Mixed feelings Clearing Out my Feeds

I started to use Netnewswire in the last few months. I didn’t do much with it until a few weeks ago when Feedly made the headlines about their AI protest control thing.

I learned they have an exporter so I exported the OPML file of my feeds and there were so many of them. Netnewswire slowly started filling in the posts and surprisingly, considering the lack of attention I’ve paid my feeds in many years, it found plenty of posts. My unread count sat at over 10,000 posts at one stage.

Still, there are far too many where the last post was in 2009 or 2012. A few were still blogging in 2019. Yet more announced they were moving from Blogger or WordPress.com to their brand-new website at some custom domain that is now sadly a spam trap for unwary visitors. The long abandoned blogs are a deep dive into history. They celebrate events that happened oh so long ago. The sites are frozen in time.

I have to say, it was sometimes lovely to read the musings of a lost generation of writers. They’re either offline or now on Facebook or one of the other walled gardens we humans seem to love. I was going to list some of the blogs that are still updated, but it turns out there are quite a few of them. You’re probably familiar with most of them. Matt, XKCD, Laughing Squid, and Simon are some of the more famous blogs I have followed for many years.

Here’s a few you might not know. Feel free to middle-click and open them in a new tab. Go on, have a look.

And oh, there’s more! I’ve also come across some incredible photo blogs that I used to love visiting. I would always wonder how they managed to capture such breathtaking photos. And there are so many WordPress blogs too, with a wide range of topics and interests. I haven’t had the time to go through all of them yet, but being on Mastodon has taught me that it’s okay not to keep tabs on everything.

One feature that has been a game-changer for me is the “Today” smart feed. It shows me updated feeds, and just by scanning through it, I can quickly see which sites are still very active. It’s helped me realize that I don’t need to follow some overly busy sites any more. It’s been a freeing experience, letting go of the need to keep up with everything and instead focusing on the feeds that truly matter to me.

Also, “Mark All as Read” is very liberating.

A screenshot from Netnewswire showing the right click menu and "Mark All as Read" is highlighted.

BTW – I’m still blogging (after all this time) here (of course) and on inphotos. My last post there is the 840th daily post in a row. I gave a talk to Blarney Photography Club recently, showing some photos from Automattic meetups over the years. I found a bunch of old photos I wanted to publish. That’ll explain the American photos that went up recently!

Google remembers they own Feedburner

Google sent out an email today to Feedburner users with the ominous subject, “Upcoming changes to Feedburner”.

It’s Google so my first thought was that they were about to shut it down. No, it’s not quite that bad, but they are shutting down parts of the service.

Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time.

This blog and my photoblog each have email subscribers through Feedburner. If you are reading this through one of those emails come visit the site and scroll to the end of the page. There’s a “Subscribe via Email” form you can use to join the 9,145 others who read whatever it is I post here. (How is that number so large? Is that accurate? Reply here please if you are one of them. It’s WordPress stuff you’re looking for isn’t it? Sorry, I haven’t been posting much about that in a long time!)

If you’re reading this through a Feedburner URL and I know there are a few of you out there it might be safer to use https://odd.blog/feed/ instead. You know, just in case Google kills it off. I know it’s unlike them to do that but you never know.

Google Takeout doesn’t include a “Feedburner” directory either. I must export the Feedburner stats and take a look at them. Here’s the tiny graph they show you. Look at that in 2010. Whoah! It’s all been downhill since then. If you’re still reading this blog since then, thank you. I really appreciate your attention since you now have Twitter and Facebook to distract you.

Irish Blog Awards 2009 Photowalk

About time I posted these. The Blog Awards took place in Cork this year, last February, and before the big night, a good number of photographers wandered around Cork City. I posted several IBA09 photos on my photoblog already but here are a few more:

BTW – if you’re in Cork next weekend, there are still places left in the photowalk! I haven’t decided where we should go after the walk but it’ll probably be The Old Oak as they have plenty of room.

Continue reading “Irish Blog Awards 2009 Photowalk”

John, my personal spammer!

With apologies to anyone named John. Spammers are getting more clever at spreading their links. Now legitimate website owners are using software tools that allow them to enter keywords of their choice to a create a list of related blogs with comment forms. Many of these applications list blogs that pass Google Rank to the websites of visitors. That’s why I stopped doing the “dofollow” thing several months ago. Since then the number of spam comments has gone down slightly. Cookie for Comments stops the spam bots dead but the human spammer scum still get through.

