FeralBlog » Site News

WordPress

mattcomroe — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 14:15:11 +0000

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.

MovableType Upgrade

mattcomroe — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 02:55:52 +0000

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…

Stop spam now with your gigantic p3n1s!!!

mattcomroe — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 22:03:18 +0000

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?

New design

mattcomroe — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 02:40:46 +0000

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.

Whoopsie

mattcomroe — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 18:29:30 +0000

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.

Funny blacklist site

mattcomroe — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 06:33:05 +0000

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.

Buh bye, TextAmerica

mattcomroe — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 17:27:12 +0000

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).

Wow, somebody REALLY wants some cock

mattcomroe — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 23:15:33 +0000

This was in my site activity log:

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

<tr>

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

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

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

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

</tr>

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

</table>

Die, fuckers.

mattcomroe — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:00:21 +0000

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!).

Site updates

mattcomroe — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 15:03:42 +0000

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.

The tipping point

mattcomroe — Tue, 23 Dec 2003 03:21:09 +0000

Well, that did it. With k’s comment about my ultra-white bread spelling of “freakin”, I reached 393 posts (not counting this one) and 394 comments. Considering I started this weblog back in June of last year, it feels like somewhat of an accomplishment that enough of my 5 friends feel compelled to comment on the drivel I write on a semi-regular basis. So, thanks!

Updated Photoalbum

mattcomroe — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 15:08:10 +0000

I was pretty tired of the .nizzle control that was handling my photoalbum section; I couldn’t add descriptions, pages would get really long and take awhile to load, no preview on the main page, etc. So, yesterday I found this cool (and free!) control that handles all those things for me. I can now go in and edit an XML file to add titles and descriptions to photos, which were sorely needed. Plus, the front page of the photoalbum looks much nicer now, thanks to a thumbnailed layout of the galleries, also XML controlled. I have a lot better control over design and layout of the pages, thanks to a suave template-driven implementation. I’ll try and go back and put descriptions on pictures, but I promise that’ll be a slow process.

New Domain

mattcomroe — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 20:52:23 +0000

I saw this deal for 3 years of free hosting, and had to sign up. Picked up a new domain from Dotster, and everything should be coming online. Problem is, I don’t know what to put there yet. So, what sort of site would you expect to see at http://trulycrap.com/? One suggestion was for bad movie reviews, etc. Another would be where I would put all the uninteresting coding stuff. Any thoughts?

Guest editor

mattcomroe — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 18:55:30 +0000

Brian will probably be doing a little bit of posting around here, while he gets his DNS/host issues sorted out. It’ll be nice to have someone with a little bit of intellect posting around here, right?!

…And we’re back, ladies and gentlemen.

mattcomroe — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 15:37:24 +0000

Well, that sucked! Just a friendly word of advice, if you’re going to register your domain with Network Solutions), use an email address that you check more often than every 6 months, even if it means having to wade through pages of spam, otherwise you might miss your domain renewal notices. Doh.

I’ve still had it with them, and based on this glowing review, I’ll be switching my domain name to Dotster today. They spam-protect your email address for you! How cool!

DNS woes

mattcomroe — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 15:10:07 +0000

Seem to be having some DNS problems with the site last night and today; couldn’t get my mail last night, and couldn’t hit the site (at least from home.. I think the DNS is cached here at work). I used a web-based ping tool, and that also couldn’t do the lookup, so maybe it’s not just me. Sent a message off to my host, so here’s hoping they can resolve the problem quickly.

Redesign in progress

mattcomroe — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 18:37:00 +0000

Got a bug up my ass over the weekend and started work on a consistant navigation for the whole site, not just the weblog. The main inspiration came from this nifty CSS tabs implementation that does rounded corners purely with CSS and no images (if you’re using Firebird). There are some things I’m not sure about yet… the white box over the background is only as large as content, which means that on the weblog homepage when the right-side column ends the white box does, too. (I’m sure there’s a way to fix this.. I just need to delve a little bit into what Matt H. is doing on his site).

I’m also not super-keen on the way that the subtabs are implemented. Right now they’re assigned an explicit top/left position to make them fall under the main tabs (see here for an example of this), but that makes me feel dirty. What if a user adjusts their font sizes? Everything will get thrown out of whack then. I’m sure there’s a way to have the

I’m also not quite sure why I’m bothering to bring in other sections of the site, since this is the only place that really has fresh content. According to my stats however, it’s the TiVo hacking and Building a Climbing Wall pages that get the bulk of search traffic. So, I guess prettying up those sections might make people want to click around a bit more. More updates as the redesign progresses.

Update 2003.08.05:

Picked a more muted background image.
Pat made the fun little “branding” image for the top bar.
Made the homepage redirect right to the weblog

Matt H. is using a table to make the heights of his columns appear even. Booo!!!

