Copia

Earlier this year I posted an off-hand entry about a scam call I received. I guess it soon got a plum Google spot for the query "Government grants scam" and it's been getting almost one comment a day ever since. Today I came across a comment whose author was requesting permission to use the posting and sibling comments in a book.

I have written a book on Winning Grants, titled "The Grant Authority," which includes a chapter on "Avoiding Grant Scams." It is in final stages of being (self)- published. I want to include comments and complaints about government grant scams on this Copia blog. I think the book's readers will learn alot from them.

How can I get permission to include written comments on this blog site in this book?

I'd never really thought about such a matter before. I e-mailed the correspondent permission, based on Copia's Creative Commons Attribution licensing, but considering he seemed especially interested in the comments, I started wondering. I don't have some warning on the comment form that submitted comments become copyright Copia's owners and all that, as I've seen on some sites. If I really start to think about things I also realize that our moderating comments (strictly to eliminate spam) might leave us liable for what others say. It all makes me wonder whether someone has come up with a helpful (and concise) guide to IP and tort concerns for Webloggers. Of course, I imagine such a read might leave my hair standing on end so starkly that I'd never venture near the 21st century diarist's pen again.

BTW, for a fun battle scene viewed in the cold, claret light of pedantry, inquire as to the correct plural of "conundrum".

[Uche Ogbuji]

Of course chores lead to more chores. After last week's round of tweaks to Copia I got a suggestion from Aristotle to rearrange the entry-specific titles, and I've done so. I got a bit more info from Tom Passin about possible encoding problems that has only deepened my bafflement.

I also noticed there has been some confusion over last week's birth announcement. It came from Chimezie, not me (congrats, brother!). On Copia the authors is specified for each entry, but previously there wasn't any such useful distinction being made in the Atom 0.3 (I'll be working on an Atom 1.0 flavor for PyBlosxom soon) or RSS 1.0 feeds. I've fixed that, but I've done through in a way I'm not sure all feed sinks will process correctly. In the Atom feed there is a top-level

<author>
    <name>Uche and Chimezie Ogbuji</name>
    <url>http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/</url>
    <email>uche@ogbuji.net</email>
  </author>

And then for each entry a more specific authors, for example:

<title>Chikaora Zion Credell Ogbuji</title>
    ...
    <author>
      <name>chimezie</name>
    </author>

I hope that helps. I made some other tweaks to the feeds, and this does seem to have had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing everything back onto the front page of Planet XML. My apologies to Planet XML readers (including me: I'd hoped to catch up after the holidays and found only Copia entries).

Copia already tells you the author of each entry, in the info line at the end of the entry.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Of course chores lead to more chores. After last week's round of tweaks to Copia I got a suggestion from Aristotle to rearrange the entry-specific titles, and I've done so. I got a bit more info from Tom Passin about possible encoding problems that has only deepened my bafflement.

I also noticed there has been some confusion over last week's birth announcement. It came from Chimezie, not me (congrats, brother!). On Copia the authors is specified for each entry, but previously there wasn't any such useful distinction being made in the Atom 0.3 (I'll be working on an Atom 1.0 flavor for PyBlosxom soon) or RSS 1.0 feeds. I've fixed that, but I've done through in a way I'm not sure all feed sinks will process correctly. In the Atom feed there is a top-level

<author>
    <name>Uche and Chimezie Ogbuji</name>
    <url>http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/</url>
    <email>uche@ogbuji.net</email>
  </author>

And then for each entry a more specific authors, for example:

<title>Chikaora Zion Credell Ogbuji</title>
    ...
    <author>
      <name>chimezie</name>
    </author>

I hope that helps. I made some other tweaks to the feeds, and this does seem to have had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing everything back onto the front page of Planet XML. My apologies to Planet XML readers (including me: I'd hoped to catch up after the holidays and found only Copia entries).

Copia already tells you the author of each entry, in the info line at the end of the entry.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I've finally had some time today, as I prepare for the holidays, to fix some things on Copia that have been broken for too long. Some of the highlights, especially concerning issues mentioned by readers (thanks, guys), are:

RSS 1.0 feed body fix. Added rss:description field for the RSS 1.0 feed, which fixes missing post bodies in readers such as Bloglines which don't support support content:encoded. I do truncate the field to 500 characters, according to the recommendation in the spec.

Single entry view title fix. Added entry titles for single entry pages. Before today, if you viewed this entry through the perma-link, the title would just say "Copia"; now it says "Copia ✏Copia housecleaning"). I've wanted to do this for a while, but I was having the devil of a time figuring out how to do it with PyBlosxom. A scolding from Dan Connolly forced me to chase down a fix. For other PyBlosxom users the trick is to use the comments plug-in, copy the head.* flavor file to comment-head.*, and then update to use the $title variable, which is the title of the entry itself ($blog-title is the title of the entire blog). In my case the updated HTML header template looks like:

<title>$blog_title &#x270F;$title</title>

I did get a report that Copia is incorrectly sending `Content-Type header text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1`, but when I check using the LiveHTTPHeaders extension for FireFox on Linux it reports the correct charset=UTF-8 from the server. If anyone else can corroborate this issue, please leave a comment with the specific URL from which you noticed the error, your platform and browser, and the HTTP sniffing tool were you using. Thanks.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I've finally had some time today, as I prepare for the holidays, to fix some things on Copia that have been broken for too long. Some of the highlights, especially concerning issues mentioned by readers (thanks, guys), are:

RSS 1.0 feed body fix. Added rss:description field for the RSS 1.0 feed, which fixes missing post bodies in readers such as Bloglines which don't support support content:encoded. I do truncate the field to 500 characters, according to the recommendation in the spec.

