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nofollow

If an href tag includes the rel="nofollow" attribute, well-behaved search engines won’t follow the links they represent when spidering. So if there was a way to automatically modify the links that comment spammers leave in comments, their chief goal — raising their standings in the search engines — would be deflated.

SixApart has just released the nofolllow plugin, which scans incoming comments and adds rel="nofollow" to each embedded link automatically. Normal users are not affected — they can still click the links. But the simple presence of links to spammer’s sites will do nothing whatsoever for their GoogleRanks.

The downside, as I see it, is that for this to be effective, it must be intalled in the majority of weblogs. Spammers need to understand that their campaigns are flaccid, and that won’t be true until most of the world is using a solution like this.

Just installed nofollow at birdhouse and at the J-School.

Music: African Head Charge :: Far Away Chant
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Hillicans

Hell, apparently, just froze over. A group of Republicans dissatisfied with what they perceive as a dearth of anti-immigration rhetoric from the right claims to have found what they’re looking for in… Hillary. And are supporting her for president in 2008.

We will sit still no longer.  Why support Hillary Clinton you ask?  Let’s be crystal clear.  We would much rather be supporting a Republican, however, Senator Clinton is the only national figure who will most probably run for president in 08, who is speaking truth.  A hard truth.  Many of us have fallen into the same trap as you over the years.  Hillary is a radical.  Hillary is a liberal.  Is she left of the social positions many of us have?  You bet.  But then compare her social positions with say a Rudy or McCain, the probable Republican nominees and it is a wash.

Speaking of Hillary, enlighten me here. I’ve always been mystified by the right’s aversion to her. She’s smart, forthright, and totally inoffensive. There’s nothing arrogant or condescending about her. Maybe I’m wrong, but is the far right’s dislike of her solely because she’s female? It seems hard to imagine that a man with a similar demeanor would engender such fervent dislike. What is it about her that I’m not seeing?

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New Webmail for Birdhouse

Working over the past few weeks to revamp Birdhouse’s webmail system. Because the default interface for CommuniGate’s built-in webmail is beyond ugly, we’ve been running SquirrelMail over IMAP for webmail since launch. But Squirrel doesn’t offer access to all of CGP’s built-in goodies, such as mail searching, rule editing, calendar, tasks, notes, secure login, etc. The solution was in finding the great collection of 3rd-party Wassp skins by SolidInterface. Impressed enough that I bought a license (very affordable!) and went for it.

Launched the new system last night (with aliases redirecting from customer domains), and customer reaction has been very positive. Left Squirrel online at a separate subdomain for people who had grown used to it.

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Origins of Dada

In Jon Carroll’s column in the Chronicle today, a nearly etymological reference, disconnected:

The origin of the word “dada” is muddled, and there probably never will be a definitive answer. In “The Dada Manifesto,” Romanian poet Tristan Tzara wrote: “Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, the howl of clashing colors, the intertwining of all contradictions, grotesqueries, trivialities: LIFE.” And there you have it.

Music: Kings Of Leon :: Rememo
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Good Afternoon, Mary

Freaky and somewhat beautiful, totally obsessive, but just strangge enough to justify itself, 2004: The Stupid Version — a short film about iPods by David Wellington and Adrian Peters (mneptok points out that the film is apparently called simply “iPods”). Walking SF streets tonight, looking at all the iPod Minis dangling from necks, all the “Life is Random” bus stop posters, perhaps the film is not so far off the mark. Other films by the pair here, but not as good.

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Kings of Leon != Strokes + Allmans

Dave Eggers has apparently started doing a monthly column for Spin Magazine (once upon a time, i.e. back in college, I subscribed and read like religion). His debut article is on why you should be digging Kings of Leon and why, no, they don’t sound like a cross between The Strokes and The Allman Brothers. The timing is perfect. My initial impression of Kings of Leon was that they were a less-interesting Strokes, with less city in their blood. Two days of Kings on the iPod and I’m begging forgiveness for forming opinions too quickly. Eggers explains why.

