Good News !  Tinderbox is Getting Better and Better

I just exchanged a nice email with Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems and the author of Tinderbox, a very cool blogging application for OS X.  I've known Mark for like 15 years now and he really, really understands this stuff.  Apparently TinderBox is going well and getting a great user community going.  That's just so cool when a small company brings out a good product and does well.  And here's a look at how TinderBox actually looks (click on it, it's cool):

[ The Tinderbox Weblog ].  Recommended.

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Spam and Blog Comments

I see from Dave that Burning Bird is now getting Spam in comments.  Given that I've just helped architect a pretty damn sophisticated (and yes I AM blowing my own horn here) anti spam system, I can pretty easily see a few solutions here:

• A comment black list organized by poster IP address where any blog author could say "This ipaddress / whatever" is a spammer.  And then if enough people agree or some other criteria a blog comment system could check the black list before the comments go public.
• A comment approval system which Jabber IMs you the comment and you reply "Y" or "N" to allow it.  I'd hate to think that we'd have to do this but it might be necessary.  Even though Burning Bird gets a lot of comments, most of us don't so it might be workable for low volume blogs.
• A comment approval system which lets "trusted comments" appear perhaps tied to your personal contact database (which a spammer wouldn't know).  Big issues here of course.

I'm a huge fan of blogs allowing comments.  To me comments bring a high level of interactive flow to blogs and I'd hate to see those minions of Satan known as spammers wreck this.

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Inbox Buddy Build #3 is Up

Ok.  We're making some real progress now even if it isn't fully in this build.  We just uploaded a fix where a problem where input field validation in one of the training dialogs could (embarassingly) prevent you from advancing.  Oops.  These things happen.  Thanks to help from Kenneth LeFebvre we now understand a rare but possible runtime error (thanks Man!, sorry I don't know what to link to).  We continue to get good suggestions from folks like Matt and Demitrious.  So it's not a major fix today unless you have this training problem and then you want it bad.  We're also getting good feedback on some of our language being confusing and trying to fix that.  Thanks everyone.

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Letting Everyone Know It's Going to Be A Bit Slow for the Next Month

I just picked up a major new project that is going to suck the ever loving life out of me over the next 5 to 6 weeks and things will be slow here (i.e. no time to think and write my longer pieces).  So expect a lesser flow for a while.

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