Mountebank Blog

This is a test from vagablog–a small program to allow blogging directly from the palm (in this case the new Treo 650).

In the spirit of unceasing fiddling, I’ve implemented Spam-Karma, in addition to AuthImage, for a try at getting rid of comment spam, and trackback spam, and still keeping the option of having trackbacks turned on. Let’s see how it works. (And while I was at it, I installed a one-click plugin manager, too.)

Just when I was feeling so proud that by using a captcha I had eliminated any bit of comment spam, I got hit with a new one….trackback spam.

And I’ve never even had a real trackback! 🙁

So for now, I’ve just turned off trackbacks. Who needs them.

Thanks to Cyd for pointing out that this Blog was sort of invisible for a while! I think that the problem was when I eliminated the blogsnob script from the template (it was throwing some script errors that bugged me). Somehow I screwed everything up, and I didn’t even know it–because my bookmark points to https://mountebank.org/blog/index.php . It was /index.html that was screwed up.

In any case, it’s back and working again–basically I just eliminated that index.html –I hope I didn’t really need it!

In salute to Patrick O’Brian, I’ve generally used this little animated version I “derived” from a Geoff Hunt print as my avatar in any online forum where I was allowed to use one. It’s a nice little picture, and I enjoy looking at it, so I assume others do, too. I don’t know how much it really represents me, but I got very accustomed to it, and it seems at least as appropriate as most of the other avatars I see around.

But in setting up my own Xanga blog, as part of the experiment of having my 095 students do the same, I decided to use an avatar (they call it a “profile pic” at Xanga) that would maybe look more like me. I remembered that I had seen this fun Portrait Illustration Maker linked on the Scribbling Woman blog some time ago. The students had a great time creating their own pictures, although (of course, as recommended) not all of them used them on their blogs. But now, from walking through it with the students, I’ve got two of myself. Which is Jekyll? and which is Hyde?

And now, in joining a new forum or two, I’m wondering whether to use one of these new, but more traditional, portraits, or my old familiar ship of the line.

I just can’t seem to get it to work. There’s a way to do it, and some cool features in one of the versions (inline image attachments, no access for users not in the database), but I keep getting these errors (Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in blahblahblah/wp-includes/template-functions-category.php on line 90 ) and if I keep trying, the email account I’ve set up for this totally stops accepting email at all. This is way beyond my php ability, and I see others having the same problem, too.

Maybe in a while somebody will figure it out!

It seems WordPress is working on it–it’s bug #0000167 on the wordpress mosquito.