Theft of the Day: Blogfox

For a couple of days the new search engine Blogfox.de allows its visitors to review various blogs and feeds. Nico Lumma of Blogg.de believes the Blogfox spider crawls files even if they are forbidden or restricted by the robots.txt – proof can be found in the logfiles of Blogg.de. Especially after being notified of these matters, the owner of Blogfox made a statement that their spider bot crawled several sites with all free accessable files, including opml, serp and other informational data. I personally believe these sites are meant to fail. To steal content from your competitors is one thing, but not to admit this treachery of honest content distribution is another one…

/von

Blogspirit E-Mail Notifications

I was surprised today as I received an email by Blogspirit concerning the communities I created a long time ago. The email below was automatically generated by the software, but unfortunately I am unable to find any kind of email notification settings within the administration panel. This does not mean that I dislike the feature, but I’d rather prefer to select what kind of emails I receive and which are rather redundant. I strumbled upon the idea of tracking comments via email as Philippe filed me a reply to my comment via email. Apparently, the function for „email notification upon new comment entry“ must be hidden somewhere in the settings – but am I too blind to find it? Perhaps Thomas or Philippe himself may have the answer… and now back to the email about the community.

Subject: A new blog in your BlogSpirit community

Hello,

BlogSpirit is proud to inform you that the blog Drippings of a constipated mind … has just integrated the community Blogosphere to which you subscribed. We hope that this new member will take part to develop your community.

Have a nice community blogging !

BlogSpirit Team
http://www.blogspirit.com

First of all a warm welcome to the BadBrother Blog called „Drippings of a constipated mind …“! This guy already created some interesting articles concerning the situation of Blogspirit. But the miraculous wonderings most people had about the free service of Blogspirit are easily explained in the recent changes of the software package. A free and a paid version will offer different functions and abilities for your blog.

/von

Mysteries

Health is vital for me. I wonder what keeps this strange cold alive. I already consumed dozents of pills, cough syrup and fizzy tablets just to keep my physical self stable. Twenty minutes ago I had an intensive cough attack, and now everything seems to be fine again. Who knows what will come next.

But earlier today, my girlfriend’s computer found its own way of not accepting the LAN at my place. Apparently, the plug for the LAN will not activate the internal „Yes, I found LAN! Let’s be online!“ processes of this stupid device. Instead, it creates the fabulous only windows internal 169.254.xx.yy network where nobody can access it ever. I guess the connector is broken since the cable works fine at my laptop. I think it’s time to get WLAN for both of us… much better in concern of movability and flexibility. So far Katharina and myself are meant to sit on the couch with the two cables dangling off our laptops. Once we find time to get together in a new appartment, the WLAN will give us the opportunity to browse the net while sitting in the kitchen, or relaxing in the bedroom, watching DVDs and doing online research in the living room, actually working in the office room, and for some digital fun in the bathroom, too! I’m looking forward to it!

/von

Comment Confusion

Now I’m fed up with the whole situation. Thankfully, Thomas offered some help with my problem. But somehow I sense there’s an error in the URL redirection of the comments processing as usually the finally sent comment will appear on the article’s permalink site – but with this current comments processing, it lures the user to the „preview comment“ page over and over. I wrote Thomas this email – of course I have no file attached here:

Dear Thomas,

I was unable to update the comments template with my own layout
modifications, but now your admin interface allows me to do that. However, I
took the restored code for the comments template and placed it again online
– including my layout additions.

Now it behaves like the following:
If I preview the comment (from the first time on the permalink page), the
preview page of the comments template includes all my comment values and
shows me the preview. If I modify the comment and preview it again, it shows
the preview fine, too.

This is the problem:
Whenever I send the comment and not preview anymore, be it from the
permalink page or the comment preview page, it shows me the comment preview
page again without any input (not the mhash, not the post_id, not the
comment, name, link and email) and without redirecting to the original
permalink page to see my comments. You may test this on your own in my blog.
I’m not sure what I forgot or where I made a mistake in the comment
template.

I attached the modified comment template to this email. I erased a few
things in the first area of the meta tags as they are actually obsolete to
my own modifications. Most of my modifications are inserted between line 62
and 112 as the header and first part of the body’s layout, while I erased
the banner-div layers around line 117, and from line 182 to the end is again
my own html footer.

