Recently in General Geekery Category
As part of my day job as a computer geek, I've been spending this week in San Francisco at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo. The Web 2.0 Expo has a lot of people talking about cool technology while not necessarily knowing what to do with it, where it is going, or more importantly, how to make money out of it.
I could talk for days about what I've seen and what I think, but that's not gonna happen here. I'm currently dead tired and running on fumes (cookies and beer) so this is going to be my big 'Web 2.0 Expo' post for now. I've had some pleasant interaction with Six Apart, the company that provides the blogging platform software that I use. Most of the time I'm a happy Movable Type user (when things go wrong it's usually due to my own screw-ups), but lets not focus on the software. Lets talk about the reasons that Six Apart rocks that have nothing to do with blogging. Most photos by my colleague Moya and her ever-present Treo phone.
7. They build a mean ad-hoc mini golf course in their office.
I even got a hole in one!
6. They print their T-Shirts on women's cuts too
So did the Web 2.0 expo. Who knew women used the internet?
5. Payam can fix things
Like this Movable Type wrench thingee.
4. They had the best party of the South Park Crawl
Trust me on this one - we stopped by most of them.
3. I won a bottle of wine by giving them my card and being the lucky person to have it drawn from the fish bowl.
Alden Vineyard Cabernet. Their CEO's vineyard.
2. Historical truths on their office walls.
1. Vodka, even if it was gone when we were there.
That's what they told us, anyways. Web geeks definitely do not drink as much as the Outdoor Retailer crowd, however.
I could talk for days about what I've seen and what I think, but that's not gonna happen here. I'm currently dead tired and running on fumes (cookies and beer) so this is going to be my big 'Web 2.0 Expo' post for now. I've had some pleasant interaction with Six Apart, the company that provides the blogging platform software that I use. Most of the time I'm a happy Movable Type user (when things go wrong it's usually due to my own screw-ups), but lets not focus on the software. Lets talk about the reasons that Six Apart rocks that have nothing to do with blogging. Most photos by my colleague Moya and her ever-present Treo phone.
7. They build a mean ad-hoc mini golf course in their office.
I even got a hole in one!
6. They print their T-Shirts on women's cuts too
So did the Web 2.0 expo. Who knew women used the internet?
5. Payam can fix things
Like this Movable Type wrench thingee.
4. They had the best party of the South Park Crawl
Trust me on this one - we stopped by most of them.
3. I won a bottle of wine by giving them my card and being the lucky person to have it drawn from the fish bowl.
Alden Vineyard Cabernet. Their CEO's vineyard.
2. Historical truths on their office walls.
1. Vodka, even if it was gone when we were there.
That's what they told us, anyways. Web geeks definitely do not drink as much as the Outdoor Retailer crowd, however.
File under General Geekery:
It came to my attention a while back that the comment submission procedure on Movable Type 4 (and specifically this blog) was less than elegant. So I turned off the default registration-required settings and set it to allow for anonymous Captcha-filtered comments. But it turns out that this was even a worse idea because the Captcha didn't even show up on the comment submission form, leading to unpredictable errors when a comment was submitted. It went something like this:
Step 1: Comment Submission: "Hello, I'm submitting this comment on an entry and there is no spam checking - wow! There isn't even a Captcha image! I'm going to tell all of my pharmaceutical distributor friends!"
Step 2: User clicks submit, with evil spam plots brewing in the back of his or her mind.
Step 3: Movable Type processes the comment and checks whether the entered text matched the generated Captcha. Here's the problem - the end user never saw a Captcha image.
Result: End user gets an ugly message and runs around in circles in frustration, their evil plans to spam-bomb me having been defeated.
Meanwhile, I'm pleased that I'm not getting any comment spam, but I'm feeling a little rejected because I'm not getting any valid comments either. I'm thinking that I might welcome some spam. I know people are reading - I get several emails a week asking follow up questions. I keep thinking to myself, why don't they just enter a comment - maybe someone else can help?
The Five Minute Solution: Take out all of the screwy if/else statements from the Comment Form template so that the Captcha will display no matter what. Since I took out all of the other authentication methods these statements aren't needed anyways. This seems to work, so comments are working (for now...)
It came to my attention a while back that the comment submission procedure on Movable Type 4 (and specifically this blog) was less than elegant. So I turned off the default registration-required settings and set it to allow for anonymous Captcha-filtered comments. But it turns out that this was even a worse idea because the Captcha didn't even show up on the comment submission form, leading to unpredictable errors when a comment was submitted. It went something like this:
Step 1: Comment Submission: "Hello, I'm submitting this comment on an entry and there is no spam checking - wow! There isn't even a Captcha image! I'm going to tell all of my pharmaceutical distributor friends!"
Step 2: User clicks submit, with evil spam plots brewing in the back of his or her mind.
Step 3: Movable Type processes the comment and checks whether the entered text matched the generated Captcha. Here's the problem - the end user never saw a Captcha image.
Result: End user gets an ugly message and runs around in circles in frustration, their evil plans to spam-bomb me having been defeated.
Meanwhile, I'm pleased that I'm not getting any comment spam, but I'm feeling a little rejected because I'm not getting any valid comments either. I'm thinking that I might welcome some spam. I know people are reading - I get several emails a week asking follow up questions. I keep thinking to myself, why don't they just enter a comment - maybe someone else can help?
The Five Minute Solution: Take out all of the screwy if/else statements from the Comment Form template so that the Captcha will display no matter what. Since I took out all of the other authentication methods these statements aren't needed anyways. This seems to work, so comments are working (for now...)
