… but I never know how to express them. 

Fortunately, I have Wordle to help me. 

 
(click to enlarge as PDF)

The above graphic represents my tweets. 

What’s that you say?  “What’s a tweet?”  A tweet is something I twittered.  It’s a short one-liner I presented to the world through twitter.  And the above “word cloud” represents all the words I used in all my tweets since I started using it in October 2007.  The more common the word, the bigger it’s representation.  Common words like the, and, a and wtf are removed for clarity.

Here’s how I did it:

1. I took all the words in all the tweets I’ve done so far on twitter
2. I massaged them a bit with vi and command line text tools (to make it all lower case, get rid of URLs and HTML, and get rid of “new blog post”)
3. I submitted the resulting text to Wordle
4. I got back a word cloud summarizing all of my tweets.  Made the graphic and the PDF.
5. (I found Wordle through Jonathan Coulton, who found it through Brad Sucks.)

Yeah, I guess I have some kind of twitter-crush on Dave2 (blogography).  Whatever.  I also see absurdist and snackiepoo and gally, avitable, watchdog, jestertunes, mr_shiny and martymankins.  All these people are on twitter and get replies or messages from me.  You can join twitter with us and get in on the fun.

This got me thinking - what do my post titles look like? (what do I write about?) What about all my posts? (How do I write about them?)  What about the comments?  (What do YOU write about?) I didn’t have to wonder long - I just exported my comments, titles and posts from my WordPress blog’s database, did the same massaging and then made myself some graphics.

whall.org post titles Wordle:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

whall.org posts Wordle:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

whall.org comments Wordle:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

I especially like the java interface where you can change the font, layout and color scheme and it renders in real-time.  Very slick!  Nice job, Jonathan Feinberg!

And the final result?  If I mash up all the posts, post titles, comments and tweets?  I get a decent summary of my online presence:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

Yup.  It says it right there - “good blog.”

I’m starting another series on the old blog of whall, and that is Wouldn’t It Be Cool If, or WIBCI for short. I personally pronounce this “wib-see” but I’ve heard others pronounce it like “weeb-see”, “why bitchy” and “who are you and why are you asking me these stupid questions?”

In this installment, I want to brainstorm about a plugin for blogs (WordPress, drupal, typepad, Movable Type, etc) that would allow people not only to subscribe-by-email to ALL comments, but just the author’s comments.

[time passes]

Ok I’m done brainstorming.

Wouldn’t that be cool?

One of the smartest things I’ve seen in a while is the Wordpress “Recheck Queue for Spam” feature:

When I first started blogging, I thought “no big deal” because I get a notification of the spam and then I go in and mark it as spam.  Seeing as how Akismet catches tens of thousands of spam comments for me, I figured I could handle the one-off’s with no problem.

But then my blog got a little more popular and there was more comment spam.  Even though Akismet still caught the vast majority, there was still some I had to moderate because it “got through” Akismet.

Then I installed the Add Meta Tags plugin, and I noticed my blog and my posts being visited more often by Google searchers, and I welcomed the new visitors.  I was impressed by how much more visible my blog was.  And of course, comment spam went up by a LOT.  Again, Akismet caught most of it but there was a noticable increase of spam going to me for moderation. 

So while I still think my spam management tasks are minor compared to many (maybe a dozen a day in my moderation queue), I was very glad to see the little link called “Recheck Queue for Spam”.  I’m happy to report that EVERY SINGLE TIME I’ve clicked it, it has 100% removed the spam and 100% left alone the “real” comments.

What I like about this spam management system is that every time someone tags a comment as spam, Akismet get smarter.  The comments that “get past” Akismet just mean that I’m one of the first to get the comment.  After a short time (minutes, hours), Akismet wizens up and when I “recheck queue” it has learned about those comments and takes care of it for me.

Yay Akismet!

You’d think I’d be content and this would be enough.

Oh, no.

You see, I’ve also put an entry into my crontab file to automatically click the link for me every hour, so the queue automatically gets cleaned out for me and I don’t even have to click the link!  Huzzah!  I figure this way, Akismet gets smarter quicker for others as well, via the verification and removal of spam comments.  Sure, I’d probably be a better spamnetizen if I actually marked the spam as spam myself and submitted it, but who has time for that?  Hopefully someone else.

