Mustard Hamsters

Lo and behold, as soon as I get home my server at school goes down.

A month and a half of cursing and occasionally emailing the professor who I know has access to the space, I decided to look up the secretary’s phone number and call the office. After a few tries, Sharon picked up!

Sharon turned the key on the server as I instructed her to do. That didn’t fix it, so I had her check that the lights were on and that the ethernet cable was plugged in. I didn’t think it worked at first, but just as Professor Heimann walked in and Sharon handed the phone to him, Mingus started responding to ping!

Sharon Blazevich has got the magic touch.

Consider this my call to arms about Wordpress’s community interaction and security. I’ll likely add to this (maybe with some wireframes or diagrams) after lunch:

The value of user interaction with Wordpress is difficult to understate. Comments from new and regular users are key to improving the writing process, but the necessity to create a new account at each blog the user visits is sometimes too much cumulative effort for them to do so. At the same time, human users can easily be washed out by spam commenters and moderators can be overwhelmed by decisions in removing spam and approving ham.

Services such as OpenID, Facebook Connect and Google Federated Login allow users to log in and interact with a site easily without requiring them to set up accounts or type in passwords. In addition to enhancing convenience, these services don’t pose a serious threat to security against spam accounts as the registration processes filter out most computer-based attempts. These features can be added to Wordpress as plugins, but as their increase in popularity and usefulness reveals a necessity to add them to the project core.

Introducing a simple CAPTCHA script or other form of bot-detection into the core of the system would greatly reduce the number of spam users created in Wordpress installations. There are plugins that will do this for you as well, but here the issue is not so much that usability would be improved, it’s that leaving this feature out of the project core requires installation administrators to learn about it on their own and install the plugins separately. That situation leaves them susceptible to attack until they’ve hit that point where installing the plugin becomes a necessity. Leaving users in that kind of a vulnerable position by default is a major flaw in Wordpress’s security.

About Dewey

If you weren’t already aware, today I launched a website I’ve been working on for several months. I was working at Fairchild Semiconductor over the summer, listening to Archive.org’s music at my desk and resetting VPN servers, when I realized that I hadn’t been doing nearly as much programming as I would have liked. It was a great job, but I was doing valuable IT work instead of development work. I had been mulling the idea around for a while, but I decided right then that I would write a music playing site.

I already had a giant database of music at the Live Music Archive that I could pull from, so I didn’t need a lot of server space. It was all legal, and users could even download it and do what they want. It was later explained to me that I was “filling a hole in the Internet” by making the massive collection more accessible to the normal user.

So now, in February, I finally launch a website that I’ve been working on since May or June. It’s gone through many iterations, lots of changes, complete redesigns of the database, a migration to a new server, addition of AJAX and search functionality, a number of mascots, and several color palettes. I put it up today because I want to be able to put it on my resume for the EOC job fair on Thursday.

Fantastic Support

I didn’t do this nearly on my own. I was definitely the driving force behind the project, and Dewey is my baby, but Dewey wouldn’t have been a success at all if it weren’t for my friends and open source software. Some of you may not have even known you helped. So thank you to (in no particular order):

Larry Han, James Murray, Andy Baio, Rob Beschizza, Scott Schiller, Matt Snider, Dan Broekman, Sam, Ann and Ken Putney, Lesley Fleishman, the Fairchild Semiconductor Web Design Team, jrabbit, wastrel and probably many others.

Reaction

I’ve been checking the site’s visitor statistics throughout the day. In total, Dewey received 2,292 unique visits and 4,210 page views on its first day. More than half of visitors stayed for at least 30 seconds, and over a quarter stayed for over 5 minutes. Out of the current sample of the most recent visitors, 5.1% stayed on the site for more than an hour.

I’m trying to keep up on the links to Dewey through statistics. These are some of the places I’ve noticed as linking to Dewey:

Boing Boing Gadgets
Waxy.org
Archive.org
Wilkins

Dewey was even featured on Delicious’s Popular Bookmarks Page for a while.

I also received an email from one of the admins who worked on the Live Music Archive in 2002:

I just saw your site http://deweymusic.org/
.. it looks awesome! glad to see people are using the xml that we put
out there to model whatever they want with the public data. awesome!

It’s been a fun day. A day I’ve been working towards for a long time.

[via swissmiss]