This too shall pass.
It would seem that the Kitten’s Comment Pay extension I installed has put an end to the comment spam for now. The spammer in question didn’t choose to pay me to post his/her spam, rather he/she got frustrated that his/her posts were not showing up and all they got was a screen asking to send me money.
To you, dear spammer, I say, “I find your lack of faith disturbing“.
Ah, the irony.
You spamma me, I charga you money.
For the last 48 hours or so I have been fighting a spammer who keeps posting nonsense comments here on my blog. The point is to fill my blog with links to their site, which helps their serach engine rankings and spams their site to people happening to read my comments.
I used the built-in function of WordPress to mark their comments for moderation before being posted, however, they are hitting me about 20 times an hour, so this has been a pain to keep up with. Blocking their IP address from my site has been futile as well, for they use a different one each time.
So, I did some research and found a great plugin called Kitten’s Comment Paythat fights back. When someone submits a comment that is marked as potential spam, they are taken to a page where they can pay me $50 via Paypal to have it posted 🙂
I will keep my fingers crossed and see how well it works.
The basketball season is less than a month away, and my preseason jitters are keeping me awake at night. You would think I am the starting point guard, but alas, I am not.
Here is the crazy thing:
Athlon Magazine has Louisville (my favorite, in case you weren’t aware of it) ranked #1 in their preseason top 25. ESPN has Louisville ranked above Kentucky (13) and Duke (14) for the first time I can recall, at number 12.
I know what you are saying: preseason polls don’t mean a lot. However, based on previous polls since Rick Pitino has been coaching the Cards, Louisville has overachieved. Last year, they rose to #2 in the country atop a 16 game winning streak. Then they fell apart to injuries and being schooled in the inside game. This year, they actually have the post players to push back against the teams that took them apart. And according to Coach Pitino, they still have that same fire. So who knows what will happen?
This is so exciting.
With no one ever posting on the old Geekamongus forum, and new exploits of Invision Powerboard growing in number related to it’s increase in popularity, I decided to try something new.
I found this cool guy online who writes really cool little PHP scripts at MyLittleHomepage.net, and tried out the My Little Forum script. The author, Alex, is aware of Web Standards, and seems to have a clue about creating well-formed web pages. I mean, how many forums have you seen that are written in XHTML1.0 Strict? And RSS feeds?
Granted, the forum doesn’t pass HTML validation, but it’s only because of a lack of character encoding (the &’s are throwing it off). This may be something I can fix once I have time to do some reverse engineering.
It’s clean, lean, and easy to set up. Invision was convoluted, clunky, and not much fun to administer because of all the options that you don’t really need. Plus, I heard they started charging for the free version, or something that sounded like it wasn’t worth upgrading anymore.
Regardless, check out my new forum, sign up, and let’s start talking!
Within about 36 hours, you will be able to see the latest round of Gray pictures. I am just waiting for the domain name to resolve to my new server. I went ahead an remade the whole site again in addition to posting pictures from the last 2 months, including our beach trip last weekend.
In other news, I was happy to see the Bookmark Synchronizer has finally been updated to work in Firefox 1.0PR, which means I can now maintain a shared set of bookmarks between home, work, and now my USB drive with Portable Firefox.
Firefox keeps getting better and better. Now if they would only develop a version for Windows Mobile 2003 so I could run it on my X3i…(hint hint)
As I wrote earlier, I pre-ordered the new Cake CD entitled “Pressure Chief”. Well, it arrived in my mailbox 3 days ago, and I thought I’d pass along my thoughts.
Since the last Cake album quickly made it into my all-time Top 10 list of albums, I was worried that this one might not live up to it. Honestly, I haven’t had time to listen to it more than 3 times, so I can’t say for sure whether or not it is equal, but I can say it is infectious, and that is what matters.
The 3 times I have heard it have been enough to get at least 3 tunes stuck in my head, and I find myself eager to listen to it more. This is a promising sign.
An interesting article on CNET today points out what many of us have been saying for a long time.
My favorite quote:
The situation has some Web developers shaking their heads in disbelief.
No wonder I have a headache…
I have been spending a lot of time doing these things lately (in no particular order):
It has been one week since I started my new job as a contracted web developer working with the Air Force. So far I like it a lot, and I don’t forsee that changing any time soon. I went in a little intimidated by the military aspect of it, not having spent any time in that environment before, but I quickly realized that it’s nothing to worry about, and that the people there are very nice.
Working downtown is great, being surrounded by all the good restaurants, and being about 1.5 miles from home. The money I am saving on gas will be amazing. I was putting over 30 miles a day on my car; now it’s barely 3. I looked at used bikes the other day, but I think I will save that adventure until spring rolls around.
Nothing too exciting to report otherwise. I’ll post some more interesting stuff here soon.
Here are some nifty links I have come across the last few weeks.
IP Chicken is a quick and easy way to tell you what IP address you are broadcasting. It’s similar to WhatsMyIP.net, but it has a chicken, which makes it easier to remember, mnemonicly speaking.
A short list of email addresses it would be annoying to give out over the phone. (link via waxy.org).
All about the Order of the Skull and Bones, the secret society both John Kerry and George W. Bush are members of.
Ever since Whois.sc started charging for reverse IP lookups, I have longed for a free service that would allow me to see all the domains a server hosts. I found one at Webhosting.info. If anyone knows of a script that I can use to provide this on my own pages, please let me know.
Don’t like the latest version of your favorite program because they added too many features? Does the new version not work on your system for some reason? Check out OldVersion.com. They keep a library of older versions of popular programs you can download.