Trackbacks are Awesome!

Without the miracle of trackbacks, I wouldn't know that I can still get my Community Server news fix at http://csnews.csmvps.com/blogs/dn/ now that the old news site has apparently stopped updating. Thank you, trackbacks!

Of course, I'm sure that someone mentioned this at some point. I should probably be more observant.

Happy Whatever

I figure that I have no excuse for not updating this thing when I've been on vacation for almost two weeks. Something to keep in mind if you run Community Server and you've ignored your blog for a while: when you go to your blog dashboard and click on the number next to "Awaiting Approval" for comments, you are presented with the list of comments published on your blog, and not the list of comments awaiting approval. Make sure you are aware of this before you start nuking comments. Otherwise, you will look like me: stupid. Thankfully, I think I only killed one legit comment. Apologies to whomever just got bumped.

I have many things to catch up on. Apparently there is a new service pack for CS, which I will attempt to deploy over remote desktop (since I am not home from vacation yet). I've also got an update for NinjaFish.CommunityServer that I've been meaning to publish for, oh, a month, which includes a new CS module that (hopefully safely) allows HTML in blog comments.

[Update] Fifteen minutes later and we have another flawless service pack application. Yay for easy patches!

Snap Preview Anywhere

Once again, this is what happens when I stop paying attention (to be fair, though, I was on vacation this time). As mentioned in various posts linked off of the Community Server Daily News, Snap (whom I had admittedly not heard of until today) has come up with a damn cool little tool called Snap Preview Anywhere that creates popup Javascript/HTML previews of the links on your site. Want to see it in action? Just roll over any link on this page! This is really handy for people like me who like to litter their blog posts with lots of pointless links.

While that's fancy enough on its own, what impressed me the most was how easy it is to implement on your site. You go through the sign up process and you add one Javascript reference to your site. That's it. Very cool stuff.

Well, it's almost that easy. Snap Preview Anywhere creates previews for every link on your page. This has the rather annoying side effect of previewing links back into your own site. Snap does provide a simple Javascript solution for disabling the previews on internal links, however:

<script type="text/javascript">

//<![CDATA[

    //change sites internal links to class "snap_nopreview"

    var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');

    for (var l = 0; l < links.length; l++)

    {

        if(links[l].href.match(/^http:\/\/blog\.ninjafish\.net/))

        {

            links[l].className += " snap_nopreview";

        }

    }

//]]>

</script>

Add this script to the bottom of your page, before the </body> tag (it has to run after the page has rendered). Obviously, you'll want to change the search string to match your site instead of mine. There's also no reason why you can't use this to filter out domains other than your own.

[Update] If you use Scott Watermasysk's Share It module, you'll probably want to update that script to filter out the links that it creates. Here is the regex I am using to do just that:

/^http:\/\/(blog\.ninjafish\.net)|(del\.icio\.us\/post)|(www\.digg\.com\/submit)|(reddit\.com\/submit)/

BlogMailr?

So Telligent released something called BlogMailr this week -- a web service that allows you to post to your blog via email. This post is more or less content-free; I just wanted to test the silly thing and see what it does. I'm using my web mail client at ASPnix to enter the post, which fully supports HTML and all that good stuff.

OK, I guess I do have some content...

BlogMailr supports attachments via the MetaWeblog API. As you're probably aware, Community Server doesn't. Well, it didn't: it turns out that Telligent has also back-ported some of the API changes from CS 3.0 to CS 2.1. The update is available here, and is a simple, one-file change. The greatest improvement is support for newMediaObject, which allows BlogMailr (and Windows Live Writer) to attach files to your posts.

And now I press the "send" button and pray that this doesn't implode.

[Update] BlogMailr is a lying liar. I just got an email confirmation claiming that this post doesn't actually exist, so stop reading it before you permanently damage the fabric of reality.

A Story About Comment Spam

This is my first blog, and I haven't had it for very long. I was surprised to find that it only took about a month for the comment spammers to show up (this was after I removed the CAPTCHA control from the comment form, which I deemed unnecessary due to the low amount of traffic).

I didn't want to bring back the CAPTCHA block, and I certainly wasn't about to disable anonymous comments (I hate having to sign up to a site just to leave a few words of feedback), so I decided to give the Community Server spam rules a shot instead. In my case, I was getting (past tense, as this particular spammer seems to have given up) persistent comment spam from one person. All of his comments had a similar theme and used a small selection of user names. Based on this information, I made some changes to the rules:

• All of the user names used by this spammer immediately went on the forbidden words list. This was a safe move, as this spammers user names were all short phrases and very unlikely to clash with a real user name. Forbidden words get five points each.
• I added a couple of choice words that were repeated many, many times in his comments to the bad words list. Bad words get two points each, and are allowed only once before they start to count towards the spam score.
• While this user did not post any links, I decided to take the advice posted on several other blogs and enable the link count rule. I allow three links, with five points added for each link beyond three.
• Similarly, I enabled the IP count rule, allowing up to three comments to be posted from the same IP within sixty seconds. Every post beyond three earns five points. I'm still wondering if this rule might be too loose, as I can't imagine anyone posting three legitimate comments in a minute, but I see no need to change it for now.
• Since the bad word count and link count rules are fairly loose now, I set the score to mark a comment for moderation at five and increased the score to mark a comment as spam to fifteen.
• Finally, I set comments to be disabled after a post had been up for thirty days.

And then I just sat back and watched. It is now about three months later, and the spam blocker has caught pretty much everything that's been thrown at it. More importantly (to me, anyway), it hasn't incorrectly flagged any legitimate comments as spam. I am very, very impressed. I've even loosened the post date restriction to ninety days, because I really don't care how much spam shows up, so long as it doesn't make it to the actual page.

I've also since installed Ken Robertson's AllCommentRss CSModule, which creates an RSS feed of all comments posted to your blog, and apparently filters out spam comments as of last week. I no longer have CS email me when I get comments; instead, I use the RSS feed to watch them while CS sends an email when I have comments that need moderation (spam).

Windows Live Writer Beta

I caught wind of the Windows Live Writer beta from Major Nelson's blog. He wasn't kidding when he said that BlogJet users should check it out — it feels almost like a BlogJet clone. There are still some things that BlogJet does better, though. For example, I like how BlogJet automatically substitutes certain HTML entites, such as &mdash; and curly quotes, as you type, as well as its text substitution features (similar to Community Server's Text Parts, but built into the editor).

CS support in Live Writer is decent enough. It goes through the MetaWeblog API, much like every other WYSIWYG editor on the market. The application did make an attempt to download my style sheets from the web site, which would have been really cool if it had actually worked. Perhaps they could add a feature to allow you to add these manually. Live Writer also makes any pings after posting via the editor itself. BlogJet appears to go through its posting API, which CS does not support, so I have to ping manually.

Windows Live Writer appears to be shaping up really nicely. If they can catch up with BlogJet's feature set and add a few more perks, I might just make the switch.

This post was made (and updated) with Live Writer, of course.

[Update] After seeing Dave Burke's post on Live Writer and that his blog is apparently much less uppity than mine and downloaded his styles without a problem, I decided to give it another go. Worked wonderfully the second time, but unfortunately it appears to have some issues pulling images out of the CSS file. See for yourself:

I'm impressed with how well the preview works in terms of showing you how your layout will work in its final form. However, the lack of CSS image support (which may stem from the fact that my styles use relative paths) makes it too annoying to work in this mode all the time. Still very cool stuff. I look forward to seeing what else they have in store for us.