Next Generation Blogging Software and the Open Source Philosophy
Posted by Moses on Apr 2, 2007
Update: I got taken. 
See the first 2 comments below. It turns out that ForkPress and K3 were April Fool’s hoaxes for the launch of the first release of Habari. So I’ve marked out that parts of the post that are hoax related. The rest is still valid.
Earlier today I was doing my usual web surfing and I came across a project called ForkPress which is an offshoot of Habari, which is itself a ground up replacement for WordPress the software that runs Three Sticks. As a relatively, new blogger I was surprised that there was such contention in the open source community regarding the different blogging platforms.
Apparently, some of the key developers for WordPress disagree with the founder’s decision to take WordPress in a commercial direction. As a result, many of the more well known WordPress developers left to create a new blogging platform called Habari. Although I certainly understand the concern regarding the commercial push of WordPress, there appears to be a strong commitment to by the WordPress leadership to the open source version of WordPress so I’m surprised that there are such hard feelings.
I personally don’t see anything wrong with providing a commercial alternative for users who lack the confidence or desire to manage a blog and its infrastructure. I am also concerned with reducing the developer focus for a seemingly popular tool that has an active user community that produces a vast number of useful plugins. This is one of the downsides to the open source community. Successful projects that are able to compete with purely commercial projects can easily lose their momentum through infighting and disagreements, leaving the average user with the following choices, all of which are unattractive:
- Continue to use the software that has been abandoned
- Use the new replacement software that lacks maturity, stability and functionality
- Switch to a purely commercial version
On the other hand the richness of the open source community is driven by developers creating projects that effectively tear down an existing project and rebuild it from the ground up creating a much improved version. In many ways this is simply the open source community’s implementation of the scientific process where theories are developed and then torn down and rebuilt with a higher level of understanding.
The key to maintaining the success of the open source movement is striking a balance between the constant rebuilding of existing tools and providing enough stability for the end users to make use of those tools in their own projects.
I believe that this is a valuable role that commercial enterprises can fill. Providing support and stability for customers are functions that many commercial companies perform exceedingly well. For those who are interested in staying on the cutting edge and dealing with the subsequent challenges it makes sense to leverage the improvements found in new projects.
For example, prior to the reaching it’s first release disagreement among the developers in the Habari project has resulted in a new project called ForkPress. It has already developed a following among some in the development community including the developer of the popular K2 theme engine for WordPress. His new version K3 will only support ForkPress.
I’ll continue to watch the unfolding drama, but given that I’ve just gotten to the point where I’m effectively managing Three Sticks on the WordPress platform, I’m not likely to change to a new platform anytime soon.
Update: For more clarification read the comments from those involved who took the time to set the story straight. Thanks guys.
Tags: blog, blogging, forkpress, habari, hoax, open source, software, technology, wordpress
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Dealing with Comment Spam and Trackback Spam
Posted by Moses on Mar 29, 2007
Three Sticks has been inundated lately with comment and trackback spam. I conservatively estimate that I have to review and delete 300 - 500 trackback and comment spams per day. Obviously this is getting old. Since I tend to just scan through the comment / trackback moderation cue, it is possible that I have deleted legitimate comments / trackbacks. If I have, I apologize. I am taking steps to address this problem.
I’ve been using the AntiLeech tool to stop sploggers. This has been fairly successful. There are still a few sites that are stealing some of my content.
This morning I installed Bad Behavior which in it’s default setting seems to block approximately 30 - 50% of the spam I was receiveing earlier. This is a good start. I will also include Trackback Validator (a research project at Rice University) this evening to see if I can further reduce the spam load. Trackback Validator has an option for you to automatically transmit your spam logs Rice for further research. I really like the idea of supporting a university project. However if it doesn’t prove sufficient, I may also try Akismet. It’s free for personal use (ex. your site makes less that $5/per month).
The spam problem is really upsetting, because the most popular links in my logs are the trackback links. I may have to turn off the links after a set periods as I suggested earlier. I really don’t want to do that for 2 reasons:
- I’m still building up traffic to the site
- I want to site to be as open as possible and to help other bloggers build their own traffic by linking to Three Sticks.
However, if I am unable to remedy the situation I will close off comments and trackbacks after a set time probably between 14 - 30 days.
Update 4/2/2007
I went ahead and installed Comment Timeout to closeout comments, trackback and pings after a 45 days or 90 days after the last trackback, comment or ping is sent to the article, which ever is later.
I also added code to my .htaccess file to block TrackBack/1.02 which seems to be a bad bot that infects other computers enabling them to perform a limited denial of service attack on a website or blog.
To block the TrackBack/1.02 user agent I added the following to the bottom of my .htaccess file. I caution that if you are weary about editing you .htaccess file then you should use the established plugins above rather than attempting to edit the file. You can disable your blog by incorrectly editing you .htaccess file.
My Additions to My .htaccess file
# BEGIN SPAMMER
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^TrackBack/*” spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^lwp-trivial/*” spammer=yes
Order allow, deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer
# END SPAMMER
I got the idea from MacMerc.com.
Tags: blogging, comment spam, solutions, spam, splog, splogger, technology, trackback spam, TrackBack-1.02
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