I’ve got a phonecam, and I’m not afraid to use it.

mattcomroe — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:44:43 +0000

If you haven’t noticed the low-res image in the sidebar, I caved and got myself a camera-equipped cellphone over the weekend.

I’ve already set up a moblog on TextAmerica. I can send a picture as a message from my phone to a special email address, and it automatically gets posted to the site. They were even nice enough to provide an RSS feed for the pictures, so you can include data from the moblog on any other site, like this one. They had a Javascript file that you could use to do it more automagically, but:

the link opened in another window.
the link was to the moblog homepage, not the larger image of the thumbnail picture used for the link
you didn’t see descriptive text (if there was any).

there was a TextAmerica ad button below the image.
So, being a programmer, with some help from an article from Scott Mitchell, I used the RSS feed to extract all the data I needed, and created the link and description text myself. I’m even caching the data once a minute so the page doesn’t have to wait for the image data each time.

There are some other neat things besides the camera. I can put my own photos on the phone, as wallpaper or startup/shutdown screens. I can also put pictures as CallerID notifications, so when Ryan calls, his face comes up.

My 2nd-most favorite feature has to be downloadable ring tones. I admit, I thought that ringtones were stupid; everyone just getting the latest song from 40 cent or whatever. But take a look at some of the ringtones that are available! The Alternative section is a bit thin, but still has good stuff in it; Stone Roses, etc. Right now my ringer is “Let’s go to bed” by The Cure.

Random Reading

mattcomroe — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 21:41:52 +0000

Got all fiesty after reading the two MT(Movable Type) articles this a.m., as well as this guide to creating a links “sideblog”, and did just that. Created a new blog, and after getting bookmarklets set up in ~~Phoenix~~ Firebird and IE, I can quickly post links of interest to the new “Random Reading” section over in the sidebar.

Bandwagon

mattcomroe — Fri, 11 Jul 2003 22:36:19 +0000

Couple of quick updates:

I made a few changes to templates on the site, including using the very cool MTOtherBlog plugin from David Raynes to cross-list new posts from the new Medium Archive on this page, and vice-versa. I’ve also been using the beta release of MT-Textile 2, which has a bunch of new features in it, the coolest so far being the footnoting feature.
Since it seems to be the new hotness, I’m also posting a screenshot of my desktop. Like the background?

Ryan emailed me a picture from my night out with both sisters in Philly, which I’ve added to that post.

Sitehack

mattcomroe — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 23:17:56 +0000

Taking a cue from Douglas Bowman’s current move to MT(Movable Type), I figured out how to remove the ugly “default.aspx” from all my PermaLinks and archive links.

The trick was a little inline C#, turning this:

into this:

Nerdy, but cool. I like to be able to hide the implementation details (i.e. if I’m running PHP, ASP, ASP.Net, etc.) from my users.

I’m nearly rich. Plus, more site changes.

mattcomroe — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 18:56:23 +0000

As of this moment, my portfolio is worth a whopping $1419.81!!! That’s up a staggering 41.981% from when I started! It can only get better when Mark starts peddling my ass on the corner.

By popular demand, the secondary title of this page is now being randomly pulled from a database. Reload a few times and see what happens. I still need to move the code to get the dynamic title on the archive pages, and I also want to make a public-facing form where people can submit their ideas and I can approve/reject them.
Update: To get the ball rolling a bit more, I pulled a few good slogans from the Advertising Slogan Generator. Enjoy.

The newest version of SharpReader is out. I’m glad he fixed the bug that was keeping Windows from shutting down, because that was a little annoying. Other than that, it still continues to be one of the coolest apps I’ve seen in a long time.

Site Tweaks

mattcomroe — Tue, 15 Apr 2003 21:51:37 +0000

Couple of minor changes to the site.

As further proof of my slavish devotion to keeping track of my BlogShares status, I’ve put a “BlogShares” item in the side navigation, which pulls data from the BlogShares site using David Reynes’s nifty MTBlogShares plugin. Right now it’s showing my weblog’s current value, P/E ratio, and my portfolio value.
I put the Nice Titles enhancement on my page (in my mind I keep hearing Sean Connery from Celebrity Jeopardy saying “Nice Titties!”), which gives the fancy popup highlight over links with titles if you’re using a “good” browser.
I added a description for the weblog under the title. It’s lame. Any suggestions as far as what i should change it to?

No matter how paranoid you are, you’re not paranoid enough.

mattcomroe — Sat, 05 Apr 2003 14:41:19 +0000

OK, I deserved this:

2003.04.04 18:36:28	66.192.41.62	Search: query for ‘ass licking homos’
2003.04.04 18:36:42	66.192.41.62	Search: query for ‘matt is a freakjob’
2003.04.04 18:36:51	66.192.41.62	Search: query for ‘matt is a geek’
2003.04.04 18:37:01	66.192.41.62	Search: query for ‘matt is a loony’
2003.04.04 18:37:09	66.192.41.62	Search: query for ‘matt is paranoid’
2003.04.04 18:37:23	66.192.41.62	Search: query for ‘matt is slightly balding’
2003.04.04 18:37:35	66.192.41.62	Search: query for ‘matt is a nice boy’

Thanks, Dave.

