Bugger, I can’t run the captcha authimage with WordPress because my hosting provider has only compliled GD and not freetype with PHP… sigh… any other solutions out there? I’ve posted this here, on the WP boards too.

Update… seems like the -hacks file in the download is blankish, tried to post this over at the creators site but it wouldn’t recoginse the code I used… eh??? Am giving up for today.

Am tracking this backto it instead, just in case.

I’m cleaning out (from my inbox, WP happily intercepting them based on content) between 5 and 40 spam attacks a day and the other week has my first experience of wikispam, nothing like what Brian & Alan are dealing with but annoying nonetheless.

But how to deal with it, well, picked up this link to some good anti-spam stuff from Raymond Yee and this Jimmy Wales quote (from this interview) sounds like the solution to me:

“Sure, I think it’s pretty simple to solve problems like that. One of the first tricks I would try is to parse the wiki text that someone inputs to see if it contains an external link. If so, then only in those cases, require an answer to a captcha.

Second step, keep editing wide open for everyone, but restrict the ability to post external links to people who are trusted by that community. Make it really easy for trusted users to extend the zone of trust, because you want to encourage participation.”

[from here]

I think that stuff like the wiki blacklist is really cool but ‘aint going to work long term.

The problem really arises when you come to weblogs though, which are, of course, built on links. I don’t think that adding a CAPTCHA is too much here, Alex has done it rather well and as soon as I’ve got a minute I need to get over the technical headspace to do it too.

Frank Paynter asks “Why Do We Blog“, well….

Me, I started trying to force students to blog before I even got round to it myself, sitting sweating over the challenge of getting learners to do e-portfolios / reflective journals the inspiring Lindon Parker (who has disappeared of late? Lindon, where art thou?) said “whatabout blogs” and then things kicked in.

It was watching the (terrible tasks by me, v. low success rate ;o) student blog their stuff, figuring out what I wanted for them and playing with the tools, installing Radio, trying out a few posts and then, bloody hell, got a scripting link (also courtesy of Lindon) and all of a sudden the miserable, empty existence within the company from hell where I had to explain to the GM that “Yes, it really is better for learners to work in groups than isolated, on their own” and “no, we can’t wipe out teachers through technology, and that’s not what you hired me for” (they’re still trying it BTW) … was gone… and there was a community of folk interested in very similar stuff to me, and they were discussing it too and I had this thing called a news aggregator and I could log in every morning and read what they’d written overnight and…. and… and….

And that’s why I still do it now, because I get to read the most interesting and relevant things from people who I may never get the chance to meet in the flesh and sure as hell wouldn’t be writing as readable / engaging / small-pieces-based stuff like this in any other medium.

And, occasionally, I get read too and people say ‘yes, but…’ or ‘cool’ or ‘don’t let the bastards get you down‘. Now that’s pretty amazing!

All the other stuff about knowledge management, becoming a better writer, opening up, sharing & giving, participating in conversations, having a voice etc. etc. is great but it’s the side story. I’m a migrant, I live and work in a country where I don’t have roots, family or a particularly wide circle of friends (of course the imploding of my personal life & legal stuff over the last 3 years hasn’t exactly helped), I am issued to the max with ‘how I appear’ and ‘what’s thought of me’ and a billion other things from when I was a kid and from what’s around me now… but through blogging I feel like I’m part of a community, one which shares some pretty important values (such as honesty, openness, freedom…) and one in which I’ve been able to explore my, pretty micro, area with others who have similar interests and who I would probably have never met otherwise.

What matters is what goes on inside and between people, and that’s why I blog.

Heh :o) Thanks Sis.

Each to their own, seriously, and it’s not like I couldn’t do with the money, but, personally, (OK enough commas now) while I’d be totally cool with blogging being part of my job I wouldn’t do it in my personal blog.

But then again Richard is being totally upfront with it… hmmmm… makes me want to unsubscribe almost more than RSS ads do though, I feel a bit like a voice I know / a person I bought in to is being hi-jacked for advertising. It’s a bit like when close friends start to try and pyramid sell you… then you don’t see them for a loooooooong time!

Would you?

I’m with Seb, blogrolls are good. They are simple, visible, physical ways of exploring a network, finding stuff you want to read and seeing what kind of interests the writer has.

After much wringing of hands Bloglines even delivered the blogroll of my dreams, one which is based on my webfeed subscriptions so I don’t even need to update it.

“Save the blogroll”!

Cool, it’s out so I’ll out it again…

Anne Bartlett-Bragg of Learning Technologies has gone and done it, and good on her for it… Blogtalk Downunder:

“BlogTalk Downunder
** Advance Notice ** Initial expressions of interest **

The first blogging conference to be held in the southern hemisphere – incorporating Australia, New Zealand, SE Asia.

Date: 20 & 21 May, 2005
Venue: Sydney

Initial expressions of interest for refereed paper presentations (20 minutes + 10 minutes questions) or panel discussions can be sent to: Anne.Bartlett-Bragg@uts.edu.au
Details are currently being finalised and a website set-up with more information – don’t let that stop you sending expressions of interest though!!! The organising committee have some exciting international keynote speakers in mind and are determined to make this an event not to be missed in 2005!”

I know some of these categorys suck but would love to see a few more nominations in the ‘best designed’ blog category… I think that although we generally read each other through stripped down feeds it’s obvious that a lot of people put a heck of a lot of time into creating usable / functional / beautiful edublogs and that does a lot for the promotion of their use, I reckon.

So go on, have a stroll through your blogroll, who’s got the looks & feels… you can nominate directly to that category here.

The Edublog Awards nominations close Friday so get in there and nominate away, for me this part isn’t so much about nominating ‘the best of the best’ but people who deserve to be in the categories and get some recognition… a lot of people are commenting that they’re getting introduced to a heap of good blogs through this so the more you can facilitate that, tha’ better!

Does anyone have an opinion about how the voting should run at the other end, I’ve stated before that I think you should be able to vote for as many people as you want to but obviously not for one person in a particular category more than once… so there needs to be some kind of authentication… but I’m not keen on using a PHP survey tool… and the current nominations thing is a bit too open & unwieldy… are there any really cool & free poll sites we could use, or should we try and keep it all in the site?

Whaddya reckon?

I’m having lots of fun pushing Drupal around over at the incsub association and my latest post there is a bit of an “I want” / wishlist thing regarding groups (enterprising Drupal), blogs and wikis… here’s one of them:

“-I want to be able to create ‘groups’ – that is, if I have an undergraduate group of, say, 300 (not uncommon at all!) I want to have one central area and 10 ‘group areas’ which moreorless have the same functionality as the central area but which exist relatively autonomously (having been created by the one Drupal site and sustained by the same database).”

This and the wikifarm possibilities for PmWiki are the things that are getting me excited at the moment :O)