Open Source

Getting Started with OpenFuego News Bot

OpenFuego is an open source bot from the Nieman Journalism Lab that curates a news feed using 10-15 Twitter users in a desired topic area. The people those users follow are monitored to determine the links that are most interesting to them and a database is created that can be a backend for other sites and services. The software powers Fuego, a web site and Twitter feed of journalism-related links. I want to run a Twitter bot that shares new software and programming links. Today I downloaded ... (read more)

2018/07/18

Hey! You! Get Off of RssCloud

Clinton Gallagher recently posted a blistering tirade against me in the comments of Workbench. He thinks that I'm part of a dishonest campaign against Dave Winer and the RssCloud element: Cadenhead you are being a jerk putting words in the mouth of Dave Winer --again-- as those of us who used to read the RSS mailing lists can attest; so herein I speak for myself in this regard. Secondly, if you were as professional as you imply Cadenhead --and-- if you were an all-around decent kind of fair ... (read more)

2010/07/22

Detecting Weblog Spam with Comment Flak

Because I don't want to add captchas to Workbench, this weblog has been drowning in comment spam. Since I began accepting comments in September 2002, I've received 13,000 legitimate comments and 172,000 spam. I'm trying a new technique this week that makes spam easy to detect by putting a bunch of bogus text areas on a weblog form, hiding them with Cascading Style Sheets, and checking them for input when the comment is submitted. I call these fields comment flak. Spammers typically put their ... (read more)

2006/10/25