Eeek!

mattcomroe — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 04:50:57 +0000

Just randomly wondering why my pagerank had gone up to 5, so I check my stats and see I have a new referrer, Technorati. I go to their site, and see they have this “Link Cosmos” thing, so I check out referring webblogs, and I see that Tankek has linked me in his “now…” section. I mean, this is the Tantek (as opposed to the other ones)... the Box Model Hack guy. So now there’s all this pressure to, like, uh, be funny or something. Well, maybe not tonight. How about tomorrow I promise I’ll write something funny, mmkay?

I will say this, having my pagerank go up to 5 kinda makes me feel like partying.

New Weblog (or, change is A Good Thing™)

mattcomroe — Wed, 05 Mar 2003 21:37:38 +0000

OK, so after one too many Blogger posts getting eaten, I’ve decided to give MT a whirl. So far I already love it; much more flexible archiving, categorization, built-in comments, EASY importing of my Blogger content, etc.

I have a bunch of maintenence to do… need to pick up the DB-driven elements from my other blog and get them in here, but that won’t be a problem. I’ll need to also go back and fix all the links that referenced Blogger archive pages, as well as starting to do some categorization. Also, I’ll probably be putting the style back to roughly what it was before, but this style here is a nice temporary filler.

Music archive

mattcomroe — Mon, 03 Mar 2003 15:49:52 +0000

Over the weekend I whipped up a page to display full-day archives of songs played. There’s a link under the last 5 played that will take you to the day of the most recent song played, and you can page around from there.

Opening my musical kimono.

mattcomroe — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 16:02:17 +0000

I added a new feature to the site; a real-time look at what I’m listening to. There are actually two interesting things going on:

First is that I now have an Audioscrobbler account set up, which means that anyone can go take a peek at my listening statistics. This is very cool, because the more I listen to stuff, I’ll get recommendations about which other users listen to similar stuff, and then I can find other music to listen to that way.

The other neat thing is the info gathering that I’m doing myself. I’m using Do Something to post artist and song title to a .nizzle page on my site, which is stuffing it into a local database. I then put some ASP-Classic (ick!) code into my Blogger template, which does a query on the db to pull back the last 5 songs I’ve listened to. I’ll work on an archive feature over the weekend, so you can pull back what I’ve listened to on any particular day. The idea for this part of the new hotness was shamelessly stolen from Andre Torrez.

i slapped together a quick

mattcomroe — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 16:00:22 +0000

i slapped together a quick automatic comments system last night… you’ll now notice a “comments” link below every post, so feel free to go in and write whatever your little heart desires. i will be styling the comments page, i swear; just haven’t gotten to it yet.

New Site. J-Lo Loves Matt

mattcomroe — Mon, 25 Nov 2002 21:53:08 +0000

ok, i’m back. reunion rocked, all the dns should be moved over (still having a small issue getting my email with a pop3 client, but that’s a minor thing. check out what pat made me!!!

wow (or, awash in good luck)

mattcomroe — Sat, 23 Nov 2002 03:21:29 +0000

lots of stuff has been happening… i think i’ll work backwards.

first and foremost, verisign finally got their act together. i had recieved another phonecall wednesday evening telling me that the fax i sent them was fine and dandy, but they still needed an “authorizing signature” to make everything go through. sent that thursday morning, and finally got an email just a short while ago telling me that they have finally reset my password. you can even see my fancy new dns mappings! by the time i get back from this weekend, the dns should be all propagated and stuff, and i’ll be able to start developing on my new .net site.

i had to stay a little bit late at work tonight in order to get my latest project out the door. on the walk to the bus, i was going right through the middle of “light-up night”. it was a zoo, and the rain was starting to come down and get even colder, so i was happy to get out of there. (btw, what’s up with that woman’s hair???)

so, after reading my entry about bike-hunting, my homeslice paul hooked me up! he has a gently used trek cross bike (and it was even housed in my building; mutual friend holding on to it for him), so i’m going to take that off his hands, and put some swanky components on it.

wednesday night i watched the penguins lose to the canadiens in overtime. the slf had gotten some really kickass seats, tho. we were in prime puck-catching territory, if not for those snazzy nets.

our long national nightmare is just beginning

mattcomroe — Fri, 14 Jun 2002 22:12:32 +0000

this day is seeming to drag on forever, which is why i’m choosing to cave in and create a blog. yes, i’m a matty-come-lately, but it will be nice to be able to just sort of free-form, post, and not have to worry about all the ftp/frontpage/asp hoohah. we’ll see how it all works out.