bulknews.typepad.com

Bulkfeeds, the official source for Blog stats in .jp?

MIC (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) of Japan seems to use Bulkfeeds as a statistical source of their press release "The state of Blogsphere". I wasn't aware of the fact that their document contains URL of my site, which is really cool :)

DNS Blacklist as Splog database

As part of fighting with spams in my side project Bulkfeeds (The site is to search Japanese blogsphere and is currently only available in Japanese), I started my own URLBL DNS service!

The service postfix is rbl.bulkfeeds.jp and here's how to lookup spams: if your comment/trackback includes URL http://poker.example.com/poker.html, you have to lookup poker.example.com.rbl.bulkfeeds.jp. If the URL is blacklisted, it'll return 127.0.0.2 and otherwise it returns NXDOMAIN.

If you run Movable Type 3.2 with SpamLookup (which is on by default), all you need is to add rbl.bulkfeeds.jp to "Domain Blacklist Services" of SpamLookup configuration. (Example Setup)

Forwarding your splog data with MT

Since 3.2, MT has a nice default plugin SpamLookup to lookup spam comments and trackbacks pretty effectively. But by default, these spam comments and trackbacks are just junked, which looks like a waste of precious information. So I developed SpamSubmission plugin (svn is also available), which forwards URLs found in spam comments and pings to the Bulkfeeds DNSBL service, using its submission API.

Here's how to install: just drop the SpamSubmission directory into MT plugins directory, then go to SYSTEM OVERVIEWS > PLUGINS and click "Show Settings" for SpamSubmission plugin. Choose "TypeKey API" as Auth Type and enter your TypeKey identity, which is required to avoid Blacklist pollution (Example Config).

Submitted URLs are periodically and manually scanned with our splog filter and reviewed by me (to avoid Blacklist pollution), then reflected to the DNSBL service rbl.bulkfeeds.jp.

See Also

http://bsb.empty.us/ and http://www.surbl.org/ both provide URL based DNSBL service.

Bloggers' Best Practice: Take Pictures before Eating

WinXP Photo Upload Wizard

Link: Everything TypePad - An easier way to upload photos.

If you are a Windows user that likes to share a lot of photos with your family and friends, then you will be happy to learn that uploading photos just got a whole lot easier.

TypePad now released a WinXP Upload Wizard. It makes me uploading photos to TypePad Gallery so much easier. Why not try using it?

O'Reilly Radar

Link: O'Reilly Radar.

O'Reilly launched new Weblog aggregated page, O'Reilly Radar. It include weblogs by Tim O'Reiily, Rael Dornfest and Nathan Torkington. Must read for geeks.

Blog Pet in Japan

Link: KDDIとワークアット、ペットの種類が増えた「Blog Pet」ベータサービス.

KDDI, the Japanese cellphone carrier and weblog service provider (LOVELOG) has made a partnership with IT startup Workat about the integration of their blog pet application "Kousagi (Blog Pet)".

BlogPet is a flash based application that can be put on your weblog side bar, that talks something by learning words from your weblog via RSS feeds. It can also post a weblog entry and send trackback pings with random words using MetaWeblog or AtomAPI. That's thought to be a nice avatar-ish application suitable for Japanese bloggers.

Blog Business Summit

Link: Six Apart Professional Network: Blog Business Summit.

Anil is going to speak on Blog Business Summit in Seatle, and Jeff Barr is taking a fine minute for the whole conference.

rel="nofollow"

People at Six Apart, Google, Yahoo! and other search engines and Blog software developer has made their collaborations to work against comman spams. It's a small but a siginificant step. I want to say "Great work!" for everyone.

Commentlogging with del.icio.us

Link: Seb's Open Research.

This is obviously handy as a personal trail of places you've been, which makes it easy for you to revisit comment threads you're participating in.

del.icio.us' flexible Tag feature allows you to track blog entries which you made comment on (like adding "mycomments" tag). del.icio.us can feed RSS with username and tag specified, which means your comment history can be tracked by other bloggers, possibly fan of yours :)

People of the Year

Link: Six Log: Recognition for our founders.

