FeralBlog

If you see things looking a little different around here, it’s because I bit the bullet, changed hosts, and moved the blog to WordPress. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, but I had to leave the 1000+ comments behind for now because exporting them tended to hit a CGI timeout unless I was exporting very small batches of posts at a time, and that got old and boring really quickly.

So far I like the way WordPress looks a lot. Just the ability to change themes on the site and have stuff work is very cool. When I have some time in about 3 months (heh) I’ll see about hacking around in one of the canned themes to get some of my own photos/colors into a layout; maybe even similar to how I had it before.

Got tired of all the comment spam, so I finally bit and did an upgrade to MT 3.2. Upgrade process was fairly painless, except that most of the comments showed up as pending, but didn’t show up easily in the admin interface.

It seems like I’m getting more comment spam than ever, but at least they’re all getting trapped, and I can delete them at my leisure without them getting published.

Maybe some hot WordPress action is in my not-too-distant future…

Even though I have the fantastic MT-Blacklist installed on my site, I still get tons of comment spams, both denials that get blocked but eat up resources, and spams for as-of-yet-un-blacklisted sites that eat up resources and my patience. The flood has gotten especially bad over the last few weeks (I’d wake up to 20 new comments and hundreds of denied notifications) so I decided to take a few more drastic measures. I didn’t quite upgrade to MT 3.1 yet, but I did follow most of the suggestions here that I wasn’t already doing, including renaming mt-comments.cgi, and taking off the comments popup from the link; instead forcing you to the individual entry archive. We’ll see how much that reduces the crap around here.

Oh, I tried to run David R’s mt-close script to close out all entries older than 5 days, but I kept getting an error about something to do with App.pm, although it is in my cgi-bin folder somewhere. Anyone else seen that before?

Hey, things look a bit different around here, eh?

I had been planning on a bit of a redesign to reflect my new surroundings, and I had a nice quiet weekend to do it in.

Much design inspiration borrowed stolen from Eric Meyer and Douglas Bowman

It’s still a work in progress, and I’m probably going to tweak the colors and also replace that top image, although I kinda like how it looks now, especially since I took it.

Interior pages will be upgraded as I get to it.

Oh, and if it looks all weird, do a shift-reload; you might have a stylesheet cached or something.

Well, looks like I had some more DNS issues of my own over the weekend. It wasn’t even Dotster’s fault I had set up my account emails to go to a Yahoo email address that I never check, because I figure I would just get oodles of WHOIS spam there. I checked it so infrequently, in fact, that they disabled my account and deleted my backlog of emails there. Oops. So, I’m guessing that I did indeed get a timely email reminder about my pending expiration, but never saw it.

BTW, I just want to point out that I got not one, not two, but three emails with the same subject line of “Dude, where’s my blog?” from friends on Friday morning. You all need to get some new material.

More posts to come… 2 weeks to go, and a lot going on.

Found a new comment spam tonight, and the domain it linked to made me laugh; it was “gays-sex-gay-sex-gays.us”, which of course is the domain I would go to first if I wanted to see some hot gay action. It wouldn’t be gay.com, or hotgayass.com, or even youvegotmale.com.

Well, after TextAmerica went and broke their RSS feed again a few weeks ago, breaking my homepage display of the latest moblog image, I finally got motivated to change services. I’ve had a few run-ins with them before. One of their bizdev dudes took offence to my posting code to parse their RSS feed to strip out their stupid ad links and link (correctly, in my view) to the full-size image page from the thumbnail. We went back and forth via email, and eventually I took down the code that was getting his panties in a twist.

My homeslice Joshua (who is now a rawk star, btw) recently whipped up an application to pull all of your images off of TA(TextAmerica), and then you can either save them locally as some XML/XSL files, or you can email and post them directly into your new moblog account, which in the case of my new moblog is on MoblogUK.

MoblogUK seems like a pretty sweet site; you actually own your own images, and it seems a bit more community-based, with ratings and open comments and (my favorite) seeing who has been to your moblog recently. I still need to tweak the code that’s pulling up my most recent image to include the title and description, as well as put a “border=0” on the image tag, but already I’m about 1,000 times happier with MoblogUK over TA(TextAmerica).

This was in my site activity log:

<table width="500" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125"><img src="/mt-static/images/spacer.gif" width="125" height="1"></td>
<td valign="top" width="75"><img src="/mt-static/images/spacer.gif" width="75" height="1"></td>
<td valign="top" width="300"><img src="/mt-static/images/spacer.gif" width="300" height="1"></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125" bgcolor="#8199A4"><font>Date</font></td>

<td valign="top" width="75" bgcolor="#8199A4"><font>IP Address</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="300" bgcolor="#8199A4"><font></font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td colspan="3" valign="top"><img src="/mt-static/images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="1"></td>
</tr>

<tr>

<td valign="top" width="125" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>2004.03.09 19:05:15</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="75" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>165.161.3.13</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="300" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>Search: query for 'cock'</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><font>2004.03.09 19:05:21</font></td>

<td valign="top" width="75" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><font>165.161.3.13</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="300" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><font>Search: query for 'cock'</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>2004.03.09 19:05:21</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="75" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>165.161.3.13</font></td>

<td valign="top" width="300" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>Search: query for 'cock'</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><font>2004.03.09 19:05:28</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="75" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><font>165.161.3.13</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="300" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><font>Search: query for 'cock'</font></td>

</tr>

<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>2004.03.09 19:05:35</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="75" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>165.161.3.13</font></td>
<td valign="top" width="300" bgcolor="#EEEEEE"><font>Search: query for 'cock'</font></td>
</tr>

</table>

The trickle of comment spam that I’ve been seeing in my comments has finally increased to the point where I was finally driven to install MT-Blacklist, and I have to say I’m amazingly impressed with how easy it was to install, and how clean the interface is. Imported the current blacklist without any problems, and it even found a stray comment that I hadn’t realized was spam (it was trying to give me some line about how my site didn’t work in OSX; nice try, sister!).

Couple of small changes yesterday. I added the fantastic MTLinkTitles plugin from David Raynes, which goes out and grabs link titles from pages I link to (since I’m lazy and don’t always put the TITLE attribute, even though I have that nice floating tooltip dealie), but the only problem is that rebuilds in MT(Movable Type) are taking a really long time now as my site tries to go out and hit every page that I’ve linked to in ALL my posts. It takes way too long, and I’m getting CGI timeout messages, but it’s supposed to cache the retrieved titles and not have to re-fetch them, but still trying to get through the inital link title fetching.

Also disabled immediate posting of comments, and instead forcing you to preview first, which might help cut down on comment spam a little, until I get around to upgrading MT to 2.661, or maybe just wait for version 3.0 to come out. I don’t get a lot of spam, and I haven’t had someone go through and hit every entry like Joshua has, but that doesn’t mean I want it to happen.