Next time Akismet marks a legitimate looking comment as spam (or you get a comment from someone who was supposedly christened Austin Texas Photographer by his parents), check your logs. Look up the IP address of the visitor. You may find something like this. Note the lack of a referrer, an old Firefox user agent and then “bsalsa.com” is in the UA of the next request for a post. Bsalsa make a Windows toolkit that this software obviously uses. They’re fans of Borland Delphi apparently!

"GET /2006/11/04/cork-cinema-listings/ HTTP/1.0" 200 43366 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.12"

"GET /feed/ HTTP/1.0" 302 84 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11"

"GET /2006/11/04/cork-cinema-listings/ HTTP/1.1" 200 12089 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) ; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11); .NET CLR 2.0.50727)"

When my blogs were dofollowing, I’d get loads of spam comments every day. The tools used fire off a request to the blog to examine the links on that page. They highlight dofollow links so the user knows their spam comment will generate Google Juice for their site.

I was getting so sick and tired of them I contacted several spammers. Lindsay who commented on inphotos.org replied:

Hi Lindsay,

As a photographer, I’m always looking for other blogs to comment on but it’s hard to find interesting photoblogs that post anything other than photos. How did you find my blog? I didn’t see a Google search in my logs. Is it a special program?

Thanks,
Donncha

She was really helpful, even replying twice when I didn’t reply again:

I actually have a program called G-force fast blog finder. Basically, i put in some keywords and it searches ALL blogs with those keywords. THEN it tells me if those blogs do or do not have the “uComment iFollow” addon. Blogs that allow the “follow” tag are good for search engines if i post a comment with a link to my site.. SO basically, i get to look at photography blogs and comment on them while i help my website obtain some more links.

Basically, search engines rank your page based on a few things, one of them is link backs. Basically, a link from a site to my site is like a vote for my site saying it is good. So the more other websites link to my site, the better.. HOWEVER, some blogs and websites have the NOFOLLOW tag in them which does not let the search engines see it. Your site does allow the uComment iFollow.

We also created a link exchange program on our website. if you’re interested, it helps you too also have links for your site on other people’s site. If you go to my site here:
http://__________.com/catalog/links.php
You can submit your link and even a small picture to be displayed.
Let me know if you have any other questions

Lindsay

Yea. I Down loaded a program called fast blogger. They have a free trial and basically you add in search term and it searches all blogs for that term. It gives you lists of links to them and tells you if they are no follow or Ufollow IConment blogs. Basically, by findig blogs related to my webstie and blog and posting comments, it helps my website with the search engines when I post a link. It’s a win win situation. You get blog views and comments and the post gets a link back to third site.

If you are interested, I also have a blog. It’s at http://_____________.com/blog

Feel free to comment away and leave a link back to your blog.

We also have a link exchange. Basically you go to Http://____________.com/catalog/links.php

Click submit link and then we will add another link to our website. All we ask is you link back to us in return.

It’s basically everyone helping each other in order to get good page ranking for thief keywords

If you have any questions , Id be happy to answer.

Lindsay

Very helpful wasn’t she? Unfortunately it was the final straw. All links in comments are nofollowed again. Bloody spammers.

The spam comments continue but recently I’ve taken to changing the name of the person to “John”, removing their email and url and then allowing through the comment.

john the spammer

john the spammer

Thanks John!

Will the real Tubridy please stand up?

tubridy

After this morning’s blogger interview with Ryan Tubridy it looks like the radio talk shot host is diving into Twitter with enthusiasm. Maybe!

Listen to the interview here courtesy of @topgold.

PS. Will has an easy way to verify that @ryantubridy is real:

@ryantubridy @DamienMulley @RickOShea validity test. What socks is Ryan wearing today? Ryan has to answer first

I don’t think Ryan wears flip flops though.

The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, we were at The Irish Blog Awards on Saturday night. Here are a few photos. They’re after the jump because there are 70 there and I’d hate to see them load every time someone loaded the front page of my site!

Gallery of shots from the photowalk to come tomorrow. Possibly over 100 shots in that. I do like to take photos don’t I?

grandad

BTW – Please Photoshop Grandad above. What’s he saying? Two example to follow ..
Continue reading “The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures”

Back from The Irish Blog Awards 2009

Jacinta and I are just back from the The 2009 Irish Blog Awards and we’re elated after the experience. If I thought I could convey half the good humour and energy and enthusiasm I’d try but I know I’d fail dismally. It was a wonderful night, full of great people and I’m only sorry we couldn’t stay longer and chat some more!

winner

Thank you Damien and everyone who helped. You pulled off a hugely success celebration of Irish blogging.