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Saturday, November 10th, 2007
Last night I got hit with my first really major spam attack. So, this morning I implemented a solution I've had in mind for a while. I'm not totally sure it will work but we'll see. If it does work, it's pretty elegant and would require substantial amount of legwork on the part of the spammer to circumvent it, work that I'm pretty sure my site is not worth. Again: not disclosing it in public but if you're interested, let me know and I'll tell you how to do it. Note: I just deleted a ton of comments without checking. If you left one last night, I deleted it and I apologize. Update: Well the spam is coming fast and furious all morning and getting intercepted by my trap! Groovy, we'll see how it holds up. Update: It gets even better! Now Lynx users can leave comments without getting tagged as spam. If you are trying to leave a comment and getting rejected as spam, let me know.
posted morning of November 10th, 2007: Respond
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OK: The comment spam filter I have in place right now is working (so far); but it would be pretty easy to circumvent if a spammer was determined enough. But I have in mind a pretty simple way to expand it and make it secure, and way better than the captcha images that everybody hates. (Drawback is, it relies on Javascript, which not every browser supports. This could be gotten around a couple of different ways.) I am going to try and implement it over the next few weeks and then I will write it up and try to get other people using it -- it's way better than captchas. (I won't write it up until it's in place because the writeup would include information on how to get around the current, insecure filter I have in place.) Update: Oh wait, no it actually wouldn't be much more secure than the current scheme. A little harder to get around I guess.
posted afternoon of November 10th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
So I'm coming up on 900 posts on this blog, in the past 4½ years. (And some number of "posts" in the previous 3½, when the site was something proto-blog-like, but there is not any easy way of counting them.) Here is how the activity breaks down year by year:
+--------------+----------+
| year(posted) | count(*) |
+--------------+----------+
| 2003 | 184 |
| 2004 | 175 |
| 2005 | 160 |
| 2006 | 135 |
| 2007 | 232 |
+--------------+----------+(Remembering that 2003 was not a full year for the purposes of this discussion) -- it seems like this last year is about the most active since I started blogging -- this becomes particularly noticeable when you consider that I posted very little in the first few months of this year. -- Indeed October '07 has half again as much activity as the next-most-active month, which is August '07; four of the ten most-active months are in 2007. This has been the latest installment of obsessing over meaningless statistics; tune in next month for popular Google search referrals.
posted evening of November 14th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
You get a lot of stuff in your web server log file that does not have to do with actual human reads of your site. I wrote a script that I think shows all the human page views in an Apache log file. It relies on that browsers get css stylesheets, while robots generally don't. (It will miss humans using Lynx; it could easily be tweaked to fix that enough. Also, I have seen Yahoo getting css files; you can fix that by putting "Slurp" in the list of files you're not interested in.)
grep "blog.css" $logfile | // get all reads
of blog.css
awk '{print $1;}' | // extract ip address
sort | uniq | // only show each ip once
grep -f - $logfile | // now pass that list
of ip's back to grep
grep " 200 " | // only show successful reads
egrep -v (any files you're not interested in)
I believe you could also use "favicon.ico" instead of your css file, but this is less reliable -- I don't know how often browsers request favicon for sites they have already visited. Or you could use the filename of a graphic included on one of your pages and hosted on your site, I think this would work reasonably well.
posted evening of November 20th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, November 30th, 2007
Hmm, Sharpie marker isn't giving exactly the effect I was thinking about. It's a step in the right direction though. Also need to learn how to edit GIFs so they are properly transparent.
posted evening of November 30th, 2007: 2 responses
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Sunday, December second, 2007
These are a lot closer to what I was looking for. Still not quite 100% but they will do for now.
posted evening of December second, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
What do you think? More readable or less? Pretty or ugly? Let me know. (Elements of the new look: colors and borders, varying font sizes and styles, dingbats. Everything sort of gradually being moved over from element attributes to style sheets.) Feedback please.
posted evening of December 5th, 2007: 4 responses
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Friday, December 7th, 2007
So here's how I came up with the new color scheme for this site, of which I am kind of proud -- I think it looks really pleasant, and might even potentially cause someone to remember the site who would otherwise not. To start with, the blog had no colors specified, so it used the client's Windows (or whatever operating system) colors. Usually this means black text on white background. Now I have my Windows colors set to a little different, so the background is a very light shade of gray and the text is a dark violet color -- I find it easier to read that way. I was reluctant though to specify colors because I did on the old READIN web site and came to regret having done it. But, well, I think this combination is good enough to use. Light yellow color for the background, deep violet text in the main portion of the window. Here, links are purple and bold if unvisited, dark gray and normal-weight if visited. If the mouse is over them, they are the horrible iridescent color unknown to man which is represented by #009900. (This is true for all links in the document.) In the sidebars, a lighter color background* and charcoal text, with the links a brighter sort of aquamarine color if unvisited and teal if visited. The links on the right-hand side (which is practically nothing but links) are not bold but the color should be light enough to draw attention to them -- the text around them is sparse. The links on the left-hand sidebar are the only ones that do not change appearance when visited, because they are small and easy to miss. (Note: Firefox renders this site better than Explorer. I am not sure why and I don't think it matters much because I think most of the visits to this site are with Firefox or such like. But MSIE does funky things with the borders and the positions of table elements.)
*The two are actually slightly different light colors, the one on the right a little blue or green, the one on the left a little orange or brown. I'm not sure why or what is the use of this.
posted evening of December 7th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, December 9th, 2007
Martha comments a few posts down that the media players are starting up automatically when she loads the page. This is not what I was wanting to have happen -- does anybody know what I should change? I have <PARAM NAME="autoStart" VALUE="false"> inside the <OBJECT> definition for each of them. They do not autostart when I load the page. Is anybody else seeing this behavior?
posted afternoon of December 9th, 2007: 2 responses
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Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
So I have a letter in the in-box this morning from Network Solutions, letting me know that my domain name is expiring in a year. This seems like a good time to ask: what's the story with other domain name registries besides NS? I understand there are some, and that they are cheaper -- do they do the same thing? NS is charging $100 for a 5-year registration which seems a little steep -- seems like it was less than that last time I renewed. I'll pay it if switching is a big hassle; but I reckon it's probably not a hassle. If you have any experience with this please let me know.
posted afternoon of December 11th, 2007: 2 responses
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