What you get when my brain crashes…

WordPress Tags

So I’ve been experimenting with WordPress’s new built-in “tags” feature. It’s pretty neat, but it’s not 100% awesome.

For one thing, I’ve got nearly 1,000 posts on this blog so far. Going back and trying to add tags to existing posts is a PAIN IN THE ASS.

Secondly, I find that often the tags I would associate with a post are just the names of the categories I’ll be posting in - so what’s the point? And when you get down to it, tags are basically just categories on crack.

Thirdly, it can be hard to think up tags. I’m not good at it. I have put a lot of tags in back-articles; I’m sure I could have chosen better tags for lots of things. And I’m sure I’ll continue to choose bad tags that only confuse people. Le sigh.

Finally, and this isn’t really a jab at the tagging system itself, but the tag widget I use will completely crap itself if you set the minimum and maximum font sizes to be exactly the same. I thought I would set them to be the same so all the tag links were the same size (I’m not sure I like the different sized items in the “tag cloud” idea), but when I did, I got all sorts of “division by zero” errors on the page and I had to switch it back. Not a big deal, really, but still.

So, I will continue to experiment with tags as time goes by. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Where’d WordPress Learn to Count?

I direct your attention to a recent post of mine. A look at it from the main page shows “Comments (3)”, but when you actually look at the comments, there are only 2.

Looking at the WordPress admin panel shows the same thing. It thinks there are 3 comments, but there are only 2. What’s going on?

I’ve looked into the issue a little bit, and found a few things:

• Some people have this problem because they manually delete comments. (I don’t; I use Akismet and the built-in WordPress tools to moderate comments.)
• Some people reported the problem, but they are all hosted on the WordPress.com site (I obviously am not; I’m self-hosted here at starkeith.net.)
• I’ve read claims that the bug is fixed. I’m running the most recent version of WordPress - so why is it still happening?

Anyone care to comment on this one? I’m stumped!

The Great Wikipedia Schism

While I’ve always been a great supporter of Wikipedia, lately things have begun changing that have me questioning whether it’ll work out the way I hoped.

Let me explain.

Lately, the higher-ups at Wikipedia have made some policy decisions which are arguably aimed at increasing the perceived “quality” or “reliability” or “professionalism” of Wikipedia, in comparison to, say, Encyclopedia Brittanica, or any other major encyclopedia. Some of these changes, though, in my opinion at least, go against the original spirit of Wikipedia - the spirit that originally attracted me to the site.

One example: Wikipedia is trying to enforce the idea that articles should only be about things that are “noteworthy.”

OK - so, what the hell is “noteworthy,” anyway?

I’d be hard pressed to define it, and so would anyone else striving for an unbiased opinion. It just can’t be done. As soon as you bring something as ambiguous and subjective as “noteworthiness” into the picture, you’re just asking for trouble. It used to be enough if an article was well-written, factual (cited its sources), written from a neutral point-of-view, and contained no original research. It didn’t matter if it was an article on Barnard’s Star or  the fictional Dahak starship from the sci-fi novels written by David Weber - as long as it followed those few requirements, it was fine for Wikipedia. After all, what seems noteworthy to one person might seem totally useless and not worth remembering to another person - and vice versa.

What’s worse is that because of this desire for “noteworthiness,” some articles are being deleted - and that really just goes against the spirit of an encyclopedia of human knowledge!

There are other things, of course - the removal of “trivia” sections; the removal of plot summaries & episode lists for TV shows - but really, the “noteworthy” thing is probably my biggest pet peeve. I just don’t think it can be reasonably enforced and really, something as subjective as that has no business being in the criteria for a Wikipedia entry.

Insane Password Policy

The trend these days in computer security as far as passwords are concerned is to focus on length rather than complexity. That’s because, with the computing power available today, even a password that uses every possible character you can type with the keyboard, if it is only 4 or 6 characters long, can be cracked in a relatively short amount of time - short enough, anyway, that it makes it of concern to security-minded people.

Apparently, at least some of the folks over at Microsoft haven’t gotten the memo.

Head on over to the Winqual site and try to sign up for a (free) account. If you’ve ever written software for Windows, it’s worth doing - you can get access to the information that is sent back when your program crashes. (The old “This program has encountered an error - tell Microsoft about the problem” dialog.)

Just be careful what you choose for a password.

W-w-w-what? It takes 6 bullet items to explain the password policy?

That’s just insane. And in case you dare to not follow the requirements, this is what you’ll get (click for image).

If anything, the policy should be changed to this, much simpler one:

• Password must be more than 8 characters long
• Any character is OK, including spaces

The quality of passwords will go up (they will be harder to crack) and, perhaps more importantly, people will be able to remember them. So they won’t write them down on a sticky-note and put it next to their monitor. Where Jim-Bob the janitor can come read it and maybe even sell that information.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d be more likely to remember a password of, say, “It was a cold, hard day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” as opposed to “d3Mx!;%j.”

An unusual form of comment spam

My post yesterday about older games seems to have attracted some attention - but in this case, of the negative kind. This morning I logged on to find a bunch of new comments - except they all looked somehow… odd. Turns out they were all from throw-away blogs (fake blogs set up to increase search engine rankings) that had done a “trackback” to my article. Some of them quoted just a bit of it (to make it relevant in Google’s eyes, I suppose) and one even went so far as to try and look like a legitimate link - except they used the wrong name! (They said “I’d have to agree with this post by Kevin B.”)

Very strange - and this is the first time I’ve seen stuff like this show up in the comments. Has anyone else ever seen such comment spam? Is this a new phenominon, or is it just old stuff that I have been lucky enough to avoid thus far?