Blob
>the personal blog of david n wallace
[aka Dave the Lifekludger]

Wonder why I’d been a bit quiet? I’ve been battling a sore shoulder since last Tuesday….finally got to get an x-ray today.

It’s broken! Fractured!

So will be a bit quiet until I figure out how to compute from bed effectively.

Photos to follow……no scar, no proof!

Dave

I got hit by my first dose of comment spam on this blog the other day. About 6 comments all much the same from the same given name and given url, with different IP addresses. This sent me looking for plugins for Wordpress to combat it and instead found a few tips on things I could do in Wordpress without installing a plugin to minimise spam. For simplicity I’ll put what I did in list form with links to refer to at the end.

• . Make sure Wordpress is at v1.5 as it has a number of anti spam comment features natively built in.
• . Set the number of links allowed in comments to 3 - any more than that, and the comment is auto-moderated. This is done in WP admin under “Options->Discussion->Comment Moderation”.
• . Put a list of blacklisted words in WP admin - the input box is again found under “Options->Discussion->Comment Moderation”. I used a combination of the words found at the Wordpress codex site and another bloggers black listed words. See bleow for my complete list. What I also did was added the common words being found in the spam I already received.
• . I checked every box except “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” in the top section under “Options->Discussion”. See screen capture below.

There’s many other plugins to try. The one getting most positive response seemed to be WP Hashcash, though as yet I haven’t tried this and will keep it up my sleeve if another barage of spam breaches my defences.

WP codex Combatting Spam
WP codex Spam Words
Usefull blog post by Tom Raftery
WP Hashcash plugin
My Spam Words list
Screen shot of my checked options in WP

Following advice Fang gave to Cam, I created a new sig for my lifekludger emails.

If you wanna see what it is send email to fangsigmeme@lifekludger.net and check out the sig!

Okay, so I didn’t put #1 here. Point is I’m having hellish time trying to get #2 working through a feed. And iTunes isn’t making it easier. So tried d/loading iPodder and the thing keeps telling me there’s errors and quits….so, lets try sticking it in here.

Blob2 - Attention, Recognition and Context.

No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

Temple Uni does a good Disability Blogs Roundup and this blog and Lifekludger get a wrap in roundup #4…

Disability Blogs Roundup, #4

I’ll start the roundup this month with a welcome to some new disability-related blogs. Australian David N. Wallace has put up TWO: blob is his personal blog, and LifeKludger is specifically for posts about strategies and technologies for barrier-busting. Samples: the former has a nice post on the concept of disintermediation as it relates to the history of disability rights; the latter has a recent post about the kinds of specialized robot arms Wallace would like to see developed.

Thanks Prof.

As you can see, I have blob up on my domain running on Wordpress.

I’ve modified the standard classic theme that WP installs to my liking.

Thanks to a script that takes posts from Blogger and imports them into Wordpress I found over at the Skeltoac blog, the process was less painfull than I’d anticipated.

The instructions were easy enough to follow if you’ve been around Blogger long enough.

Once the posts were in I had a lot of cleaning up to do. This was due to my insistance of using a specific font that wasn’t the default used in the Blogger template. That caused each post to have and styles insterted throughoput the posts when they were generated from Blogger. So a tip is to use whatever style Blogger puts out and avoid it imbedding inline styles.

Still a lot of things I want to do with blob but now the foundation is there to build on…and at last I have categories.

Skeltoac-http://www.skeltoac.com/2005/03/12/from-blogger-to-wordpress-2/

Rumours of my demise are much over-rated!

Yes, that’s right. Contrary to a couple posts (now deleted) this blog, called blob, is NOT going to disappear.

Instead, it will continue as my personal blog to be filled with all those wonderfull things I get to say you just can’t live without!

I will no doubt be moving what and where blob is hosted and will move to my domain dnwallace.com, while trying to keep the subscription links the same.

So, if you’ve unsubscribed and happenned over here … please subscribe to blob - the blog of david n wallace.

And while you are about it, you might like to subscribe to my lifekludger blog.

Cheers, Dave.

Hi folks (all 2 of you! :))

I’m starting ANOTHER blog! I’ve reached the limits of what Blogger can offer me so I’ll be using WordPress as the platform.

Blob will still be used but as my personal blog for anything that catches my eye.

The new blog will be called “Lifekludger” and generally be about the workarounds I use, or could use, to get around barriers in doing life with a disability as well as exploring other ‘life enriching’ kludges, hacks, technology and thoughts that might help us all in the world of “digitalis interuptus“, as Andy calls it.

In time some of these posts might re-appear over there if they are “kludgey’.

Please either wander over there or subscribe using this link

Cheers…and thanks Blogger!

Dave

www.ifekludger.net is now up and running!

We were brainwashed

Okay, I relent. I started out this blog thing not really knowing what I was doing and had formulated ’styling rules’ in my head and tried to follow them for consistency. Such things as “tiny font”, “small pic in top right-corner”, “no caps, just punctuation”, “cryptic titles” were the unwritten rules running around in my head as I wrote the posts.

As I read more of others blogs I began to see some holes in my ‘rules’. I also tripped over my own rules, especially on the post I wrote with Dragon Naturally Speaking - seems it didn’t know my rules and went ahead capitalising things! Gee, who would’ve thought!

I decided the font really was too ‘tiny’ so allowed myself to go to ’small’, which really looks too small still.

So I’ve decided to change my ‘rules’ (repeats silently to self - ‘change is good, change is good, change is good’). The thing that finally swung it was reading Darren’s post on 12 tips on writing content for your blog and the very top, number one tip was to use titles with keywords that tell what the post is about rather than a cryptic title. Pow! There goes the whole premise of the cryptic side to my blog.

Well, I’ve decided to change the titles themselves to be more relevant to what the actual post is about yet still maintain the cryptic bent by adding a sub-title to each post. Perhaps that way I can cater to me ‘creative’ whims whilst maintaining a blog that is easily readable and accessible.

i’ve always viewed computers and technology as a tool. especially from the time i acquired my disability. before that point in time computers hadn’t crossed my path much and technology i didn’t much think of in any terms other than a tv and a (beta) vcr. but being from a mechanical background, tools i knew! so i think i’ll share more about tools in future.

i’ve been on leave from work this week. i didn’t go away anywhere as traveling for me can be a pain, in the sense it becomes a logistical nightmare, instead i had a mate fly down from newcastle so we could hang out together. consequently i didn’t spend very much time in front of a pc. instead we did other interesting things.

one interesting thing was running an optical cable from my pc in the study to the digital amp in my lounge. this works beautifully and i can now play my mp3 music from my pc in the lounge through the speaker system. it took me a while to get the basic bits together and get all the bits in place and while it’s nothing new and astounding that has never been done before it is definately more than just a toy for me. it’s a tool.

this latest tool gets around my not being able to put cd’s in and out a cd player and enables me to share my music when i have friends around.

my next task is to install the wireless usb adapter on my pc and the sd wireless card in my o2 so i can use terminal services on my pda to control my pc and play music from anywhere in the house. i have what’s needed, just need the help and a bit of time. more about that step later. and more on some other of my life tools too.