Until very recently, the URLs for individual blog posts on this site looked something like:

http://mikeboers.com/blog/601/friendlier-and-safe-blog-post-urls

The 601 is the ID of this post in the site's database. I have always had two issues with this:

1. The ID is meaningless to the user, but it is what drives the site.
2. The title is meaningless to the site (you could change it to whatever you want), but it is what appears important to the user.

What they would ideally look like is:

http://mikeboers.com/blog/friendlier-and-safe-blog-post-urls

But since I tend to quickly get a new post up and then edit it a dozen times before I am satisfied (including the title) the URL would not be stable, and implementations I have seen in other blog platforms would force the URL to retain the original title of the post, not the current title.

So I have come up with something more flexible that gives me URLs very similar to what I want, but allow for (relatively) safe changes in the title of the post (and therefore the URL).

Read the full post...

My site recently (finally) started to get hit by automated comment spam. There are few ways that one can traditionally deal with this sort of thing:

1. Manual auditing: Manually approve each and every comment that is made to the website. Given the low volume of comments I currently have this wouldn't be too much of a hassle, but what fun would that be?
2. Captchas: Force the user to prove they are human. ReCaptcha is the nicest in the field, but even it has been broken. But this doesn't stop human who are being paid (very little).
3. Honey pots: Add an extra field to the form (e.g. last name, which I currently do not have) that is hidden by CSS. If it is filled out one can assume a robot did it and mark the comment as spam. This still doesn't beat humans.
4. Contextual filtering: Use Baysian spam filtering to profile every comment as it comes in. By correcting incorrect profiles we will slowly improve the quality of the filter. This is the only automated method which is able to catch humans.

I decided to go with the last option, as offered by Akismet, the fine folks who also provide Gravatar (which I have talked about before). They have a free API (for personal use) that is really easy to integrate into whatever project you are working on.

Now it is time to try it out. I've been averaging about a dozen automated spam comments a day. With luck, none of them will show up here.

*crosses his fingers *

Update:
I was just in touch with Akismet support to offer them a suggestion regarding their documentation. Out of nowhere they took a look at the API calls I was making to their service and pointed out how I could modify it to make my requests more effective in catching spam!

That is spectacular support!

I recently discovered a charming web service called RoboHash which returns an image of a robot deterministically as a function of some input text. Take a gander at a smattering of random robots:

These would make an awesome fallback as an avatar for those without a Gravatar set up, since it will always give you the same robot if you enter the same email address. So of course I implemented it for this site!

Read the full post...

I have pushed a lot of changes to my website in the last week.

• All of the source code driving this site is now available on GitHub under the BSD license.
• All of the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
• I can now render gorgeous math courtesy of MathJax:

\[ J_\alpha(x) = \sum_{m=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^m}{m! \, \Gamma(m + \alpha + 1)}{\left({\frac{x}{2}}\right)}^{2 m + \alpha} \]

Hopefully that doesn't look like a jumble of backslashes. *crosses his fingers*

I have finally pushed out the start of my new website. While not everything works quite yet, and some of the formatting has been lost in the transition from Posterous, it is at least good enough for me to start using it.

Things which still need work include:

• formatting of old content Done(ish).
• better styling of general typography Done.
• automatically pull in other services (eg. Flickr, Reddit, etc.) Done.
• better separation between these blog posts and other services (eg. Twitter)
• preparing the source for publishing (eg. remove secret keys) Done; see GitHub.
• tags on blog posts
• deal with timezones, as my dev machine and server are different Done.

And a whole bunch more!