Josh's FIAT 1500 Cabrio

11/24/2005: Comment Spam

Up until about a month ago, I never had a problem with spammers putting junk in the comments on this site, mainly because I use blosxom, which isn’t a very popular blogging program among non-technical folks, and so the spammers weren’t targetting it.

Well, they’ve figured it out, so there were a number of spam comments advertising various drugs in there, annoying me.

I’ve cleaned out all the bogus comments and have enabled a javascript-based anti-spam measure. This change should be invisible to any normal users, as long as you have javascript enabled in your browser. Please email me if you have any problems posting a comment.

Hopefully this change will suffice for now. I’d hate to have to have folks register to be able to post comments, as some sites do.

Anyway, we’ll have to wait and see. Unfortunately the spammers are engaging in a bit of an arms race, so the rest of us have to cope with this kind of annoyance from time to time.

Just another reminder- please consider subscribing to the site to be notified when I make new postings.

Also- I’ve updated the Other Car Restoration Websites and Parts Vendors pages with some new links.

7/5/2005: Subscribe to the Site!

If you would like to subscribe to automatically be notified when a new entry is posted on this site, you have several options.

Since this site publishes an RSS Feed, you can subscribe to it using any RSS Aggregator or blog reader.

Some RSS readers you can install on your PC include

NetNewsWire (mac)
SharpReader (windows)
AmphetaDesk (windows, mac, linux)
Mozilla Thunderbird (windows, mac, linux)
Mozilla Firefox (windows, mac, linux)

You can also use a web-based RSS aggregator like Bloglines (this is my favorite, since i don’t have to install any new software to use it)

In addition, i’ve just greated a Yahoo Group (mailing list) that you can subscribe to to get an announcement whenever I post a new entry. I also welcome any general questions or discussion on that list. You can subscribe to it here:

http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/josh_cabrio/

12/18/2004: Reference Info

I’ve added a new page to the reference section of this site, a collection of Informational Articles on Other Sites. This is a list of reference articles I’ve found elsewhere on the internet, broken down by topic.

This list should be a good complement to my existing list of Restoration Projects on Other Sites.

Both lists are updated ocntinuously as I find new stuff. Right now it’s just a list of links, imported over from my bookmarks. I will be working on the organization and adding descriptions to the links in the future.

8/25/2004: Photo Gallery

A while back, I set up a photo gallery on this site for other folks to use. I’m not putting my own pictures in it for the most part, since I have so many and my disk space on this web site is limited. But here it is.. Anyone is welcome to share fiat-related photos here. Just request an account, create an album, and upload away.

http://www.hitchhiker.org/fiat/gallery/

This should be a lot more flexible than the fiatcabrios yahoo group’s photo gallery, and it will preserve the photos’ full resolution.

6/2/2004: Translation

I’ve noticed a number of hits to this site are coming from overseas, so I decided to add some links on the left hand side to altavista’s Babel Fish Translation Service to make it easier for non-english speakers to read this site.

Just click on one of the country flags to translate this page to that language. If you’d like another language (which is supported by babelfish) to be added, just let me know and i’ll add the button.

Hope this is helpful for someone :)

4/11/2004: Tweaking the site

I’ve made a few changes to the blosxom software used to run this site. I removed the “comments” feature because it didn’t really work very well- I’ll replace it with something better.

The “archives” pages now show entries in chronological order instead of in reverse.

I’ve added new index pages that list the entries out, rather than showing the full bodies by default (though the option is still there to show them all in full)

To make it easier to follow the project’s progress, i’ve also added a direct link to the latest post from the welcome page for the site.

2/29/2004: The Website Goes Public

I’ve been developing this site on and off since I began this project, at the end of last summer. Finally I’ve sorted out the remaining details and have decided it’s time to open the site to the public.

If that’s you, then welcome! Please let me know if you have any questions or problems with the site.

At the moment things are going a bit slowly on the car, but I think it will pick up again, now that the weather is finally starting to warm up.

01/05/2004: Model History Information

I’ve added a bunch of content to the Reference Information section of the site, including an extensive Model History coverying all the cabriolet models and their predecessors.

I also added a set of Model Specifications with photos for each of the cabriolet models.

11/26/2003: Blosxom

This site is implemented as web log (or “blog”) using a software package called Blosxom.

This program is very extendable, and so i’ve added a number of third-party plugins and some of my own design.

Because of the “blog” style of this site, every page on it is timestamped, so you can browse the site either by topic or chonologically.

You may also subscribe to the RSS feeds provided by the site, just like any other blog.

Technical Note

Blosxom has one design choice which I intensely dislike (relying on file mtimes for dates), but wrote a script deal with it. Since I keep my dates in the entry titles, I wrote a script which reads these titles in and fixes the file modification times.

If you want the script, here it is: fixdates.pl