Tag: blogging

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I finally got around to setting up convenient links to a couple of social bookmarking sites. At first I resisted the idea, figuring regular users probably have bookmarklets or extensions that take care of it. But social networking sites have casual users, too, and posting a few small icons is a subtler form of self-promotion than putting up a giant banner that says, “Hey! Submit this #$!@ story to ____ now!”

I ended up using Sociable, a plugin for WordPress that already knows the right link formats for several dozen such sites.

Of course, since Sociable provides links for so many sites, the obvious question becomes: Which sites do I include? I don’t want to post all 25—that would just be a jumble of icons, hardly usable (never mind aesthetic!)

I settled on five to start with:

  • del.icio.us is my online bookmark service of choice. I still manage a lot of bookmarks locally, but this lets me share a set between multiple browsers at home and work.
  • Digg seems to be the leading service for actually sharing and discussing links these days.
  • Fark wasn’t on my list at first, but then I realized that I make funny/weird posts here all the time. Some of them would fit right in.
  • Reddit is new to me, but it popped up a couple of times when I went looking through sites that I read.
  • Yahoo MyWeb I mainly added out of name recognition.

What social bookmarking sites (if any) do you use?

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The Blood KnightSorry I haven’t posted much here lately. The main reason is that I’ve been re-reading Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series before picking up The Blood Knight. (I’ve also been spending time at the Comic Bloc Forums discussing the Flash relaunch.)

Re-reading The Briar King and The Charnel Prince both followed the same pattern: I read half of the book over the course of the week, then finished it on the weekend. I started the new book, The Blood Knight on Saturday morning and basically spent the weekend on the couch reading. About ¾ of the way in I realized acutely that, no matter how fast I read it, there would still be one book left when I finished.

It’s funny, when I first read The Briar King I didn’t like it much. I think mainly I was expecting something less steeped in medieval Europe (based on The Waterborn and The Blackgod). I picked up The Charnel Prince anyway, and liked it much better, and quite enjoyed The Briar King when I reread it.

One thing that’s unusual about this series is that there’s no Merlin figure. No Gandalf to show up in the first few chapters and explain what the Ring is, who wants it, and what has to be done with it. No Moiraine to explain who the Forsaken are, and what it means to be the Dragon Reborn. All the characters are pretty much figuring things out as they go. And they make mistakes—pretty nasty ones in some cases.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Greg Keyes and Neil Gaiman are the only authors whose work I will buy in hardcover, sight unseen. Looking at Keyes’ website, I realized that I actually own a copy of every book he’s published. There aren’t too many authors I can say that about.

Only 1½ years until The Born Queen…

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Remember how LiveJournal, TypePad, and related sites were down the other day? The official line was that “Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack.”

It turns out that the DDOS wasn’t aimed at 6A, LJ, or any other part of their network. It was aimed at Blue Security, an anti-spam company, who decided to re-route their web traffic to their blog—a blog hosted on TypePad. So instead of their own site going down, it took out Six Apart’s entire network of millions of bloggers.

Classy move, guys.

I do admire Six Apart’s restraint in not pointing fingers themselves. If it had been my site (though in a way, I suppose it was, since I’ve got an LJ blog, even if I don’t update it very often), I would have been royally pissed off.

Sure, Blue Security didn’t launch the attack—but they did choose where to redirect it. Maybe they thought Six Apart would be able to handle it. Maybe they thought the attackers were targeting them by IP and not domain name. Maybe they were panicked and didn’t think. Maybe they thought things through, but 6A got bitten by the now-all-too-familiar law of unintended consequences. They could easily have pointed their domain name at empty IP space, or to localhost. Redirecting it to a third party was less like deflecting a punch and more like the “Do it to Julia!” moment in 1984, or the classic joke, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.”

(via Spamroll)

Update: Additional articles at Computer Business Review and at Netcraft, and a Slashdot story.

Update 2: According to Blue Security, the DDoS was not targeting their website by name, and the DDoS didn’t attack their blog until after they had already redirected the website. So it looks like it was less a case of them redirecting the attack and more a case of the attackers chasing them.

*Sigh* Must remember to collect all facts before engaging in righteous anger.

Update 3 (May 9): Apparently “all the facts” as reported by Blue Security don’t add up… (via Happy Software Prole)

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I’ve been meaning to mention this, but for the past few weeks the spam category here has been syndicated on Planet Antispam [dead link]. Thanks to SpamAssassin’s Justin Mason for the invite!*

It’s been odd, knowing that anything I post in that category will show up on another site within an hour or two. On one hand, I’m writing more on the topic than I have in months. On the other hand, anytime I start to write a spam-related post, I find myself thinking about whether it’s worth cluttering up the feed.

*Actually, it wasn’t an invitation so much as a call for submissions on the SpamAssassin mailing list. But he accepted it.

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Molly Holzschlag writes about the Accidental Blogger Effect—what happens when you post something offhand that somehow ends up as a prime search result, leading to that offhand remark taking on a life of its own. I made a comment about how Another One Bites the Dust turned into a 3-year-long thread about Frosty, Heidi and Frank, but it occurs to me that the often-viewed Fallen Angel cover art I posted about last week is the same phenomenon.