Single entry view title fix. Added entry titles for single entry pages. Before today, if you viewed this entry through the perma-link, the title would just say "Copia"; now it says "Copia ✏Copia housecleaning"). I've wanted to do this for a while, but I was having the devil of a time figuring out how to do it with PyBlosxom. A scolding from Dan Connolly forced me to chase down a fix. For other PyBlosxom users the trick is to use the comments plug-in, copy the head.* flavor file to comment-head.*, and then update to use the $title variable, which is the title of the entry itself ($blog-title is the title of the entire blog). In my case the updated HTML header template looks like:

<title>$blog_title &#x270F;$title</title>

I did get a report that Copia is incorrectly sending `Content-Type header text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1`, but when I check using the LiveHTTPHeaders extension for FireFox on Linux it reports the correct charset=UTF-8 from the server. If anyone else can corroborate this issue, please leave a comment with the specific URL from which you noticed the error, your platform and browser, and the HTTP sniffing tool were you using. Thanks.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I finally broke down and made Copia safe for MSIE. When I first set up the site, I tweaked the IE look a bit, but it was such a frustrating exercise that I gave up once satisfied with its appearance on FireFox and Safari (I need to install Opera for testing). Last night I found this excellent Wiki resource and soon got things sorted out. In the process I was alerted to the fact that Copia gets rendered in quirks mode, which is not what we want. I think I know how to fix most of the problems, but some issues are buried in PyBlosxom and plug-ins code, I think, so it may have to wait until my next burst of energy before we can sport one of those fly "valid ?HTML ?" icons.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Well, I'm heading off to catch the flight to Amsterdam for XTech 2005. I'll blog as much as I can, and I have some FOSS work to do as well, on Amara, especially, to prep the 1.0b2 release.

We've had the spam comment folks doing their thing here, and so far I've been able to keep them mostly in check by deleting them soon after they appear. The trip will probably leave too big a hole for them, so for now I've turned on draft mode for comments. All comments will be held until explicitly approved. I apologize for any inconvenience. I've been tinkering on a more solid spam fighting system, building on the great work others have done on black-listing the punks.

[Uche Ogbuji]

So I took the line of thought from Eve Maler and the hack from Tarek Ziadé and sprinkled rounded boxes throughout Copia (for Mozilla browsers only, should be regular, square boxes on others). I have a glass eye for Web design so someone will have to tell me whether the Copia look has turned to even more rubbish now.

[Uche Ogbuji]

latest_comments.py

You may have noticed a new feature on Copia. This one was inspired by a feature from Burningbird (Shelley Powers' blog). Copia now lists the last ten comments posted, with links to the author and the referenced entry. This weekend I wrote another plug-in latest_comments.py, which implements this feature. from the doc string:

Generates a template variable, $latest_comments, which contains a listing of the most recent comments to the Weblog, in the form:

<div class="comment-link">
Author 1
on
Entry 1 title
</div>
<div class="comment-link">
Author 2
on
Entry 2 title
</div>

This plugin requires the comments plug-in (comments.py).

This module supports the following, optional config parameter:

latest_comment_count - the number of comments to include in the
                         output (default 5)

It's taken a beating over the past few days, and held up OK. James Governor exposed a Unicode bug when he tracked back to an entry with a title using high characters. That's all fixed now (it took down Copia for a little while).

I release it under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License (I really need to iron out the CC licensing throughout Copia).)

Let me know what you think. I need to get all these plug-ins into CVS and into the PyBlosxom registry one of these days.

[Uche Ogbuji]

In Shelley Powers entries "Ms Pancake" and "Let’s keep the Blogroll and throw away the writing", I've learned that there is some controversy about blogrolls. When I threw together Copia I tossed in a blogroll, which was just a random list of blogs I read. I hardly worried that the list would grow too long because I have limited time for reading blogs.

Shelley's posts made me think about the matter more carefully. To draw the basic lesson out of the long and cantankerous points in her blog entries (and comments), a blog is about communication, and in most cases communication within a circle (if an open and, one hopes, expanding one). Based on that line of thinking, Chime and I had a discussion and thought it would be best if rather than having a "blogroll" list of blogs we read, we had a list of other Weblogs with which we have some more direct and reciprocal connection. This includes people with whom we've had personal and professional relationships, and also people who have taken the time to engage us here on Copia. There is still some arbitrariness to this approach, and there is some risk of turning such a listing into the manifestation of a mutual back-slapping club, but it does feel more rightly to me. We do plan to post an OPML as a link on the page template, so people can check out what feeds we read (if they care); this feels the right compromise to me.

So there you have it. The list of "folks" on the left hand side, are people we feel to be in the Copia circle. We hope and expect it will expand.

[Uche Ogbuji]