I suggested to Carl over at Codegolf that the old reverse game would make an interesting challenge. He agreed, and after making some changes to his site’s back-end (to accommodate multiple correct solutions) he unveiled the challenge today: http://codegolf.com/reverse
I can’t wait to give it a try!
I’ve re-launched my little Django-powered pastebin (formerly paste.e-scribe.com) under its own shiny new $8 domain name: dpaste.com. Not that the world really needs another pastebin, but people have been using it daily and it’s a fun side project. From the about page:
Philosophy: Simplicity and usability. The grayscale look makes the colorized source code stand out. Cookie-based personal defaults eliminate lots of extra form widgetry. Automatic expiry means the database never fills up. Auto-focus on the Code field means mouse-free operation. No required fields means you can paste, tab, return, and go. No running list of recent items means the spammers remain invisible. And Django makes nice clean URLs the path of least resistance.
It’s now official: right-minded people hate those little “Blog me, digg me, add me to your feed baby!” icons attached to blog posts. References:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/93-its-the-content-not-the-icons
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/10/10/mooching_20/
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000587.html
Maybe I’m part of the problem. I avoid the Nascar-style decorations, but I do have text links at the bottom of each post that cover three such sites. My links are tasteful, of course – no icons, just gray text. Faster than a bookmarklet, even, since you can use them right from the front page of the blog. But I do feel mixed about them.
After seeing a similar offering from the Web 2.0 pastebin Attachr I couldn’t resist. So here’s a simple TextMate command that submits selected text to paste.e-scribe.com, opening the new URL in your default web browser. Bonus features: the filename is used as the title, and the language syntax is guessed from the file extension.
This is a very crude little script, but too much fun not to share. Download paste.tmCommand.zip and double-click the resulting .tmCommand file, that should be all there is to it.
This past spring I posted about a simple pastebin app I wrote using Django. This week I updated it to use the excellent Pygments syntax-coloring library (formerly known as Pykleur).
Pygments has support for a healthy number of languages/syntaxes, offers a great deal of flexibility, ships with several different color schemes, and can produce output in HTML/CSS, LaTEX, or ANSI terminal colors. I created a “pcat” alias to take advantage of that last one when working in the shell.
My spam stats page was broken for a while, but I’ve fixed it. Looks like I’m rejecting about 10,000 spam attempts per day, which is significantly less than I expected given the rate of growth when I last checked the numbers a few months ago. It’s possible some of this reduction is due to the fact that I’m no longer collecting spam via spamtrap addresses, with some of those addresses (which accounted for about a third of my total spam volume) falling off the lists of spammers who actually check for deliverability.
I’ve yanked out my own crude anti-comment-spam tests and replaced them with a nice tidy call to the Akismet API. If this works out I’ll most certainly incorporate it into the Django version of the blog – there’s a nice Python interface as well.
seanrox commented on Thu Aug 24 14:58:33 2006:
Akismet is nice and works wonders on comment spam as you’ll see on your site.
The guys over at automattic.com really know their stuff.