely be making some minor tweaks to the feed over the near future, but for now this should do nicely.

Tumblr - info.mattwalters.net

Matt — Mon, 21 May 2007 23:08:43 +0000

I’ve been slowly becoming more and more interested in Tumblr ever since Alex King mentioned it here and here (Alex is the best web aggregater I have found to date, I discover most things through him if you haven’t noticed). I have to admit, it’s made me think more and more about either trying to move my blog towards being more “Tumblr like” (aggregating all of my content into one source) or switching to something like Tumblr as my main “broadcast station.”

Anyhow, I’ve set up http://info.mattwalters.net/ if you’d like to check it out. It does a nice job of showing my photos, links, and blog entries (the 3 main things I post), and if I happen to post a video or something then it will toss it up there for your viewing pleasure as well.

If you’re a subscriber, I wouldn’t change your feed for me to that one, at least not yet. I have an idea or two that I might try out here, and if I go that road, I’ll probably be turning Tumblr off.

As a small side note, I’ve stopped splicing my del.icio.us links into my main blog feed. So if you’d like to continue to follow my “link blog”, here’s the feed.

Welcome

Matt — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 23:54:29 +0000

Well, if you’re seeing this, you’re seeing the new mattwalters.net (you may need to pop out of your RSS reader to really see it). I decided to (yet again) switch web-hosts and try out (mt) Media Temple. They seem to have a good setup and so far I’ve been enjoying configuring the site and getting things up and running. Hopefully I’ll start posting more often, or at the very least start putting up some of the things that I’ve been slowly working on in the background over the past couple of months, which for the most part is just some simple PHP plug & play type stuff. I have a few plug-in ideas that I’d like to try to work on as well to help equip the new site.

I’d also like to give thanks to some developers because I’m using their plug-ins :)

I’d also like to thank Scott Wallick for making the plaintxtBlog theme which I’m using here with a tweak or two :)

Thanks for all the hard work guys, you’ve made putting this site together real easy.