Webdev: October 2004 Archives
Today I ran across three situations related to censorship. They are not related to each other, but the coincidence struck me.
First, I found out that my hosting provider bloghosts closed their support forum. Bloghosts gives excellent service and support and I recommend them to everybody looking for a reliable hosting provider. A few weeks ago they had some internal technical problems with their servers, resulting in lost support tickets. While normally support tickets were answered within a few hours, in that period tickets got lost and were not answered. To get the attention of the support staff, some customers started complaining in the support forum. Since normally this forum is very, very quiet ---about one post a day---, these few people completely took over the forum. The forum is now closed....
Directly after that, I read the comments on Robert Scoble's Are you afraid to blog?, which suffer from a troll called J.Toran. Some commenters requested Robert to remove these comments, but until now they are still there and I expect them to stay there.
And finally D. Keith Robinson wrote about Comment Moderation and Censorship after having to remove a whole thread.
As for censorship on this site, until now I only removed commercial comments ---spam---, but I reserve the right to moderate comments in some other situations as well, as is explained in the Comment posting policy of this site.
Movable Type version 3.12 was released today, and as usual I immediately installed it. The feature I wanted was the promised fasted build times, but I also encountered some undocumented new buttons in the edit screen:
I uploaded the image above using the Upload File button, but was a little bit disappointed that this feature did not copy the corresponding <img> element into my entry. Shall I wait for version 3.13?
The 'Dooie Donders Club' is an infamous club in Harmelen, formed by four self proclaimed brothers. Until some years ago, they had a nice web site with plastic ducks and other toys as decoration. I made this site using Microsoft Frontpage, and maintained it for some years. It contained stories about the activities of this club, which had its highlight in 2000, with an appearance in the Dutch men magazine the Panorama and the production of their CD Dagobert, de heerser hier. Shortly after, the site disappeared, and the club became dormant.
Last week I accidently found the text published in the Panorama, and thought that it was a pity that the history of the DDC is not available on the internet. But wait, maybe the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has saved something of that site. Indeed, it was all there. I quickly installed Mambo Open Source on my server, created a new subdomain, configured Mambo and copied the texts into new entries. And there it is: the DDC is back!!!
At the moment is a pretty default Mambo site, but I plan to make some custom templates to give the site some Dooie Donders sauce.
