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Embed LaTeX in Wordpress

I don’t run Wordpress, but this is pretty cool: you can embed LaTeX right into your Wordpress posts. (Official announcement at WP.com)

Whoa

It was supposed to be like flipping a switch, changing over to this new look for the blog, but of course it was nothing like that. I think that most of the kinks are worked out, although I have some stylesheet cleaning up to do later on and a bit more restoration—the sociology blogroll is missing for now, for example, but it will be back soon. I was going for a simpler, one-column design here. Did it work? Finding anything horribly out of whack?

Updates

On the way to a broader site update, I just installed the new version of Textpattern. Things look mostly normal for now; if you encounter anything hinky, please let me know.

We got to go in and visit the penguin

A quick observation: That one of the alleged thieves planned to use his share of the loot to fund his band only makes this story better.

Tagback

Burning Bird has a neat idea for a trackback-style system based on Technorati tags. Tagback would assign a unique tag to each blog post; followup posts (or photos or links) labeled with that tag are picked up by Technorati and compiled at the page for the post’s tag. For example, all the tagbacks to Shelley’s “introducing tagback” post can be found right here.

Aside from potentially solving some of the problems of trackback spamming, this is a pretty neat way to add trackback-like functionality to blog software that doesn’t yet have any built-in support for it, like Textpattern. All it takes is a link from each post to its tags page, and all the heavy lifting is done off-site. It should be easy to make a quick Txp plugin to create and display the appropriate tagback link based on post titles.

Denial of service

There’s no doubt that spammers, like those who clog my logs with bogus referers and make trackback unusable are Assclowns of a High Order (I think that was also the title of a Gene Simmons solo album). Since making the switch to Textpattern a year ago, I haven’t had a single comment spam, and since Txp doesn’t have a trackback feature (yet?), I have been safe from the kind of attack that hit Crooked Timber yesterday. But the referer spam is heavy; and I don’t even display referers, so while it’s quite useless to the spammer, it still overloads my logs and takes up bandwidth that I pay for. Patching my htaccess with the latest batch of spam referer domains—a tedious, stupid, and ultimately ineffective thing to have to do—I noticed that the bogus web sites have something new: They all include a form for reporting abuse.

Ha-hah! Reporting abuse, and of course, they want you to leave your URL. Hey, a turnip truck!

But it occurs to me that the form leaves some opportunity, because all the domains that left spam in my logs use the same form. I’m not one to advocate misuse of network resources or anything, but I imagine that a hearty use of that form might make the spammer’s own ISP take notice.

Just sayin’.

Site wonkery

I’ve been tinkering with a few elements of This Old Site this afternoon, adding the ability to send information to Technorati Tags. Tags will be familiar to users of del.icio.us or flickr. This kind of tagging system has lately been dubbed folksonomy. When you view individual entries here, you’ll now get a bit of extra information displayed below the link (for items in the linklog) or formal category (for regular articles): One or more tags will show up, and, when clicked, they will lead on to the Technorati page associated with that tag.

That page displays some cool information: It starts with tags sent directly to Technorati, and adds to it links with the same tags gathered from del.icio.us and flickr. See for example the page for the sociology tag. So from a single entry here, it’s possible to navigate within this site using my set of categories, or to navigate through external links that have some association with that topic. Pretty neat. When a textpattern tool to navigate by tags within a site is put together, the formally-structured categories may drop out entirely—in the meantime, there is some redundancy between categories and tags.

For Textpattern, see ajw_technorati_tags for a plugin to enable tags.


About, the short version

I’m a sociologist. This site is powered by Textpattern, TextDrive and the sociological imagination. For more about me and this site, see the long version.

Syndicate me with any of the following: Atom, RSS, sociology and linklog feeds are available.