Warning: Something's Not Right Here!

hype-free.blogspot.com contains content from randaclay.com
, a site known to distribute malware.
Your computer might catch a virus if you visit this site.
...

The source of the warning is the image / link in the comment form, which I have now removed (or more precisely replaced with a local copy). It seems that the randaclay.com has been hacked and thus it is classified as malicious by Google, which in turn leads to all sites linking to it being marked a potentially malicious. So, while I’m sorry for doing this, I will remove the links to their site until they manage to resolve the issue and will mirror their manifesto below:

Almost all blog platforms by default are set up so that a “dead end” piece of code is inserted wherever there is a link in a comment, so that search engines will not “count” the link as they are crawling the internet. This was originally designed to help stop comment spam, but it doesn’t work. What it does is remove some of the incentive for your readers contribute to your site by commenting on your posts.

What can you do about it? Turn off “nofollow”. Show your commenters that you appreciate them. Spread the link love.

The problem was that the server hosting the SWF and JS file didn’t serve them anymore, instead giving a 403 – access refused error. To mitigate this problem I’ve uploaded the SWF file to Google Code and used the JS file from the Google Ajax Library and bought the plugin back to life.

So, if you are using the plugin and you are subscribed to my feed, go to the original (now updated) post and use the new code.

Thank you and sorry for any inconvenience caused!

So, if you like my ramblings, please subscribe. If you don’t, leave a comment and subscribe :-).

Unfortunately I failed to get it to work :-(. I tried to make it recognize my blog, but I had no success (just a bunch or error messages). I’ve tried both the free basic and a trial of the pro version on two systems (one running WinXP and one running Win7) with the same (lack of) results. One thing I remarked is that it installs a Firefox extension, the purpose of which I’m not entirely sure about… (probably it has some integration with the browser). Their FAQ system wasn’t much help either. It only offers to search by keywords, and doesn’t show a list of known issues. It also didn’t return anything when I tried to search for “Blogger” and other related URL’s…

But the the funniest (or most annoying – depending on your point of view) message was the following:

This appears when you try to uninstall the product it asks you if you want to restart your computer, but the text of the message gets lost somehow (this problem reproduced constantly on both systems with both versions). If you are unfortunate enough to click Yes and have some unsaved work… (then again, you shouldn’t try out beta software on your main system).

Final verdict: unknown. I wouldn’t pay money for it at the moment, that’s for sure.

Picture taken from Bitpicture’s photostream with permission.

Below you can see the pipe, which is relatively simple:

The code consumes the result of the pipe as JSON and generates the flash object. It is adapted from the original include code. If you wish to use it, you should edit the Yahoo Pipes URL (replace it with your blog URL and the number of tags you wish to show), the text color (on the line with “tcolor”) and possibly the size of the flash. The weird method for constructing the links is necessary because Blogger seems to “muck” with the code otherwise.

<div id="tagCloudContainer"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var tagCloud = {
  'storeCloud' : function (obj) {
    var baseUrl = location.protocol + "//" + location.host;
    var cloud = '';
    for (var i in obj.value.items) {
      cloud += "<" + "a " + "href='" + baseUrl + "/search/label/" + obj.value.items[i].title + "' style='8'>" + obj.value.items[i].title + '<' + '/a>';
    }
    cloud += '<' + '/tags>';    
    tagCloud.cloudTags = cloud;
    setTimeout(tagCloud.renderTagcloudCallback, 100);
  },
  
  'renderTagcloudCallback' : function () {  
    try {
      swfobject.embedSWF('http://hype-free.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/blog/tagcloud.swf', 'tagCloudContainer', '230', '240', '7', '',
        { 'tcolor' : '0x666633', 'mode' : 'tags', 'distr' : 'true', 'tspeed' : '100', 'tagcloud' : tagCloud.cloudTags },
        { 'wmode' : 'transparent', 'allowScriptAccess' : 'always' });      
    } catch (err) {
      alert(err);
      setTimeout(tagCloud.renderTagcloudCallback, 100);
    }
  },
  
  'init' : function () {
    var script = document.createElement('script');
    script.src = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.2/swfobject.js';
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
    
    script = document.createElement('script');
    script.src = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?BlogUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fhype-free.blogspot.com%2F&Topcount=10&_id=xKTkgQsT3hGl4j3nJpREag&_render=json&_callback=tagCloud.storeCloud';
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);    
    return this;
  }
}.init();
</script>

If you are reading this in your RSS reader, visit the blog to see it in action.

