Seems WordPress didn’t like this version of PHP5 with this version of Linux, so my friend/host reverted to PHP4 and wala! Sorry for the downtime. 🙂
Category Archives: Site News
News about my site
Changing Hosts
I’ll be switching hosts over the next couple days. Expect some downtime.
I Don’t Use GMail!
A lot of people think that the “Viper007Bond@GMail.com” to the right is my e-mail address and have been using it to contact me. Well let me set you all straight — I don’t and never have used GMail for my e-mail, so please stop e-mailing me via that. 😉
I did set it up to forward to my real e-mail address, but it’s still somewhat annoying when use it. Please just use my contact form that’s linked to at the top of this page. It’s there for a reason, folks. 🙂
Avatar.Viper007Bond.com Killed
Sorry, but I’ve had to kill my public image rotating script. So far this month, it had gotten over 180,000 hits (in the whole last month, only 140,000 hits were made) which resulted in WAY too many open connections to the site at once. While that was very little bandwidth, it was still way too many people trying to access the script at once and my host had to kill it as it was starting to affect other people on my shared server.
It’s a real shame too as I had already completed about 1/2 of the complete recode of it. Perhaps one day I’ll bring it back up as an invitation only service for use on non-high traffic sites, but not for now (busy with other things).
And for those who have no clue what I’m talking about, I had a script located at http://avatar.viper007bond.com/ where after signing up, you could enter the URLs to some images hosted elsewhere. Then you’d use a URL given to you by the script as your avatar or sig on forums and my script, when called, would redirect people to one of your URLs. Basically, it was an image rotator.
Sorry guys.
Spam Spam Spam
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
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
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
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
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. 😉
New Hosting Plan
Woot, just switched hosting plans. My old one (which you can no longer sign up for) was running me $11.99 a month (I pay yearly though) and which got me 1 gig of space and 50 GB of transfer. Now I’m paying $9.99 a month and I get 5 gigs of storage and no real bandwidth limit to speak of (they’ll probably get mad if I use HUGE amount of bandwidth though).
And if that hosting plan sounds good to you, my host is HostRocket if you’d like to check them out (that’s a referral link that gets me money if you signup BTW).