First of all if you don’t know what Microblogging is, and you’re lazy to type Wikipedia into you’re location bar here’s the link to the the entry about it. Long story short, it’s basically some sort of online community where you can post public and private messages usually of 140 characters, the size of an SMS. It depends on your encoding, and responses on services like jaiku can be much longer, but that’s just to get you sort of an idea what it’s about.

This cap of characters your able to use is already the first problem you’ll probably face using Pidgin as you have absolutely no idea how many characters you already typed into the input field while the web sites of the services themselves usually show some sort of counter next to the input area or field. This brings us to our first plugin:

ConvCharCount

It’s kind of a no brainer to guess what it does. It counts the characters contained within the input area of Pidgin and shows the count on the right side of the bar where the emoticons, formatting and the like are located. Get it here

Pidgin identi.ca/Twitter Status

These two plugins set your status message to whatever your last dent on identi.ca or tweet on twitter was, only use one at the same time. Installation is quite easy, on Linux and you should already have everything you need to run them, on Windows however you’ll probably need to install ActivePerl. Which isn’t uncommon and you need for a lot of Pidgin plugins. Anyway here’s the like for the identi.ca plugin and here’s the one for the Twitter one.

Twitter in your profile

It puts your last tweet inside your protocol’s profile at a position you defined. You can put all your usual stuff in there and tell the plugin where it has to put the text of your last tweet. Personally, I don’t see a use for this. Is there anyone who even pays attention let alone looks at profiles on instant message services? Well, if your part of such a group this is probably for you. It works and it does what it promises. Link

Microblog-Purple

This is the one plugin you should probably keep an eye on or maybe even start using it today. I currently only supports Twitter, but other services like Jaiku and identi.ca are planned for the future. When Twitter dropped it’s xmpp support a lot of people were sort of pissed as they couldn’t use pidgin anymore to post tweets. Ping.fm already existed at this point which some did not want to use following their Stallmanian ways. Microblog-Purple, when activated adds another protocol to your account management: TwitterIM. After you gave it your password and account name you can start writing and reading tweets. Link

I know that there are a lot of desktop application like Twitux, Twhirl and Gwibber out there which do an amazing job and which I used for a while and appreciate all the work that was put into them but I prefer to not run one gazillion applications at the same time, and if Pidgin does the job. Why not?

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In the evening my shared host provider sent me an email in which he explained that they though there was an DoS attack directed at my page and that they had to move me on an isolated server, after a quick email discussion and me telling them that it was in fact the digg front page what caused DoS like traffic they put me back on line.

There are few things I could have done to prevent the site from going down, the best probably being getting a root or managed server instead of an shared host but that’s not a quick solution and as I think this is probably an isolated case not really necessary. Now the support team of my hosting provider gave me this great tip on how to get rid of all that incoming digg traffic which was taking down my site with some short two lined addition to my .htaccess-file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?digg\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

These to lines will drop incoming traffic from digg and show them a forbidden instead of forwarding them to my index.php where a lot of load is produced executing or accessing php files. Some people will assume the site remained done, some will be just confused why they’re forbidden to access the site, as I know digg some will shout censorship, and those who know what happened will just enter the URL in their address bar and access it this way as only traffic from digg is blocked. Anyway, I thought there is maybe a more elegant way, which I didn’t use because I did not know what Wikipedia’s policy would say about this and to be honest I’m just too lazy to dig it up. It is possible to to redirect incoming traffic from a specific source, in this case digg to a completely different URL and one that would suit quite well is the Wikipedia entry about the digg/slashdott/etc. effect.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?digg\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg_effect$1 [r=301,nc]

Well those two are what I could have done, but when I noticed what was happening most of the traffic has already had happened and at this point there was nothing I could do.

I think I was quite lucky that I installed the wp super cache add-on for WordPress which cached pages, making static URL files being served instead of executing the PHP files every single time which reduced the load at least to some extend but it clearly wasn’t enough and the server struggled every time a new page has to be cached.

Is there anything else more I could have done? I love the idea of a WordPress plug-in that puts those lines in my .htaccess every time a set number of visitors from digg or other social media sites tried to access the page, I don’t even know if this kind of automation is even possible though.

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Wikipedia e.v. was forced to stop the forward because Lutz Heilmann brought this to court and explained that the Wikipedia entry about him contained untruthful accusations of him dropping out of university and engaging in dubious affairs within the porn industry, which apparently wasn’t the case.

When it became public that a member of the Party “Die Linke” (lit. the left) which inherited a lot of Members of the PDS successor to former GDR ruling Party SED the press and the general public was crying out loud, wrote about the lack of understanding of democratic principles by former East German politicians and the their Party. For one, the Party, while controversial had nothing to do with this, and her Member made use of his right as a citizen to protect himself from false accusations.

notice on wikipedia.de (German)

Being able to question wrong accusations is of course in favour of every German citizen, but what I want to criticise is how the law handles such cases, the domain wikipedia.de isn’t hosting any content, and shouldn’t be target of such rulings. Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia a non-profit organisation in the United States and therefore not liable under German law which the judge acknowledged and within his right ruled that the forward should be suspenend.