Ben & Mena Trott have recieved "People of The Year" by PC Magazine, with Evan Willams from Blogger. They're also listed at 15 World Class Innovator from DEMO. Congratulations for what you've done this year!

Movable Type 3.14 released

Link: Movable Type Publishing Platform: Movable Type 3.14 released.

We have just released Movable Type v3.14 which fixes the issue of extreme loads witnessed on servers under the strain of a massive spam attack.

Movable Type 3.14 is now released, with fixes to reduce the overhead caused by comment spams. In Japanese weblogs, you can protect almost all comment spams by simply denying ASCII-only (single byte) comments. Though iIt can't handle Chinese and Russian ones but it's still effective considering its easiness.

feed on feeds: Bloglines on your server

feed on feeds - about

Desktop aggregators are great. They sit there all day, pinging away at sites, and as soon as they notice something new, they pop up little windows on your desktop, and let you read items. But what about when you go home from work? Or what about when you are on a trip? You get totally out of sync, and don't know what you've read and haven't read. You are enraged.

Feed on feeds is a Server-side RSS aggregator made of PHP. It can be used something like "Bloglines on your server".

Everything TypeKey

Six Apart Professional Network: Everything TypeKey

Andre Torrez, developer of the super cool service DropCash, has launched Everything TypeKey. It's a new wiki that lists all of the sample code, classes, scripts, tutorials, and applications that have been developed around our TypeKey authentication service.

DropCash founder has setup new Wiki called Everything TypeKey to show useful resources around an open authentication service TypeKey.

Six Apart Professional Network: Kanoodle/TypePad partnership

Six Apart Professional Network: Kanoodle/TypePad partnership

We've just announced our partnership with Kanoodle which will let TypePad customers easily add contextual ads to their weblogs if they choose.

Six Apart announced their parntership with context-based ads provider Kanoodle. Amazing thing about it is that Jeremy's analysis on Web 2.0 predicted this.

In the blogging world, Google's Blogger has hit all three of the requirements. TypePad from SixApart has #1 and #2 nailed. I wonder what they'll do about #3. Maybe just AdSense integration?

WYSIWYG Editor for TypePad

Everything TypePad!: Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added two new features to TypePad: Rich text editing, aka “WYSIWYG” (What You See is What You Get); and an Integrated spell checker.

TypePad released their new outstanding feature of WYSIWYG Rich Text Editing form. In fact, I've tended to think these kinds of User Interface are something thought to be dull for geeks who can edit raw HTML by hand (like me). However, this TypePad's RTE has made me change my mind a little, because:

Though its script seems to be based on htmlarea, the generated HTML is more sophisticated than that, as it's based on HTML and CSS standards. For instance, the "B" button does not generate <B> tag, but <strong> tag, more prefered one in HTML standards these days. Similarly, "Font Color" button doesn't generate <FONT color=""> stuff, but <span style="color:#xxxxxx">.

My applause to TypePad User Interface designers and programmers.

Bloglines Updates

Bloglines | News

There has been a lot of activity involving the Bloglines Web Services, and we have updated the list of programs that use them. Several additional aggregators have announced support for Bloglines. There's a new Bloglines IM notifier, several programs dedicated to Bloglines and podcasting, and a script to download your Bloglines feeds to your iPod.

My tiny script bloglines2ipod is now listed on Bloglines 3rd party softwares.

Finally, we have updated the Bloglines Web Services Sync API. The getitems method now supports bulk fetching of articles from all the subscriptions within a folder.

BWS's getitems method in Sync API now allows you to fetch all items in a single REST API call. It'll reduce much of Bloglines API overheads in RPC call transactions.

use Perl; to TypePad

Today I've moved my old use Perl; journal to here bulknews.typepad.com. Here's useperl2mt.pl, a quick script to scrape use Perl; journal entries and dumps them as Movable Type exported data format.