Best regards,
Mike Schnoor

Feel free to contact me by visiting:
The Alternative to Urban Reality – https://mikeschnoor.com/

I can only pray that this is just a minor error and not a result of my own layout modifications… who knows what the future will bring us ;)

/von

Blo.gs for sale

,

The pinged-by-blogs monitor platform Blo.gs is for sale. Basically, the package contains the domain name blo.gs and weblo.gs, the database full of blog adresses and feed urls, and „all rights to the software“ as long as the new owner keeps in mind that the whole platform is based on open source technology. I don’t wonder what made Jim Winstead jr. change his mind of being a blog provider:

i don’t have a price in mind, so don’t ask. cash-flow wise, the site has cost approximately $3500 to date (mostly for hosting), and has earned less than $750 (mostly from google adsense ads).

Will $4000 suffice the whole effort and price? In the end, he will earn $500 plus all his previous expenses.

/von

Comment Trouble

Currently, I have encountered some severe errors with the comment template. I’m not sure why but sometimes the comments are being erased. Therefore, I have manipulated the comment template and erased any coding within it and just put a meta refresh to my blog’s start page. In other words, I asked Blogspirit for help… let’s see what they can make out of it – here’s my „help me“ comment to Philippe:

I believe I strumbled across an error concerning the comments template. Before the updates and changes, the template was not in use by the software – I guess never modified the layout to match with the rest of mine. But now the comments template is apparently an essential part and is in use – I noticed this because of the weird looking layout (which is just the rough css template) – however it will only give a „preview your comment“ again and again, and sometimes it will not submit the comment to the blog.
The comments page does not guide the user back to the original post, after previewing twice the post-id value is lost.

I erased the whole comments „preview page“ with a simple meta-refresh to my blog’s startpage and erased the „preview“ button, too – it annoyed me that my commentators/visitors were sent to „preview your comment forever“ pages.

I hope you are still able to comment, and if possible, try to comment here for testing… I’m confused!

/von

Support for Blogspirit

I believe it is time to put some more effort on my side into the already well done work of the Blogspirit team. I took Philippe’s original instructions and translated them for a greater audience into english:

To profit from the latest additions to Blogspirit, you have to update the template pages of your blog immediately. In order to get this update into work, go to „Design“ > „Advanced Settings“ and mark all various templates checked (except the Stylesheet and Calendar Template), and click on the button to „Restore original version“.
Warning: If you have already implemented these templates in your blog with manual html or layout modifications, your changes will be lost. Remember to create backups before restoring the originals. If your modifications only remain on the Stylesheet or Calendar Template, you do not have to worry since you will not update these templates.
This kind of update includes several thousands of blogs is quite complex to maintain. All pages of all blogs have to be updated and this operation can only be made on your individual niveau. You will have to wait a few days or weeks to see all blogs on Blogspirit being on the most recent status.

I mainly used a translator to catch the drift of the original french writing, and I will not take any guarantee for the correctness of this advisory. It is all up to you, I am not liable for what you do. Thanks ;)

/von

Illness Overload

What did the weekend bring? Nothing but stress found within learning and utmost pain. I should stay in bed instead of sitting on the couch infront of my laptop and next to my documentations. I have deep coughs, pain in my limbs and continous headaches. I am suffering. Only Katharina joined me in this time of inner crisis, I am thankful for her support. The only perspective for this week is to survive the last set of final tests without going to the doctor to be given a medical certificate – for not participating in the final tests. But then it’s time for a most relaxing party here in Flensburg and in Sonderburg… before the two of us will move to Berlin for a nice holiday and then to Greifswald to meet with Katharina’s family.

/von

Update Testing

I guess Blogspirit pushed the previously announced Updates into its database. Let’s find out if the trackback works and if everything is being displayed correctly…

/von

The Weekend

I can’t wait for the weekend to begin! And now it’s about to be over again… currently I’m enrolled in listening to this song by Michael Gray. After I woke up a little bit too late, I had a fast and steady breakfast consisting out of a meshed egg on a roll and a nice cocoa. My girlfriend Katharina was already finished, so we cuddled a little bit more on my couch before we went out for a walk in the snowy park. It was beautiful to watch her infront of the city’s skyline. The park is on a hill and it is possible to locate nearly every corner of the city from the park’s viewpoints. Now its time for some excercises in Statistics 1 – I’d rather like to do something else than tearing my eyes apart due to the overload of formulars and and and and and.

Earlier we’ve been watching a new show on Pro Sieben called „Do Over“. Sometimes I wish I was young again to change my future, but then – what would I loose instead? Would I ever be as happy as I am now? I’d probably have never met this woman… so where’s the reason behind changing what you have now if you have reached a state of personal peace, enjoyment, love, fascination and inner strength?

/von