Category: Website

I finally turned off trackback on this blog. For a while there have been certain posts that were trackback magnets, and I was dealing with those through a manual review process. In the last month, though, just about every post started to collect trackback spam within a day or so of being posted. The version of Manila that my host supports doesn’t really provide any mechanisms for managing Trackback spam—there is no notification mechanism and no facility for centrally reviewing pings. So it’s gone as of last night, and good riddance.

I’ll continue to send out pings when I post, but given my experience with Trackback I don’t know if anyone will be receiving them.

…but I’m currently drowning in comment spam. I don’t even want to think about what the trackback spam picture looks like right now, too…

I’m about this close (holds fingers together) to turning off trackback on this blog entirely. I can’t remember the last time I saw a meaningful trackback ping.

One year ago today, I blogged about my new job with iET Solutions. It’s been a busy year, and we’ve done a lot: launched two brand new product lines; built a product management capability from the ground up; started hitting our release dates; even gotten ink in some fairly serious industry journals (check out this roundtable with our CEO).

I feel like I’ve grown a lot in the last year too. My writing on the blog may have fallen off, but my professional skills and experience have grown immeasurably, and I appreciate all of you who have stayed along for the ride.

I managed to get one of the last flights out of Boston tonight, after the storm passed by. Only JetBlue was still flying — just barely, as we had to wait for them to rustle up a flight crew before we could take off — but there were no problems getting off the ground. Which makes me wonder: why couldn’t any other carrier get it together long enough today to get any flights moving? You would think, since they’re practically all in receivership, that the threat of losing paying seats would motivate them to start flying again as soon as the storm passed through.

Anyway, I’m at the Bellagio right now, and we’re off to a roaring start. $10.95/day for Internet and only one electrical outlet that’s accessible without moving furniture. Plus I had to take a “smoking permitted” room. Hard to believe that in a hotel this size they could run completely out of nonsmoking rooms. Maybe I can switch in the morning.

Egolinking

The process of linking to things you find when you egosurf.

Today’s egolinks are to two unlikely sources. The first is to an interview in a Sloan School of Management publication about Sloan bloggers. Which reminds me: I need to add the other folks in that article to the Sloanblogs list.

The second is to my first mention in the New York Times—or more properly on the New York Times website. Not because of the Boycott Sony initiative, as one might think; this is as an addendum to an article about authors reading what bloggers say about them. My blog is linked from a page that summarizes bloggers’ discussions of Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. Ah well. Cool to see one’s name associated with the Grey Lady, no matter how it got there.

FWIW, I don’t think I invented the term egolink, but there aren’t many people using it. Spread the word!

1. I got a job. This is actually numbers 1 – 5, because through that job I got to bring a really cool set of products to market, liveblog the Gartner IT conference, and visit our German subsidiary. But more importantly I got a chance to confirm my value as a marketer and product manager and enabled us to have the financial capital to do a ton of stuff on the house. Which leads me to…
2. We fixed our house. Or a lot of things with it, including: air conditioning, heat, got rid of the oil burning boiler, media wiring, new windows and front door, insulation, rejuvenated bathrooms, improved storage, closed up walls, fixed the back lawn… Also found my way into a community of like minded individuals from whom I’ve learned a lot about home improvement projects.
3. Before I started the job, I learned a lot about myself through teaching SAT prep. I didn’t write about this experience too much at the time, but I think getting in front of people—especially high school kids—two or three times a week was just the kick in the pants I needed to get my self confidence back to secure a job.
4. I got to listen to some really good music—and review a lot of it, thanks to my association with Blogcritics.
5. Speaking of music, Sony BMG’s DRM mess wasn’t a great thing about the year, but the way the blogosphere, the public, the press, and the legal establishment responded to it, including the response to my Boycott Sony blog, was. I’m very grateful to all my readers on that blog for their contributions to the story.
6. And speaking about music again, I’ve had a chance to sing with two great musical groups, the choir at Old South Church and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Between the sublime moments like singing Mahler’s 8th at Tanglewood opening night and the semi-ridiculous ones like the Pops Christmas shows, it’s been a lot of fun.
7. I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with family, including one big road trip to my parents and a wonderful holiday (my inlaws were here through a few days after Christmas, my parents arrived on the 26th and left on Saturday, Esta took off this morning). And I’ve had the pleasure of another year with my loving and wonderful wife and our dogs, which is the best thing of all.
8. Lastly, I’m grateful to you, my readers. I am always surprised and humbled to realize how many people read this thing, and am frequently astonished when old friends contact me because they found the blog on Google. Here’s hoping that next year will be just as great as this one was.

Over at BusinessWeek Online, there’s an article about the effect of the customer boycott efforts against Sony. I’m quoted about the Sony Boycott Blog. See my followup there for my reaction to the article.

I only wish they had actually linked the blog. That would have been an even nicer birthday present.

