Greg In The Desert

I get over 150 comment spams a month and I have been using the highly effective akismet anti spam plug-in, which has identified 99% of the incoming spam. I’ve been getting some odd comment spam lately. All the comment has is a link to Google and a link to Yahoo. Perhaps they spammers scripts aren’t configured or they are testing for vulnerabilities. Because of this and site CPU optimization efforts, I thought I would try to keep spammer from even getting the opportunity to make a comment.

The first thing I stared doing was to turn off comments on posts which get the most spam. The “10 Interesting Links” posts are very popular with spammers, I assume due to the keyword density of the posts. There are also some very old posts which get spam comments. I turned off comments for those posts as I see comment spam appear but as soon as I do it seems there’s someone who makes a legitimate comment. With a small site such as mine, I would prefer to encourage comments where ever possible.

I started using the WP-Ban plug-in which allows me to ban IP addresses. This is a tool I wield carefully. I investigate IP addressees that I can see a pattern in the spam comments from. I do a whois check for that IP range and depending on where they IP is from.

I was surprised to find all most all of the comments are from a single network: Ripe Networks of Amsterdam. That doesn’t mean the spam is coming from Amsterdam, the IP itself is for some other country. Germany or Russia or somewhere not in the US. I then add the first two numbers of the IP address and wild card the last two.

In the last month that I’ve added IP addresses to the Ban plugin, It’s blocked about 160 IP addresses, most more than once (one 94 times). The Ban plugin allows me to include a custom message where I clearly state that the IP was banned due to spam and that they can contact me at my email address if it’s a mistake.

When Twitter first came out, I didn’t see the value of it. Much like every other new internet thing (like blogging) I became involved with it eventually. A little over a year ago I signed up on Twitter and have been following about 90 people. Despite it’s growing popularity I have not logged into the site in about a month. I don’t miss a thing.

The first problem: if I have more than maybe a dozen people I follow, it’s difficult to see what’s been going on since I last logged in. The best I can do is to scroll through the website, click the “load more” button at the bottom of the page and try to remember where I left off. Twitter really needs a summary page that shows what I’ve missed. I’ve tried using apps like Twitteriffic with Growl to show on screen updates people make updates, but that got annoying after a while.

The next problem: it’s nearly impossible to follow threads of conversations. More often than not when I log in I see @ replies about some subject that interests me but can’t tell much in 140 characters. I can click on the users name and then go to their list of updates and try find what the original subject was about, but that probably wont happen. THe original subject is forever lost. Twitter really needs a threaded view.

Finally there’s what I call following spam. When someone new starts following me I look first to see what kind of updates they have posted, so I know if they are writing things I’m interest in. I also look to see how many people they follow. If someone has less than a few hundred people they follow it’s conceivable that they might actually reading what others are writing. When someone follows me with thousands of followers I know they are only following me with the hopes that I will follow them back. They have been listening to some social media douche bag expert who says they can sell more things by being on Twitter.

Following spam doesn’t actually affect me that much other than to annoy, but it indicates where Twitter is going. Along with issues like the ones I mentioned here and other annoying issues like short URLs, Twitter is just becoming a waste of time instead of a useful service where I can learn new things.

RapidWeaver has failed me for the last time. I moved some stuff around and RapidWeaver started giving me a error:

NSRangeException — *** -[NSCFArray objectAtIndex:]: index (2147483647( or possibly larger)) beyond bounds (39)

Stack trace: 0×12419a 0×9206be3b 0×958c8eeb 0×958c8f2a 0×95a547ff 0×959d2188 0×17e36644 0×17e36804 0×12d4ac 0×12f807 0×12cc91 0×17e2e8bb 0×17e2cd8d 0×17e24591 0xe1d7 0×15439 0xeb41 0×1317d 0xff6a 0×42f14 0×959d77ed 0×959d7394 0×95285095 0×95284f52

12/18/08 4:19:46 PM RapidWeaver[6233] Exception while exporting site: *** -[NSCFArray objectAtIndex:]: index (2147483647( or possibly larger)) beyond bounds (39)

RapidWeaver won’t publish and it’s been since December 19th since I reported it. RealMac support said they would look at it then marked the case closed and resolved. Besides that issue, RapidWeaver is slow to open and save and has a number of other issues.

It’s too bad. I liked making use of my .Mac/MoblieMe account for blogging but it’s time to move to something else.

I’m still looking for a hosting provider. There’s so many choices that I can’t figure out who is the best. It would be nice to get someone who runs everything on Macs.

For the moment, I’m moving the RSS feed over to my gregjsmith.wordpress.com account.

Update: Wordpress.com is no more. Got my own hosting up and running relatively easily.

Rapid Weaver 3.6 was released today with some significant improvements. One of which is multiple categories in the blogging module. I won’t go into the whole list here so check out the MacUpdate page.

I’ve been watching the development of RW for a while and I think it’s good enough to use as my Blogging platform. Unfortunately there’s no way for me to import the 1300+ entries I had my Blosxom blog. It’s also missing a few other things that Blosxom can do, but does a lot of things it can’t.

A link to the old site is here until I can figure out a way to import the entires. The RSS feed should remain the same.

Welcome to For The H*ll Of It 2.0, now powered by Blosxom. I’m not here to bash iBlog, my previous blogging app, it’s been a good system and I paid the full shareware fee for it. But I’ve been disappointed with the slow pace of development and lack of fixes for even the smallest bugs. After studying different system, weighing the pros and cons, I decided to abandon iBlog for a more customizable solution. Blosxom also gives me some features that I really like.

Blosxom has no database to keep track of entries. The file system is the database, so to speak. Entries get filed as text files and saved in folders. Blosxom then generates the site categories based on the folder structures, this means subcategories are easy to make. It’s easy to manage this way and there’s no secret to where your entries are. It’s also very easy to move to another computer if necessary.

Running Blosxom on my local computer is easy. Once I have the single perl script installed in my webserver directory on my local computer (and have personal web serving turned on) I simply access it via this URL: http://localhost/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi. .mac doesn’t allow the use of cgi scripts, this is where the killer feature of Blosxom comes in; it can generate static web pages. By using a proper command in the terminal, I can tell Blosxom to make a static version of the site where ever I want, in this case I have it generate the site on my iDisk.

I will be importing my iBlog entries over and writing more about this and how I did it in the coming weeks. Until then they are still in their old directory structure. (you can fine the old home page here)

Update 05/17/05 8:05PM: Still playing around with Blosxom/MarsEdit and how it saves entries. This one may move around as I figure out how date/time stamps work.