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.
The long-awaited (by me) conversion of this blog to Django is underway. After a couple hours’ work I have a full set of models and a functioning admin, and working index and detail views of postings and comments. Searching, posting comments, and tags are the major pieces remaining. Because of my busy schedule I’ll only be able to work on it in fits and starts, but I expect the total labor in the end to be about five hours.
I’ve tiptoed into the Web 2.0 world by adding a couple small Ajax features to the blog.
First, there’s now a “More” link at the top of my Random Bookmarks sidebar which fetches another seven random links from the server and plugs them into the page without reloading.
Second, I added a gratuitous animated roll-unroll toggle to the comment form, and made it closed by default. OK, that’s not Ajax, that’s just fluff.
My “Let’s play a game” post, featuring a simple number game implemented in three different scripting languages, has received many comments and updates in the few weeks it’s been up. There are now twelve implementations, seven written by me (wide variations in quality!) and five contributed by readers. The languages represented, as of today: Haskell, Io, JavaScript, Lisp, Logo, Lua, PHP, Prolog, Python, REBOL, Ruby, and Scheme.
I’ve learned a hell of a lot, and gotten some good ideas about which languages might be rewarding to dive into further. My favorite new discovery so far is Io. It’s clean, simple, consistent, and yet very pragmatic at the same time (e.g. lots of useful bindings, embeddable, etc.). The messaging syntax feels very natural, and the lack of brackets (cf. Objective-C) gives more than just visual relief: you don’t have to backtrack to the beginning of the expression to insert a bracket when you decide you need to chain one more message on the end.
Can’t stop tweaking the blog engine. Added:
.txt to any individual post URL to see the Markdown source, like this (mostly added for the benefit of people curious about Markdown)