German Internet related laws are increasingly outdated and incredibly web2.0 hostile and while classic journalists, the printed media and most of television is being protected by the freedom of the press, and freedom of speech laws by some extend, Internet forums, social networks and blogs are not. There is a large number of lawyers basically living on suing their way through the blogoshpere.

Lutz Heinemann luckily abandoned his lawsuit, but he was in his right to sue the German Wikipedia e.v. and the authors of the entry about him but not every case is resolved this quickly without any notable damage to the German Internet crowd. But I doubt anything will change, as everyone seems to be focused on bashing the “Die Linke” instead of finally proposing laws that will help to deal with the reality of the Internet of the 21st Century.

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His idea is as brilliant as it is simple, he just quartered a video of Rick Astley which is not “Never gonna give you up” (kudos to you Mr.doob), and uploaded each of them. He now wrote some little JavaScript for his page so he could start, restart and pause the videos together and removed their Youtube chrome. The result is amazing, four videos become one, four times the resolution, four times the size.

Now I doubt that we will see a lot of such, or similar videos following this idea, and I doubt google is really fond of it but I’ve to admit I’d love to see a 32×32 vid on a large screen, just for the sake of it, ha!

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Access to them is pretty easy but not very intuitive since everywhere inside GMail you only get forwarded to your inbox’ atom feed. It would be more convenient if could subscribe to tags right on the page of the specific tag. But well, It works so yeah, no need to complain I guess.

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/<label>

Are the feed urls, just add them to your reader of choice.

Wait, no, there’s a catch. Your feed reader has to support access of authenticated feeds and now guess which popular feed reader does not support this feature. If you guessed Google Reader, than your right. Google’s own feed reader can’t handle the GMail feeds. Firefox’ dynamic bookmarks do however support it, not sure about the Sage add-on though.

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Features and fixes in version 1.13:

• Fixed bugs relating to link colour switching in the theme options menu
• Added an option to disable image hovers in the theme options menu
• Properly cleared entry div to fix floated blockquotes and other floated elements
• Added automatic author comment highlighting

You can grab the newest release on the theme’s website

For those who don’t know Vigilance let me tell you about this great theme.

Vigiliance is a theme for the WordPress blog software and has been released under the GNU GPLv3, it focuses on readability, a elegant default colour scheme and a couple of features you could expect to find in in commercial premium themes like a dedicated options page in the design-section of you admin panel. Options range from an easy way to change colours, the looks and header images of the theme to easy ways to include code for Google Analytics or Google Adsense without having to install a plugin or alter files of the theme.

One recent design change on my blog you may have noticed was the inclusion of thumbnails, and larger intro images only being shown on the main page but not on the single post page itself. This is a feature I’ve been working on with good buddy Robert who basically did most of the initial work and helped me to replace my own sub par piece of code.

Before I provide you with the code, let me explain what it does and how it exactly used:

WordPress gives you the option to use so called Custom Fields for ever page and every post of your blog, you can use these custom fields to define meta data like some special keys which you can grab via PHP to use in you theme or for plugins.

We added the following keys to use in your Vigilance theme:

• thumbnail: 140×140 pixels
• entryimg: 594×140 pixels
• caption

Both image keys are used in the same way, you put either “thumbnail” or “entryimg” in the key field in you custom fields tab and enter the url as the value in the text area next to it. You should resize images to the given sizes beforehand or they will be resized automatically which might distort their ratio.

Setting a caption, like adding copyright information, links or license information to one of these pictures is just as easy, just enter caption as the key and the text you want to be used as the caption as the value, html code can be used to set links.

Now get to the code, the most important part of it is added to the index.php of your Vigilance theme right below the <div class="entry clear"> line:

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<?php $img = get_post_meta($post->ID, "thumbnail", true); $caption = get_post_meta($post->ID, "caption", true); echo ($img == "") ? "" : '<div id="thumbnail-caption"><div id="postthumb"><a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="read more..."><img src="'.$img."\" /></a></div>$caption</div>"; ?>
<?php $img = get_post_meta($post->ID, "entryimg", true); $caption = get_post_meta($post->ID, "caption", true); echo ($img == "") ? "" : '<div id="entryimg"><a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="read more..."><img src="'.$img."\" /></a>$caption</div>"; ?>

The next and last step is to add style information to your used CSS file which can both be the original one or the one of the child theme:

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#postthumb {
float:left top;
margin:6px 8px 0px 0px;
overflow:hidden;
color:#999;
font-size: 0.7333em;
text-align: right;
}
 
#postthumb a {
text-decoration:none;
}
 
#postthumb img {
background:#ffffff;
border:solid 1px #ddd;
width:140px;
height:140px;
padding:2px;
}
 
#entryimg {
float:center;
overflow:hidden;
color:#999;
font-size: 0.7333em;
text-align: right;
font-style: italic;
}
 