0   *   *   *   *   wget -O - -q -t 1 http://whall.org/blog/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?page=akismet-admin&recheckqueue=true&noheader=true

I started wondering why yahoo or google doesn’t offer this feature… I mean, wouldn’t it be even more beneficial in email, where you’re dealing with a much bigger influx of content, and even more value for identifying spam AFTER it’s delivered? 

Added bonus:

If you read down this far, I give you an added bonus.  The Bible says that God’s promise to mankind that he’d never again send a global flood is represented by the rainbow.  Others have said that Beer is proof that God exists.

This picture combines both ideas.

(click to enlarge)

This week I performed some maintenance on my blog.  As many of you know, I use the open source (read: free) Wordpress software to power the blog, as I find it easy, extensible, powerful and, well, FREE.  My hosting provider actually offers a wizard to just launch a new blog and it’ll do all the setup for you, but I chose to install from scratch and do my own customizations and what-not, seeing as how I’m a geek.

The first upgrade I started with was the upgrade to Wordpress 2.2.3 from 2.0.1.  Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not 100% positive I was on version 2.0.1, although my admin dashboard page said so.  I looked back in my source folders and I had a copy of 2.1.3 floating in there, so I probably upgraded to 2.1 at some point.  I may have even blogged about it but since my search page is broken, I may never know.  Even now that I’ve upgraded, it still says “powered by 2.0.1″.  Oh well, I’ll figure that out later.

I say “first upgrade I started with” because as I was reading the install/upgrade instructions it recommended a Maintenance Mode plugin.  I thought - how cool is that?  So I installed the new maintenance plugin, did my backups of my blog, database, etc, activated the plugin and whammo - I have a maintenance page!

Very cool.  I’m almost professional, even.

So then I started the WordPress upgrade, and it took no time at all.  I un-enabled (is that a word?, er, disabled) the maintenance mode and now I’m all upgraded and safe. 

The next piece, albeit very optional and mostly unrelated to the wordpress upgrade was to upgrade SpotMilk.  SpotMilk is a great enhancement to the WordPress administration console.  The original one that comes with WordPress is nice enough, but SpotMilk is way cooler.  I was at 2.0.1 and upgraded to 2.2.1 with much lack of pain.

Now I’m on the hunt for what else I can upgrade or pimp out my blog with.

Hey, that’s a good idea!  Pimp Out My Blog.  It can be a weekly series where good web designers descend for a week on some poor shlep’s blog and totally pimps it out.  Ok, I just googled it and it seems someone else has taken the domain name and the idea. 

Some things I’m thinking about for my blog:

• Profanity filter for the comments. 
  I want cuss words to be cartooned out, like s$!t or @#$@@!  I understand some people just use profanity in their normal course of work, and I also understand some people would highly prefer not to see it, and I would understand people who avoid blogs that contain it.  So seeing as how even cartoons such as Calvin and Hobbes has curse words veiled behind punctuation, why can’t I?  I’ve seen a couple out there but haven’t actually tried any of them yet.
• Tag cloud for categories, or a category browser
  I still have a hard time deciding what to do here.  I have used 343 categories!  Some subscribe to the theory of only using a short list of categories, so as maybe to structure their posts or make it easier to browse around.  I like using more specific categories because they get used as tags in pingomatic or digg or technorati.  If I blog about spotmilk, I want the category or tag to contain it, if for no other reason than it enhances the ability for someone else on the internet to find my entry.  Especially if they’re looking for someone who <b>upgrade</b>d <b>wordpress</b> with <b>spotmilk</b>.  This post has three of those keywords!
• Search that works
  I don’t know why mine is broken - but then again I haven’t really looked.  I’m thinking it’s because I have # (pound sign) in some of my posts, but still, I have no idea.  But maybe there’s a better search plugin I can load that will solve the problem for me
• Pages for better navigation
  Right now, I just have the blog and a sidebar.  I want to add a FAQ, About, Most popular posts, my favorite posts, etc.  Maybe even a rating system for entries so people can “vote”.  I don’t know

What do you like about people’s blogs that’s NOT content-specific?

I’m going to upgrade from 2.0.4 to 2.1.1 of Wordpress, the blogging software I use to run this site.  It should be mostly easy, and hopefully all you folks who watch my blog every single hour just to watch for updates won’t be disappointed

EDIT:

Oh great, now 2.1.1 has been declared dangerous. 

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.