Kings of Leon are motorboats on crowded lakes and waterskiing in cutoffs and hiding Milwaukee’s Best in the forest, in the snow, in January, because your parents caught on that you were keeping cases in the fridge in the garage. Kings of Leon are knowing a guy in juvie and having a cousin who’s been in jail twice. And that cousin, by the way, the one with the burns all over his right forearm–nothing interesting, just an accident with coffee–that cousin, Terry, would love Kings of Leon if he gave them a chance.

Thanks Andrew

Music: Dead Meadow :: Dusty Nothing
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Play-Dough Hat Hair

Miles was wearing his fireman’s hat for like three hours tonight, never left his head. Amy finally went to take it off him, only to find it stuck. Hunh? She pries it off and looks inside: A big honkin’ lump of blue Play-Dough, mushed into the dome and glommed into his hair. Then more fun discovering that a small wad of Play-Dough can be used to make a little plastic person walk up the side of a wooden house. Making Play-Dough hamburgers, um-um (ice cream), green beans, making sure everyone gets a bite. Learning the difference between eating food made out of Play-Dough for real and eating it for pretend. Learning why it’s not the best idea to mix the colors too thoroughly, or to let dried bits of Play-Dough from previous sessions become intermingled with the current project.

Two months ago Play-Dough was this bizarre substance he wasn’t quite sure what to make of, regarded with trepidation; now it’s an obsession surpassed only by Thomas the Tank Engine (more on Thomas another night).

Music: Black Arks :: Come Along
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Mac Mini 2U

So… how long before someone sticks four Mac minis in a 2U rack for a cheap $2k server cluster? (e.g. web, mail, dns, and sftp). Just a dynamite little box for sysadmins. Amy’s jazzed – ordering one for her tonight; she’ll attach it to the Studio Display I’m using now, and I’ll switch to 20″ iMac. Two machines for what a PowerMac would have cost. More KoolAid!

Music: Circle Jerks :: Product of My Environment
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WebDAV on Birdhouse

A birdhouse user wanted the ability to publish their iCal calendar to their own site rather than purchasing a .Mac account, so I’ve enabled WebDAV in apache. For now, I’m enabling user-home-level (or custom dir) WebDAV access on a per-request basis.

WebDAV alone does not give a server the ability to parse iCal .ics files into web-enabled calendars — users still need to subscribe to the .ics file and view it locally in iCal. To produce a full Web calendar from an .ics file requires post-processing by some kind of server-side software. Apple uses a proprietary WebObjects system, but open source equivalents are available — will look into those soon.

DAV functionality goes beyond iCal subscription access — users who want it can now mount their birdhouse home dir directly in the Finder or Explorer (or use any DAV client, such as Goliath). Working out a couple of small kinks before a full rollout.

Music: Kings Of Leon :: Velvet Snow
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Tangled Legacy of The Magic Band

For fans of The Good Cap’n: At Beefheart.com, an interesting entanglement of letters and articles (check the links in the top grafs) by members of The Magic Band on what it was like to work with Don van Vliet (consensus is, generally miserable but rewarding) and on whether Beefheart actually wrote every note of every track of Troutmask Replica on piano in 8.5 hours — a factoid that’s casually tossed into most cocktail conversations about Beefheart but that turns out to be almost certainly untrue — a leftover from an old Rolling Stone article, now almost canonical. Or even whether he wrote most of the music at all.

Amazing (or perhaps not) to hear that the band to this day hasn’t seen a single check from royalties (Bill Harkelroad tells of running a record store and re-ordering Trout Mask regularly, even into the 90s, without ever receiving royalties).

And some weird bamboozlement about a Henry Kaiser interview that Kaiser claims never happened. But “You can read Henry Kaiser’s statement about a non-existent interview and made-up quotes, along with Dave DiMartino’s response and a full transcript of the interview which Kaiser claims never took place.”

Trying to make sense of it all feels like it might have felt to play in The Magic Band for even five minutes. Got to check out some of this reunion material (sans van Vliet).

Thanks baald.

Music: Ray Anderson :: The Gahtooze