If you notice anything “wacky” in the next couple days, let me know. I just put dcortesi.com through a big upgrade in many areas.
This is also why I haven’t posted much about Rainier or the closing of my summer lately - that’s coming soon, though, once I get back to my speedy Internet in Chicago.
In an attempt to reduce a certain url from being spammed in my comments, I put that url into my wordpress comment blacklist. I know there’s a warning about being careful what you put there, but I figured the url was safe…well it turns out I was wrong. I didn’t look into it too much, but it seemed the url matched any comments that were put in. That means I lost comments from some of my recent posts like automating subversion, upgrading mysql on Gentoo, and running tentakel in Windows…some posts I really would have liked to see some feedback about.
My apologies to anybody that tried to post in the past two weeks and didn’t see anything show up. What a bummer. 
I just realized I’ve only made two posts for the entire month of October…wow. Sorry about that…guess I’ve been busy with life. Lots of busy weekends - vacation, work, having fun. I have lots of pics to post so hopefully I’ll get around to that sometime. 
What the heck is going on??
In the past 12 hours, I have received 40 new comments, all of which are spam! But here’s the odd part.
This is not your common spam like “shop at jim’s casino” spam. This is…complimentary spam..cspam, if you will. This is spam that says “nice site” and “great design” and is sometimes in a foreign language. Now that wouldn’t even be so bad, but what makes it worse is that somebody is going to a great deal of trouble to put this spam here. The 40 comments come from 40 unique ip addresses!
The onlyspammish thing about these is in the referer. On occasion, I’ve noticed that the referer is actually spam in my server logs. So I guess it’s just referer spam. One of the downsides of going to a popular blog engine, I suppose.
*delete*
I’ve had to disable comments temporarily as I started getting some really odd comment spam today… You can still post them, they just won’t show up right away. It’s coming from multiple ip’s so this is the easiest for now. And since I’m going to be away from the computer for a while (w00t fireworks), I figured it would be best. Enjoy the show and see you later!
amanda had a question for me about my indented categories in my sidebar using the Minima Plus theme. I figured I’d make a post out of it instead of replying in the comments.
I had the biggest problem getting those categories like that. I tried every combination of parameters possible and was getting nowhere. If you take a look on the Wordpress forum (specifically, this thread) you will see that other people were having similar problems.
I found the answer in another thread which turns out to be use list_cats instead of the new wp_list_cats. Apparently there is a bug with the latter which will be fixed in WP 1.5.1.
Here’s the actual line I use in my sidebar template:
< ?php list_cats(0, '', 'name', 'asc', '', true, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0,'','','rss','','','1') ?>
I seem to be having problems with pingomatic on my WP install…time for some ngrep fun!
The site was really starting to bog down for some reason lately, but I figured out what it was.
Turns out it was what I suspected all along. On my first site, I had some statistics on the pages about how many times they’d been googledbotted as well as any referer’s. However, I was generating that content from my Apache logs which I configured to log directly to MySQL and are now at just over 1,000,000 rows. Being that my server is a virtual colo (thank you, John Companies), the database was getting pegged out pretty easily.
Now that I’ve disabled those queries, it’s running much faster.
I have finally decided to move my blog to a more complete blogging solution, WordPress. There are a few reasons for this. Probably the most important is that nobody links to me. My old custom-rolled blog didn’t provide for others to link back to me very easily. Nor did it allow for notifications of search engines such as Feedster and PubSub. I’m hoping that by using a blog engine that does these things, it will increase readership. We’ll see… Plus I get cool features now like search, categories, and soon a linkblog.
Fortunately, I was able to hack up some of the WordPress import scripts to pull in the posts from both of my old sites, even the Grand Opening! I’m pretty happy with it thus far, especially all the plugins.
I hope you enjoy the new site, and let me know if something doesn’t work.