pf » Tag: blog on Pete Freitag's Blog

I had been wondering why my Gravatar images haven't been showing up for a while in the comments on my blog.

I haven't been monitoring my trackbacks for a while, and when I checked them this morning I found a ton of spam. After I was finished deleting around 700 trackbacks (not by hand, I ran queries with spam words).

I found that over 90% of all the trackbacks that I've had on my blog are spam.

I built a simple tool that lets you create an amazon wishlist blog badge. It generates compliant HTML via some javascript that you can insert into your blog or website template, and style with CSS.

Here's an example:

img.

I just threw in support for Gravatar in my blog comments. If you go and sign up for a gravatar account, you can assign a picture to your email address, then when you post a comment on my blog or other blogs that support gravatar, your picture will show up next to it.

Of all the features that I've added to my homebrew blogging software tagging (or folksonomys) has been my favorite. Here's why:

Tag Clouds

I've designed the home page of my blog to make it easy for a first time visitor to know what my blog is about.

A few weeks ago I posted a collection of my best blog entries in 2002, now for 2003:

Using Custom Tags in ColdFusion - kind of a primer for coldfusion custom tags.

I have picked up quite a few new readers over the last few months so I though I would uncover some old blog entries. I started blogging in 2002 and I wrote very few blog entries that year - but some of these entries have remained popular in the search engines.

Google has no doubt not suprised anyone with their new Blog Search BETA.

What is suprising is the search result quality. I was hoping the Google would use their immense trust of brain power to come up with a blog search that produces good accurate and relavent results. But they didn't.

I decided to redesign my blog today, I was getting really sick of the old design, which has been up for a few years now. As you can see the new design is not too far off from the old one.

You would think that by having custom written blogging software (only two other blogs out there are using this code), and not allowing HTML in comments, that comment spammers would not waste their time on me. But they do.

I went ahead and annotated the bloggers BOF photo from the cfunited conference on Flickr. I annotated the names and blogs of each mug (except for one unidentified blogger). It was cool to put some faces on the blogs we read.

Steven Erat has posted an entry about the BOF here.

I redesigned my homepage last week. My goal was to help readers find some of my older posts that may be interesting.

So to start, I added a prominent search box at the top left, I simply use google's search my site for this feature.

Jeffery Zeldman proclaims that tag clouds are the new mullets. However, as I'm sure you're aware some people just can't resist the mullet.

To avoid comment spam, my blog comments are displayed as plain text. However urls to other entries on my blog are often posted to in the comments. So I wrote a simple regular expression to create hyperlinks out of them:

REReplaceNoCase(comments.comment,

"(http://www\.

I spent a few minutes adding a rating system to my blog entries. I added this feature to help people find posts that are most useful. I have posted nearly 400 blog entries in the last 3 years, some have been quite handy and others are not.

Following Bruce Schneier's lead I created a page listing the 100 most recent comments on my blog.



I may also add an RSS feed for recent comments, would anyone find that handy?

Since implementing tags on my blog I have noticed that they are much more powerful than categories. Here's why:

You find related items by searching for mutual tags between items. That's how I show you related posts on my blog.

As you may have noticed I recently added tags to my blog. The main reason I implemented tags was so that I could find related posts based on mutual tags. So if two posts have similar tags, they will show up in as related.

When I implemented the new trackback feature on my blog, I was aware that spammers like to use trackbacks, so I coded in a keyword blacklist. Roger Benningfield added a comment about track back autodiscovery and spamming that got me thinking.

I hopefully have trackbacks working on my blog now. If you want to test the methods given in my trackbacks article you can trackback to this post.

Here's some code I use to check and see if my trackbacks was successful:

<cfset tbError = ReReplaceNoCase(cfhttp.filecontent, ".