Andrew R didn’t know for sure either, but said he was getting a 403 message from my site feed, and reckoned it looked like something on my server was treating his server as a potential threat and blocking his requests. Other B4L users may remember he has been having some spam/DDoS trouble recently so has become a lot more aware and clued-up about about anti-spam measures after having to install a few himself in a hurry.

I had a deluge of spam comments myself recently, which was only fixed by installing Bad Behavior (sic). And that seems to be the problem. As well as blocking all that nasty spam it has also been blocking the legitimate requests from B4L.

There is a way out of this: amongst the Bad Behavior files is one called whitelist.inc.php where you can put trusted IP addresses so they will be let through. I put the B4L server IP in there, wrote a bland test post and it appeared on the B4L site within minutes.

I had wondered why BB was reporting such a large number of access attempts blocked: over 200,000 in the first few days and now 80,000+ in the last 7 days. Looking at Statcounter, it looks like visits generally have been down, and that all makes a bit of sense now.

So if you are using Bad Bahavior and notice that your site feed is not appearing in places where it should – and if Bad Behavior log is reporting an unfeasibly large number of “access attempts blocked” it might be worth your while investigating the white list.

Having spent a little bit of time looking at the server logs as a result of this I now have more questions than answers though. Like – why am I getting so many hits with the referrer being something called “pukiwiki.php” at addresses ending in aaa.livedoor.jp? Is that where all the spam comments were coming from in the first place?

Also I had forgotten about it until the last minute.

It would have enjoyed meeting all the other Andrews and Pauls again – and regret missing the opportunity to meet up with Lisa, Neil and others I haven’t met before.

New Years resolutions are crap generally, but if I make one this year it will be to make an effort to go to the next meet which is in, or near, London or Brighton.

• Age – 44
• Gender – Male
• Astrological Sign: Give Way
• Zodiac Year: Giraffe
• Occupation: IT Project Co-ordinator
• Location: Crawley, West Sussex RH11 9RA

Interests:

• Music
• Film
• Literature
• Politics
• Art
• Football
• Photography

Favourite Films

• Fight Club
• Apocalypse Now
• The Icicle Thief
• Blow Up
• Belleville Rendez Vous
• Anything with zombies in
• Dirty Harry

Favourite Music

• Gang of Four
• Pink Floyd
• Kraftwerk
• Les Negresses Vertes
• Metallica
• Spizzenergi
• Yes
• Dancehall
• Dr Feelgood
• Angelique Kidjo
• JS Bach

Favourite Books

• Godel, Escher, Bach
• Margrave of the Marshes
• Sherlock Holmes
• Darwin’s Radio
• Christopher Brookmyre
• Robert Rankin
• Iain Banks
• The Third Policeman

No apologies for not taking astrology seriously!

Its only a bit of fun, and non-competitive… but I shall be put out if anyone beats my best of 326 moves in 3mins and 6 seconds…

The photo here should help a bit.

Jayne told me that I had a parcel at home from Amazon, and as I have not ordered anything from there for ages I was full of anticipation to find out what it was. I imagined it could be a birthday present, but couldn’t think who it would be from.

When I opened it up I found that it was from a fellow blogger and could not have been more gobsmacked. The phrase “its the thought that counts” is used so much we sometimes forget the meaning of it. I was really impressed that someone would go out of their way to make the gesture, which is not to belittle the article itself – its a book I really did want but never got round to buying.

I have heard of the concept of random acts of kindness, like going to the toll booth at the Dartford Crossing and paying for the next five cars, and have sometimes thought it would be fun to upgrade a stranger’s Flickr account to Pro just to surprise them. OK, this is not totally random, but it still had a similar impact.

If the intention was to spread a little bit of happiness then it worked. I shall not embarrass the person who now holds the unofficial title as nicest Labour blogger, but they know who they are and they know how much I appreciate it. I intend to react not necessarily by reciprocation, but more likely by doing the same thing for an unsuspecting third party – paying it forward instead of paying it back as the Kevin Spacey/Haley Joel Osment film has it.

I must be getting sentimental as I get older.

I was thinking of putting a bid in, then I remembered that as a member I already own it as much as anybody does.

Instead I unwound by sorting out the 311 photos from the digital camera and deleting the 500 spam comments and 200 spam e-mails which accumulated in 4 days.

