Category Archives: Blog News

News about my blog

Spam Spam Spam

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Wow, my blog is getting spammed hardcore right now at a rate of around 3 per minute for the past 24 hours (it was doing a lot, but not quite as many over the past couple days). I can literally watch the count just go right up before my eyes.

I mean, it’s not like I really care. Not one of the spams has gotten through thanks to the anti-comment spam plugin I’m using, Spam Karma 2 (see this previous post of mine), but still, it’s kinda a pain in the ass. I wish the spammers would just figure out that if the first 2000 comments they made never showed up that perhaps the next ones wouldn’t either. Oh well…

EDIT: And yes, I’m already running Bad Behavior, the latest beta even, but it’s not helping much. 🙁

DDoS

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So the server this domain is on has been being DDoS‘ed all day, resulting in it being down for most of the afternoon. Luckily my host rocks and resolved the issue fairly quickly, but of course it’s still having issues here and there. Just thought I’d let you all know what’s up. 😉

Working On A New Theme

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This post was originally posted on March 7th, 2006 at 4:33 PM. However, I busted my blog by upgrading to the wrong version of WordPress and had to revert to a database backup. That resulted in the loss of this post.

I’m working on a new theme for my blog as I’ve grown tired of this one. You can check it out at my development blog. It’s still a work in progress and is based on andreas09, a template (I converted it to a WordPress theme) by Andreas Viklund.

If you have any suggestions about it, please let me know by leaving a comment on this post! I’m looking for it to be the best theme as possible. 🙂

Spam Karma 2 + Akismet

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First, a bit of history. I have been using the anti-spam plugin Spam Karma 2 on my blog for months. It’s quite an excellent piece of work. It uses a ton of different methods to determine if a comment is spam including the age of the post, a Javascript payload (most spam bots don’t support Javascript), URL blacklists, comparison to other spam comments by the same person, etc. All of those result in a very low error rate and next to no spam actually making it onto my blog.

Anyway, I decided to try out recently the only other player worth mentioning in the WordPress anti-spam field, Akismet. Rather than trying to figure out if a comment is spam by doing a bunch of tests on your blog’s end, it sends the comment’s contents off to Akismet’s servers and it compares it to the huge database that it has.

Now of course this has it’s pros and cons. The pros are that it’s always up to the second on spam as it uses other blogs to compare with. However, it doesn’t do the Javascript tests or compare it to other spam on your blog. And in the end, I found it to be reliable, but not quite as much so as SK2. Which is why I switched back.

However, the other day I ran across an excellent little plugin for SK2 that uses the Akismet servers as an additional resource for evaluating the comment’s karma. So, now I have the best of both worlds!

Oh, and before I forget: spammers, please go die in a ditch. Thanks.

Broke My Blog

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As some of you may have noticed, I broke my blog earlier today.

Long story short, I tried to upgrade to the release canidate of version 2.0.2 of WordPress, but accidentally downloaded and upgraded to a very alpha version of version 2.1 instead. It was really not what I wanted and it’s so alpha that it didn’t even work quite right. And of course the worse part was that it upgraded my database and so I couldn’t just downgrade.

Luckily I just happened to make a database backup on Sunday, so I only lost a couple posts and comments. Pretty funny actually seeing how I usually only backup once a month. Close call, huh? 🙂

Anyway, I saved the lost posts and I’ll re-add them tomorrow as I’m off to bed for now. 😉

My Blog Is Being Slow

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Apologies, but it seems my blog is being pretty slow, REALLY slow on some pages. A redesign and recode is in the works though, so rather than trying to figure out what’s hanging and causing the slow page loads, I’m just gonna not worry about it and instead spend the time working on the new version.

Sorry for the inconvience.

WordPress v2.0 Betas

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Yes, that’s right, beta versions of WordPress v2.0 have been released and I must say, it’s majorly kickass. Partially AJAX admin area, tons of new features, etc. WordPress is really shaping up to be an even better blogging software, not that it wasn’t before.

If you want to try it out, you can download via the link in this thread of the WordPress support forums.

I’ll post a screenshot later today hopefully (it’s already 7 AM and I still haven’t gone to bed). Oh, and if you encounter any issues with my site, make sure to leave a comment on this post pointing them out.

Update [6:23 PM]: Here’s the screenshot of WordPress v2.0. Note the draggable boxes on the right side and the AJAX category selection.

WordPress v2.0 Beta 2 [Thumbnail]

Update [7:10 PM]: Just realized I screwed up my .htaccess when I was working on it last night. Permalinks / comments should work now for posts. Sorry.

Blog Fixed

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Sorry, seems Gravatar.com was down and my site was trying to update a cached Gravatar and this was causing major page timeouts here. Anyway, caching as been disabled for the time being and all should be better now. 🙂

New Comment Features

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Just thought I’d share the news (and code) of two new comment features that I’ve added to my blog.

The first is auto-scrolling to your comment after you post it. It works on themes where each comment has an id or link. If you’d like to add it to your blog, check out this thread on the WordPress support forums.

The other new feature is the ability to edit your comments for 30 minutes. Ever posted a comment only to realize that you made a spelling mistake or whatnot? Well now you can fix it.

This feature came out of a thread that I made on the WordPress forums where I was coming up with ideas for the feature. I had originally planned to code it myself (and after looking at the resulting code, I could have), but jalenack got to it before I could. It ended up working out for the best though since he accomplished the feature in a much more elegant way than I would have (he didn’t use any custom forms or anything).

Anyway, you can test out both features in the comments area of this post. Just click the comments link below. 🙂