I’ve made another update to my homebrew standalone trackback and comment package. You can now edit the author, url and comment fields of comments. Those who host their own Radio Userland weblog can use this as a drop-in replacement for the Userland hosted service. Those using other weblog software will need to modify their templates.

Features

• Composite Trackback RSS feed
• Composite Comment RSS feed
• Trackback and Comment deletion (unfortunately, this does not propagate to the RSS feed)
• Comment Editing

Requirements

• Web Server capable of running cgi scripts
• Perl with the following Perl Modules:
  • File::Spec
  • Storable
  • CGI
  • CGI::Cookie

I believe that these are core modules as of Perl 5.6.0.

Download standalone trackback and comments.

8 Sept: Countering Spam in Standalone Trackback and Comments

27 Sept: Tag Moderation Update

I have no problems with the concept of Ad Supported RSS, but I have a lot of problems with its poor execution. Case in point, 2RSS. They recently added advertising in their Atom2RSS service. But they’ve trashed the signal to noice ratio in doing so.

I recently added a low volume, blogger provided feed to my subscription list. The only subscription link on the page went through Atom2RSS. And after going through the backlog, Atom2RSS injected six consectutive ads into the feed with no new content.

Compelling content might support one third advertising (by both number and footprint). I suspect that one fifth will prove a better threshold for most of us. If you want to stay in my reading list, then mind your signal to noise ratio.

Recently, I’ve been running across weblogs without an obvious link to their RSS feed. A quick look at the page source shows the requisite RSS auto-discovery links, so I can only assume that there is a standard template that makes it easy to omit the explicit link. Now, without naming names [cough TypePad cough], might I suggest that all weblogs with an RSS feed should contain an obvious feed link.

If you think that Aunt Tillie will be confused by all those angle brackets, then have the feed link go to a page explaining how RSS aggregation works. Those already in the know can quickly see the link and let their aggregators auto-discover the true feed. And those who click through will get a nice explanation. For extra credit, transform the true RSS feed into something that might appear in a single page aggregator.

John Patrick thinks the time is ripe for local fulfillment, the combination of online e-commerce and local fulfillment. And yes that would be nice, but what I really want is local escrow. There are plenty of services that help you package your goods for sale on eBay. I think that someone should turn it around and act as a buyer’s agent and provide local escrow.

We’ve all heard horror stories about auction fraud. And while I’m confident that buyers save enough on their good purchases to offset the bad over the long haul, I’m not sure that I’ll be in it long enough to see the long haul. I’d like to have a local business act as an escrow agent. They hold the money, sellers ship to them and buyers pickup from them.

I’d pay a modest premium to have that extra peace of mind.

It’s about time that someone revisited the design of the Wireless PCMIA card. IOGear’s Notebook Network Short Card is small enough to remain in the laptop at all times. It’s a pain to pack the network card away whenever the laptop goes back into the bag, so this will definitely be on the short list the next time I’m in the market.

[via The ‘Book Review]

You don’t owe me a thing. If anything, I’m in debt to you for generating an RSS feed. But after seeing a reference to a weblog that I thought that I was subscribed to and spending 30 minutes validating feed urls, I wish that everyone would be more diligent in announcing url changes.

With Gmail gathering all the press, I thought that I’d renew my recommendation for Fastmail email. The member account is a fabulous deal – a one time payment of $14.95 provides 16MB of storage and 80MB/month of bandwidth. Here are some of my favorite features.

I work from several computers. Having my personal email on Fastmail’s IMAP server provides me with common access from all of them, whether via an IMAP client or Fastmail’s web interface. If you’re concerned about security, then you can use IMAP over SSL or https for your entire web session.

Fastmail provides subdomain addressing in addition to rules for inbound mail sorting. If the primary email address is user-at-domain.com, then anything-at-user.domain.com can also be used as an email address. And if anything happens to map to a folder name, then it will be automatically sent to that folder.

A great deal at $14.95 for life.

Micha Ghertner thinks Wal-Mart is hated for being so damn successful. I tend to think it’s sex discrimination and time shaving on top of their success. We tolerate behavior from small, scrappy, up and comers that we abhor from big established firms. So while we may have looked the other way while they were fighting their way to the top, we’re not going to tolerate it now that they’re at the top.

Their corporate disavowal of sex discrimination and time shaving just doesn’t ring true to me. Wal-Mart is known for it’s fair but harsh business practices – suppliers get one mistake, two and they’re held accountable. Something is amiss when major corporations run scared and individual store managers don’t. If corporate was sending a clear message to stop, then I think that it would stop.

[via the Carnival of the Capitalists, this week’s host: Clay Whittaker]

Or is that second rate? This marks the first Survivor that I’ve primarily followed via Reality News Online, because Survivor All-Stars failed to deliver the goods live.

The game started with too much information. I knew too much about the players and the players knew too much about themselves. So I missed out on having their personalities revealed through play and the players started voting people out based upon past performance rather than current game play. But there was still hope for some conniving and backstabbing down the stretch.

But then, the game failed to deliver strategic twists down the stretch. This was the best strategy our All-Stars could come up with: stand by the Rob-father and hope for an immunity win? Their only chance for a win was to break the Rob-Amber dyad. Yet week after week we saw them play for third place.

Uggh.

lease welcome Macsimum Perspective and Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants to the blog roll. I keep my blog roll small by applying two criteria: you need to be interesting and you need to be low profile. Macsimum Perspective is a new weblog, but it’s rapidly becoming my favorite for Mac news. And Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants provides a nice Smalltalk perspective on the Software Industry.