Update: it seems that the Flash file can’t interpret tag names with special symbols in them (like ‘). Because of this I modified the pipe so that such tags are filtered out. This will result in some top tags not being displayed (if they contain special characters), but I considered this the right solution, because even if they were displayed, clicking on them wouldn’t result in anything. Credit goes to Evie for finding this issue.

Update: the S3 instance hosting the flash file and javascript (halotemplates.s3.amazonaws.com) went away (thanks to Soufiane for pointing this out). So I’ve downloaded the latest version of the WP-Cumulus and uploaded the SWF file from to Google Code. The SWFObject library is also served from there. So to everyone using the old version: please update to the latest code posted above to make it work again. Sorry for the disruption!

Update: The update broke the “clickability” of the links, since it seems that the new SWF file requires absolute URLs for that. This is now fixed in the script above.

Update: Yahoo pipes changed their backend and thus some adjustment was needed in the pipe which was done.

Update: reduced the number of tags to avoid hogging the CPU.

Update: the server hosting the javascript / flash files went away, so I’ve moved them to alternative locations. See this post for the details.

So I give it up and embed directly the Blogger widget offered by Yahoo. I didn’t want to go this way for two reasons: I didn’t want my readers to have to load an other javascript. Also from a security stand point, it is better not to load Javascript / Flash from third party sources (not that I don’t trust Yahoo, but better safe than sorry).

PS. I checked out some alternative RSS manipulation services, but none of them could deliver HTML in a sinkable enough format. So until Yahoo offers HTML out or I figure out the mysteries of the Blogger RSS fetcher, I’m stuck with this solution.

Image taken from Tomas Caspers’ photostream with permission.

<link href='http://www.blogger.com/favicon.ico' rel='icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

Which overrides my favicon setting. The solution? Put your favicon declaration after the following line in your template:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Something like this:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<link href='http://hype.free.googlepages.com/info.ico' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

I tested it in FF3, Opera 9.50 and IE7 and it works in all three of them.

Hope this helps.

The steps performed by the pipe are the following:

1. It takes the blog URL from the user
2. It removes the beginning (“http://”) and end (“/”) of the URL. This is much easier than requiring the user to enter the URL in a particular format
3. It builds the URL for the comment feed of the given blog. We only fetch the summary of the last 500 comments to conserve bandwidth.
4. It fetches the given feed.
5. You can specify a given user who should not be shown (probably your own nick)
6. It filters out comments made by anonymous and by the specified user
7. It aggregates the comments based on the author names
8. It sorts the result in descending order based on the number of occurances
9. Puts the author name in the title and the author link in the link field for the resulting feed.
10. Finally it appends the count to each title

You can access the pipe here and create your own, customized version (different blog URL, different user to filter out).

To add it to your own blog, add a “Feed” widget with the resulting RSS feed (you can obtain the address of the feed by going to “More options” -> “Get as RSS”)

Update: I can’t figure out how to make the Blogger RSS fetcher to update the complete feed. Until I figure out, you can use the the alternative solution described here.

• Added my logo in the header
• Redirected the autodiscovery feeds through Feedburner. This should give a more accurate readership number (fortunately users don’t have to do anything for this to work).
• I’ve moved my sidebar over to the right. As most people start reading on the left side of the page, it is more logical to have the content there, rather than navigation / subscription / etc (although this may depend on the goals you try to achieve).
• I’ve reduced the number of text fields. To do this I’ve hidden the blogger navbar (it doesn’t seem to violate the TOS) – my biggest problem with it was that the search box was on the left side, while I would have preferred to be on the right side. To compensate for it, I’ve added a search box on the right side (where it belong IMHO). I played around with Google Custom Search for a while, but there was a delay between me posting and Google indexing, and also it didn’t blend it nicely with the template.
• Also, I’ve hidden by default the e-mail subscription box. It was distracting attention, and probably most people will use feeds anyway. You can still get to it by clicking on the “Subscribe via e-mail” link. The image used for it was taken from Wikimedia Commons.