Site News

I’ve been fighting comment spam for a long time now. The majority of those sites are selling prescription drugs to fight erectile disfunction and poker sites. I long for the days when spam was ads for pornography. At least I could get some use out of that. But I digress. These spamming sites have been mostly no name, fly-by-night outfits that don’t have a reputation to maintain. They don’t care that the public at large hates them. They make some quick profit and then die as a company. ...

The blog editing software I’ve been using for a while now, MarsEdit, has finally gone 1.0. I consider it the second most essential software I use on my site (right after WordPress). It works with a variety of blogging packages, so if you use a Mac and blog, you need to check it out. Congratulations Brent. I look forward to future development of this software.

Much like most of the WordPress community, I’ve been waiting with baited breath for the release of 1.3. I’d all but forgotten about it until I recently discovered Blogsome in an attempt to get Dana into a quality blogging package. Blogsome is a little known free blogging site. And it’s run with WordPress 1.3 software. They even give you your own subdomain name in the format: yourname.blogsome.com. How sweet is that? At any rate, seeing the new features in 1.3 resparked my interest. I know it’s only a matter of time before it’s released (and hopefully soon). As such, I’ve put up a testing installation. It’s going to be in a state of flux as far as format and looks go, but the content will be static as I simply copied the data from this 1.2.1 installation into a new database for testing. ...

After struggling with Bloglines rather limited blog interface (which did make linking fairly easy), I’ve decided to give it up and go to del.icio.us to host those links and data. I couldn’t pull the list directly into the main site with direct links to the real things I was linking to. To top it off, they never even responded to my questions about fixing their blogroll publishing (which features completely incorrect structure. ...

I’ve set my good friend up with a blog on this site. Keep an eye out for exciting changes. He’s always got something going.

I figure a lot more people will visit if they can do more than just comment on my babbling. So go do it up in the forums. I even made a politics forum for people to fight. If you have anymore ideas, drop me a line.

No sooner than Peter Cohen mentions getting more than 11,000 comment spams than I realize that I had been hit. I previously had less than five spam comments. I now had about 50. Ugh. Luckily, setting WordPress to moderate comments with more than 3 links in it did the trick. Considering the success he had with MT-Blacklist and MovableType, I thought it was time I got WPBlacklist which is the equivalent for WordPress. Installation was quick and easy. ...

Check out the new styles. I’ve made “blue” the default, but I’m partial to orange myself.

I think I may finally get satisfaction from my webhost. There are some problems currently being experienced by the apache servers at this time. Our admins are working on upgrading them to avoid these problems in the future. We apologize for the inconveniences caused by this and your site should be working shortly. I’ll know that they’ll finished these upgrades when the upper right hand corner of my web page stops giving the fsockopen error message (which I had to implant). Hopefully the upgrade will also improve some speed issues as my page takes well over a second to be generated now (just a little sluggish).

My server is acting wonky again. I’ve sent my fourth request for service to my webhost. This is a downward spiral. If anyone knows of a good cheap host with support for PHP, MySQL, Perl scripts, Python scripts, etc. (basically the works), please drop me a line. This is getting out of hand. On a happier note, unbeknownst to me, my website has been linked to by MacSurfer. In particular, my entry on Jef Raskin has been picked out (which I did not expect when I wrote it). That would explain the exceedingly large number of comments I’ve been getting (including some rather angry/vengeful ones, go me). If I can get this kind of response simply by saying I wouldn’t want someone at a party, I might pass out if I try to think about how many hits I’ll get by actually criticizing someone in a meaningful way. ...