Programmer Musings

Upgraded MT

After using the 2.65 version of MoveableType for over a year, I finally decided to upgrade. I saw there were plugins that support filtering comment and trackback spam, and I'd like to restore those features to my site.

Of course, as soon as I got started with the upgrade a new version of MT comes out with possibly better protection. I'll wait a little while before upgrading again.

Anyway, starting with this entry, I'll go back to allowing comments. If this survives without much trouble, I'll re-enable comments throughout my blog.

An Apology

For most of the ten months I've written this weblog, I've tried to keep it open for comments. Now, I finally have to bow to the inevitable.

Although I have enjoyed getting comments from a few people. (Possibly the only ones who have read this<grin/>), I have gotten far more spam than actual comments. To give you an idea, I have received 1574 individual comments on my weblog. Of those, 8 were actual comments. The rest were peddling drugs or gambling or whatever.

I was doing okay killing a handful to a dozen a day. Any IP address that seemed to consistently send spam was banned from commenting. (As of today, 49 addresses were banned from commenting on this site.)

But today, the spammers went too far. I received 929 spam comments around noon today. The cleanup time was far longer than I wanted to spend on clenaing up someone else's mess. More annoying is the fact that someone was trying to use my website to sell drugs. It's kind of like walking outside to find that your house, garage, fence , and car have all been plastered with signs selling products from some drugstore.

So as of now, I am turning off the commenting feature. If I can come up with a way to stop (or at least limit) this kind of thing, I may turn it back on. If you want to send a comment, feel free to email me at comment@anomaly.org. If it's a real comment, I'll try to post it as such. If it's just spam, expect it to be deleted.

To the few of you that are reading this and might have liked to comment, I apologize.

One Moment Please...

Unfortunately, my professional life has intruded into my ability to write much lately. Issues with a new company, new commute, and such have kept me away.

Hopefully, I'll be able to get back to writing this blog a bit more regularly.

For the few people reading this, I apologize for the delay. "We are working to resolve the problem. Please stand by."<grin/>

Welcome to my blog

I've been experimenting for a few months with blogging as a way to store URLs, interesting information, and ideas on my local machine in a way that I might be able to find them again.

I've finally decided that this approach would help me to do some things on my website that I haven't quite gotten around to doing. (Mostly out of false laziness.)

Stay tuned for programming book reviews, interesting (to me, at least) programming concepts, and who knows what else.