I’m going to occasionally post stuff here about the Sony Boycott that doesn’t seem appropriate for that site. Since this site is allowed to be as narcissistic as it has to, these things will end up here…

• The Baltimore Sun name checked me on Sunday, citing both the Sony Boycott Blog and my original post on the topic as evidence of the role of bloggers in keeping the Sony DRM story alive. Nice to be cited in company with Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing and Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals.
• Our old friends at the Guardian also cited the blog in their discussion of the case as an indication of how badly things are going for Sony BMG.
• An MSNBC column that appears to be a list of random links clicked on while surfing Slashdot and Digg pointed to the boycott.
• Finally, Home Theatre Magazine cited the boycott blog as part of its analysis of how this fiasco is damaging its reputation with customers.

I’ve previously cited cases where the BBC, the Toronto Star, and others have pointed to me, as well.

Sometimes I forget how long I’ve been writing this blog: over four years, going on five. Four years ago today, in 2001, I pointed to my friend John Vick’s band Hello Swindon. Four years later, Vick is a family man—congrats, John, on your recent marriage.

Three years ago today, in 2002, I disclosed my struggles with depression for the first time. I won’t lie and say that that is no longer a problem, but I’m certainly a lot better off than I was then, thanks largely to the support of family and friends.

Two years (and a day) ago today, in 2003, I had just returned from Santa Rosa where we tasted some great wine and I got my picture taken with a famous round-headed kid.

And a year ago today, in 2004, I announced my job search. Happily, that one turned out well. I love what I do and wouldn’t be anywhere else right now.

A quick note of apology if you see visual weirdnesses with the site (style sheets or graphics not loading, site not updating). My host changed the location and IP of my static server, www.www.jarretthousenorth.com, and it is taking a while for the change to propagate through DNS.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably not using Bloglines. As I wrote a few days ago, I’ve been having problems with my feed in their service. Yesterday one of their support people left a comment on the post:

It appears that your server is blocking the Bloglines crawlers. When we try to fetch your feed, we receive a HTTP 500 error. If we receive a permanent error like this for 14 consecutive days, we assume the feed is dead and we remove it from the system. My guess is that this is what happened to your feed.

Sure enough, my site has the dreaded Bloglines [!] next to it in my list of feeds again.

And I’ve been having 500 errors accessing the site from my hotel, which is why I’ve been updating so infrequently this week—well, that and the fact that our coworkers have been extremely hospitable.

If someone is reading this site from www.www.jarretthousenorth.com, please try reading it at discuss.www.jarretthousenorth.com and let me know if you run into any problems.

Wow. I can’t believe it took me this long to check out GreaseMonkey. This Firefox add-in, which provides the ability to apply little bits of DHTML to pages on your browser on the fly, changes everything.

Case in point: trackback spam on Manila. There’s currently no way short of manually checking every checkbox in a list of trackback spam to get rid of it all. (Hello, carpal tunnel.)

GreaseMonkey to the rescue! Using the CheckRange script, all I have to do is check the checkbox for the first trackback spam entry, then scroll down to the bottom of the window, hold down the Shift key, and click the last checkbox. All the checkboxes get checked—and in my case that’s somewhere over 100 pieces of trackback spam—and another click deletes the whole kaboodle.

What’s cool about this is instead of waiting for Userland to implement my ideas for better spam management in Manila, I can (to an extent) take some matters into my own hands. Vive la Greasemonkey!

(Oh, and the Google search that is helping me identify pockets of trackback spam is pretty useful too.)

I think that carpal tunnel may be rearing its ugly head here. I’m about two-thirds done deleting the comment spam and my arm is killing me.

The worst part is, I’m finding some previously unnoticed trackback spam too. The worst: a post from last year that had somehow accumulated 116 spam trackback pings.

Things that Manila needs to better manage comment and trackback spam:

1. Email notification for Trackback pings
2. “Delete All” on comment and trackback pages
3. A way to delete multiple messages in the discussion group without opening them one by one

There are other things that could be improved, I’m sure, but I hurt too much to think about them right now.

We spent a great day on Cape Cod. The wonderful day was almost enough to make up for the nasty surprise waiting when I got home. I had almost 300 comment spam messages. All from the same person, left over the course of the day on messages all through my blog. It’ll take me hours to sort them out.

I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m removing the comment links from my posts until I get this sorted out. Until I do, you can create a login on the site the old fashioned way (see the link in the right navigation) and use the Discuss links. I’m sorry to inconvenience everyone, but unfortunately if people insist on pissing in the pool, I eventually have to make everyone get out so I can clean it.

It just came to my attention that the forwarding address that I use for this site is down, and, thanks to a bureaucratic snafu, I can’t get it fixed right now. If you’ve been trying to contact me, you can reach me for a limited time at toj8j at mac.com. Apologies to anyone who’s gotten a bounced mail notice from me. Some heads are going to roll…