Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

As I mentioned, my desire to be above reproach when criticising MPlayer lead me to produce a PHP script that converted their website into an Atom feed. I have now emailed that script to their webmaster and await a reply. In the mean time, I hope they will not see it as a lessening of their security that I publish the source code here, especially since the project itself has benefited from the openness of their code. Also, in case we forget, I should point out that contributing to an open source project is not just a form of political activism (and even if it were “just” that it would be worthwhile in itself), but it has short term benefits (the only type which some people appreciate) in that it has increased my understanding of the Atom format so I am now confident I could use the format in my own projects, whether at home or at work. In terms of the benefit to people reading this, well, they may be looking for a script that converts a site to an Atom feed (as I was before I endeavoured to make my own), they may be interested in screen scraping in general (which is the method I am using), or they may just want to check someone else’s PHP code for style tips (or possibly examples of mistakes to avoid). Being GPL code you may do all those things, as long as you respect the requirements of the licence.

After setting up the anti-spam plugins for my blog, I said that they had saved me from having to block the trackback and comment features that WordPress provides. It is only now, months later, however, that one can get a sense of the long term effectiveness of these defensive measures, and also appreciate their hidden cost. The cost I refer to is false negatives: spam ending up in the moderation queue (instead of being deleted outright), in particular trackback spam accepted as being from a legitimate blog. While the situation has certainly improved, over the course of months the extra effort of catching these false negatives could prove sufficient to make one abandon the idea of an open blog. I will thus analyse the true situation so far, and also point out a piece of good news about the popularity of my blog.