Sometime back I wrote about comment spam in the blogs and using fake comment pages in order to catch automated spambots and record their IPs. Over the months I clocked up a few thousand spambots and I thought it might be fun to do something with them. Like block them for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who runs a blog knows about blog spam (or comment spam). Here on this site I run SpamKarma 2 which keeps out 99% of the spam and puts the other 1% in moderation for me to check. But when the number of spam comments reaches into the hundreds per day, then it starts to skew the logs too much. Flattering though it is at first glance to see hundreds of eager visitors each day, closer inspection shows many of them to be comment spammers. So, I started to look at ways to stop them before they got to leave a comment in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Yup, I’m going to nominate a Man of the Year (if Time magazine can do it, so can I). And he is: Dr Dave, a card carrying Evil Genius, creator of Spam Karma, the software that protects this blog from spammers and scammers.

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Astute observers (thank you Shawn!) noticed that some of the pages were missing from the blog. In particular, the static pages. The dynamically generated posts were fine. Which is probably why I didn’t notice immediately.

Over XMas I upgraded Wordpress to the latest/greatest release, V2.0. It has a very fancy new admin section and a bunch of other improvements… been extensively tested, in beta for weeks. What can go wrong???

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Back in February I wrote a short piece about stripping down Wordpress to a more basic functionality (see Wordpress on a Diet ) and now I’ve just undertaken it for another site, so here is a bit more information, also making use of the latest version, Wordpress ‘StrayHorn’ 1.5.1.3.
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Back when Wordpress was a little wee thing known as B2, it was easy to install and train users in the use thereof. Now Wordpress is a full featured blogging system (and very good it is too) but, for some it is overly complex. Here is a look at how to simplify the installation and use of Wordpress. Wordpress-Lite if you like.

[Note: since WordPress 2.0 has hits the stands, a lot of this article is moot. Wordpress 2.0 has a simpler set of permissions for users which give them simpler administration screens]. Read the rest of this entry »

Astute observers may note that the site has changed a little… well quite a lot really. All the articles and notes have been moved over to the Wordpress blogging software and the site slightly redesigned to accomodate that. Much of the site is based on the Kubrick set of templates.

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This is the order of loading of files when Wordpress loads up. I’m assuming a default installation and this is according to 1.3alpha4 as pulled from CVS.

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