Category Archives: Blogs TNG

The peacock’s tail

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Well it’s not that beautiful, but then lots of bird’s tails are not that beautiful. But make a few simple evolutionary rules and somewhere amazing things happen.  Like this website on accommodation in Chester that thinks that if it republishes Paul Frijter’s post on engineering solutions to climate change, that it will (presumably) work it’s way up Google’s rankings.  Presumably there’s some method in it. Anyway, it even acknowledges where it plagiarised the content so I guess you can’t complain.

Peter Faris goes meta

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While it’s very unedifying when people are stirred up, I enjoy the odd ‘meta’ discussion, or at least thinking about what the right principles are for discussion in the blogosphere. So I was intrigued to see them eloquently expounded in Crikey today – by virtue of the publication of an email to Crikey.

From: Peter Faris QC
Sent: Tuesday, 7 October 2008
To: ‘Jonathan Green’
Subject: How to deal with hate comments on a blog

Jonathan,

I have changed my mind — I do not think is useful for me to do a Crikey blog. This change of mind is propelled by the comments on the Crikey pages in response to my Henson piece.

The two or three serious, on-topic comments are swamped by a deluge of personal abuse. A good number of the comments are hate comments.

I am as thick-skinned as the next commentator, probably more so, but there is no point in having dialogue with people who have a visceral hatred for you personally. The dialogue necessarily goes nowhere.

I am a long-time blogger. I have been through all this before. That is why I have shut down the comments on my personal blog. People can read it or not — if they dont like it, too bad.

Crikeys venture into online comments whether from published articles (like mine) or from actual blogs will raise these issues.

As I say, I am not being sensitive to the hate comments — its just that by inviting or allowing such comments the debate gets nowhere. I would be very happy for a comment which attacks my argument and demonstrates that I am wrong. Healthy debate is important. The problem with hate comments is that they are neither healthy nor a debate.

Whilst I dont care, Crikey will find that some contributors will not want to expose themselves to this sort of hate and abuse by writing for Crikey. And if they do, they might sue Crikey for publishing defamatory comments.

There are no satisfactory solutions. I went through all of this on my blog some years ago.

The possible solutions are these:

1. Some form of censorship. Continue reading →

Ranking the economics blogs

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Congratulations to Andrew Leigh who has scraped onto the list of the top 50 economics blogs.

This came as a feed from The Austrian Economists where one of the five bloggers was excited to come in at 38.

Marginal Revolution was on the top, followed by Econbrowser and then Paul Krugman. Can’t be bothered working out the methodology, these things are too suss in my opinion. On the score of “links to” over the last 90 days, Marginal Revlution scored 57, Econbrowser 47, Krugman 46, The Austrian Economists 9, Andrew Leigh 7.

Not Just Me Then

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The man behind our main line of anti-spam defence is hanging up his hat.

Indeed, I am hereby officially announcing that I will no longer support, maintain or further develop Spam Karma (beside some very occasional, very limited poking, until the transition to a self-maintained project is completed).

Luckily he’s relicensed the code under the GPL, which means others may and can pick it up and run with it.

Why is he giving it away? Firstly because of the soul-sucking nature of engaging in an arms race with spammers:

Much as I love the challenge and excitement of coding an anti-spam filter and thinking up new tricks to defeat parasitic life-forms of the web, I just dont have the time anymore. And to be honest, if I did have the time, I probably would have other challenging, exciting new projects Id rather tackle. Im fickle like that.

I can certainly relate to that.

I can relate even more to the next reason:

Wordpress.

I will really try to keep that one short, because I could probably write a novel of that. And it wouldnt be a very interesting read.

In a word: Wordpress kinda sucks nowadays. Its retarded upgrade rate makes it nearly impossible to keep up, in turn making it a constant security threat on my servers. And each time I finally cave in and install one of those mandatory security upgrade, it also installs 600 Ko of other theme compatibility-breaking fluffy crap that I never asked for in the first place. Usually setting the ground for the next cycle of security-exploit-rushed-upgrade. To sum up, its become incredibly bloated and tedious to support. Replacing it on my own servers is very high on my list of things to do (which means somewhat in the first 1000 items).

Having no interest for Wordpress anymore, I have thus very little interest for Wordpress-related development.

Preach it brother.
Continue reading →

Shared Hosting is Doomed (and I have the graphs to prove it)

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My abiding and irrational loathing for Wordpress has at last yielded fruit.

Wordpress thrives in the classic shared hosting market, where the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — is almost universally installed. It’s free, fairly user-friendly, well-marketed, widely used, has oodles of third party plugins and themes. My only objection to Wordpress is that it’s rubbish11. Har Har: Yes, I realise I’m saying this on a Wordpress website. Sometimes the poor workman doesn’t get to choose his tools. [↩].

But that’s not my point today. What Wordpress has given me is the impetus to think, and think, and think some more about what blogging software is and what it should do. The dozen or so computer types who follow Club Troppo have seen my sketches in this direction before. Starting with a pre-history of blogging, I moved through a call for a “next generation”, through to consideration of the various interested participants in the world of blogging software. Later I returned to the topic of Wordpress to complain about its architecture, then foreshadowed this post with remarks about a PHP performance benchmark.

My topic today is a discussion of how and why I think shared hosting is doomed. Let me start with a chart which I think will attract no argument22. About the charts: All charts in this post are illustrative, not data-driven. So YMMAPWV. [↩]:


Continue reading →