#entryimg a {
text-decoration:none;
}
 
#entryimg img {
background:#ffffff;
border:solid 1px #ddd;
width:594px;
height:140px;
padding:2px;
}
 
#thumbnail-caption {
float:left;
text-align: left;
overflow:hidden;
color:#999;
font-size: 0.7333em;
font-style: italic;
}

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Surfing the web one encounters many different interesting pages and can subscribe to the feeds offered on these, you can collect feeds of those sites, blogs and even social sites like digg or twitter. You create your own personal web of information that really matter to you, without having to visit all these different web sites. Feeds changed the way I use, the way I gather information on the web significantly  and one thing I came only to think about recently is that many of those blogs, or news sites I follow I haven’t seen the real web sites in an awfully long time, some I haven’t even visited once.

I don’t have to.

They only thing that would make me do visit a site would be to write a comment or read those already there.

For me web sites consist of mere lines of text on a white background, with simple or no formatting at all, pictures may play their part but often look out of place. No headers, no logos, no side bars, no footers, just the post and me.

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Folks with their own website or self hosted blog can use so called id delegation to link your website to the OpenID provided by those third party companies and projects, and this leads us to a problem, maybe even nightmare for those really concerned with the safety of their data and identity. OpenID, as mentioned above, is not only a way to prove your identity but can be used as a single sign-on solution for numerous websites and trusting others with this sensible data might not be a very good idea when you think about it and especially not if you are concerned about the control and integrity of your personal information.

So you got your own site and you want your own OpenID.

You can get one by hosting it yourself and the most easy way to do so is using a a small and neat PHP application called phpMyID, a standalone, single user OpenID provider.

Since I couldn’t find the simple solution that I wanted, I did what any [idiot|geek] would do, and created the missing option for myself: a single user OpenID server.                 — CJNiemira

phpMyID consists of two files, the configuration file and the application itself. The download package includes a readme and the license, GPLv2. The setup is rather simple:

1. You upload the files in a directory,
2. Create a hash of your password and write it, along your personal details if you want in the configuration file,
3. Put the delegation links inside the header of your page,
4. profit

It is really as simple as that but in case you’re still not getting it to work, there is a FAQ and a forum.

phpMyID relies on http digest authentication as security which uses md5 hashing and nonce values preventing your password getting send over the Internet in plain text. It is an safe, easy and foremost non expensive, when compared to SSL certificates, way to secure your log-in data.

I still want to remind you that you should know that even if you are hosting your OpenID and using it as a single sign-on that you must not give away your password and user name. Single sign-on is a major convenience but comes with risks and you really shouldn’t use it for sensible, important accounts. I recommend using it only as proof of your identity.

If you are really looking for a way to handle your passwords and sign-ons you should consider using a password manager like KeePass or KeePassX

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When I started using Gmail some years ago I wasn’t really trying to keep my inbox clean. I marked some of my mails read, but somethimes I was even to lazy for that. Over the time all those unread and and un-archived emails added up to a couple of thousand messages plugging up my inbox and I just couldn’t be bothered cleaning up the mess up, just because they were so many — a vicious circle.

But you don’t have to worry about spending hours cleaning up the mess as you can do it in less than a minute by using GMail’s filter functionality. That’s how it’s done:

Go to your “Settings” page on GMail and click on the “Filters” tab. At the bottom is the option to create new filters. Clicking on that should bring you to the filter creation page with 5 input fields.

We need the “Has the words“-field, as shown in the image above, on the right side of page.

First we want to get all that unread mail of your being marked as read so we write “label:inbox” without the quotes in the field. Now click on “Next Step” and confirm that you know what you’re doing in the warning dialog. We are experts, we don’t need warnings!

Now, select the boxes “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)“, “Mark as read” and “Also apply the filter to x conversations below.”

After that, hit the “Create Filter“-button. Your inbox should be clean now.

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original picture by Elke Wetzig, CC-SA-BY 2.0 Germany

As it turns out Stallman doesn’t like web applications, he doesn’t like them at all and says that using GMail and its kind is “worse than stupidity” and just as bad as proprietary software.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control … It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

The FSF itself created a license for web applications called AGPL which is used by projects like identi.ca, so this little rant really surprised me. Why do you create a license for some kind of software if it is evil anyway?

I could agree with Stallman on many issues but clearly not on this one. While it is true that we don’t have control over our data, applications aren’t available on every PC, obviously not everyone is able to set up his own server and/or build personal web applications. I run a couple of applications namely irssi, mutt, ejabberd and my webdev environment on my personal server right next to me and Ubuntu does a great job helping you to set all of those things up, but you simply can not expect all people to learn how to set up servers, bother with ports and ips and dynamic dns. This isn’t Sparta but it still is madness.

What’s next? Should I produce my own electricity, drill for water and get some cows living in my flat? I really don’t think so.

Anyway, if now you’re concerned about your data and think about hosting your own services and apps you may take a look at Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Jeos

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