Tomorrow I shall systematically inflict my holiday snaps on the world at large via Flickr, with a few choice examples on these pages as well.

You have been warned.

Its all very Web 2.0

The first ‘opportunity’ came though Flickr, the photo-sharing site/community, the second through Amazon’s interactive elements, and the third through blogs.

In the end I politely declined. The whole Labour conference blogging scheme started while I was away and I don’t really know anything about it, and anyway I can think of loads of Labour bloggers who would be more knowledgeable, interesting and entertaining than me on the subject – so I pointed Radio 5 Live in their direction. (I hope they don’t mind…)

I suppose its a bit contrary for someone who maintains a few web sites to be publicity shy, but thats how it goes.

Some people may not have heard about WRD syndrome because it is something I made up – another of my frequent contrived and incoherent analogies which nobody else appreciates. Anyway, I don’t know what they are like for music now, but Woolies always used to sell a fairly limited range of albums and all the top 30 chart singles, but only the top 30 singles. As a kid I used to wonder about that. If they only sold the top 30, how did anything get into the top 30?

It seemed to me that Woolies depended on other shops existing in order to have a top 30 to sell. I used to think that if all the other shops did the same, the whole system would fall apart. (I quite like the term WRD Syndrome actually. I’ll have to see if I can develop it to apply it to supermarkets selling bestselling books and stuff like that. Maybe it will catch on)

In the same way, the idea of recommended posts will only be successful if enough people ignore them and read more widely in order to be the first person to recommend a post. However, having met a fair few B4L people I’m sure that will not be a problem.

For myself I don’t think I will pay too much attention normally (unless so many blogs get affiliated that I can’t keep up) but will find it invaluable if I have been away on holiday (or if our power gets cut for a few days again) and only have time to skim the cream of the crop. For that reason alone I think its an idea worth pursuing.

From experience so far, there are a couple of refinements which might make it even better:

• Votes displayed on the main screen.
  At the moment you can only see how many (if any) votes a post has by casting a vote yourself.
• The ability to vote from within a post.
  I don’t know how this would work technically, but sometimes I might just go to the main page of a blog I particularly enjoy and read all the recent posts, or having followed a B4L link I might then follow sidebar links to a previous post. I might like what I see there, but to vote for it I would have to go to B4L and hunt through the main feed for it.
  I know this would only work if Andrew wrote a clever bit of code compatible with Blogger, Wordpress, and other packages and everyone installed it on their own sites for it to work and that would be a drag.
  I also realise that this would mean that visitors from outside the B4L fraternity could easily vote, and this would probably be a bad thing for reasons which I can’t be arsed to go into now.

Today, Andrew published the first results of the voting, and it turns out I am the third most recommended blog so far, after Norm and Kerron. I’m not drawing any conclusions from that though; its one of those artificial situations like West Ham being top of the Premier League after the first game of the season. Having read a few books on maths and statistics I can work out why my ranking is artificially inflated.

The main reason is that there is a very small sample. I was surprised to see how small, but then it is early days. It is more than likely that there are only a handful of people actively doing any recommending and possible they are the more active ‘members’ of B4L. By virtue of geography I have met a lot of the most active members since there were meet-ups in Brighton and London and I live halfway.

I suspect that there is a trend towards the people doing most of the voting being those getting most of the votes. That is not to say everyone is voting for themselves, just that a smaller group who are more networked together and inclined towards each other’s sites are the early adopters.

That is not to say there is not a little bit of self-voting… I recommended one of my posts to see how it all worked, and then curiosity led me to recommend another to see if it had any recommendations already – see my first point above. Because of the slow start to this and small sample, such experiments have a disproportionate effect.

As a general rule I don’t approve of self-promotion in this sort of thing, and one danger would be that the whole thing turned into a game to get more votes which would defeat the purpose of helping to identify the most interesting posts. Then again, if I post something I am really proud of and which I feel deserves to be seen more or which I just think is very funny I won’t feel too proud to give it a recommendation but would resist the temptation to just recommend every single post.

All of which is a bit of a long-winded way of trying to encourage Andrew to keep at it with this sort of innovation.

However, there is a new one just started by Snowflake5 which looks promising. Only 4 posts so far, and two of them are just pictures of snowflakes, but the other two posts are a list of all the Labour tax cuts since 1997 and some speculation on the Tories’ position within the EPP group in Europe, which are both interesting reads and I hope an indication of more to come.