Category: Site

Since I switched to my most recent anti-spam tool, it has caught 528 spam comments for me. In all that time, I have had to manually mark exactly 2 comments.

Hey spammers: Go somewhere else; on this site you are denied!

I believe Deblog, News from Great Castle Wilson, Great Castle Wiki, and The Wilson Family History and Ancestry site are all up and running again. Some highlights of the effort were:

• Even though there is no HOSTNAME=-AUTOMATIC- line in the hostconfig file, adding HOSTNAME=mikew.ca really will force the host name appropriately.
• Newer versions of PHP ship with register_long_arrays and short_open_tags off.
• Despite being newer than 10.4.4, I do not have to follow the instructions here. (And, it would be detrimental to do so.)

In any case, I think we’re good to go now, so let me know if you see any oddities.

Wow, what a battle!

I was tired of my G5 being so badly misconfigured that I couldn’t even install a new printer, so I completely erased the HD and started over. That was drastic medicine, but I’m hoping that it will be the right answer in the long run.

Of course, in the short run, I have had a full day of terror, getting things back together, and I’m not even close to being done with that. I did manage to get the blog live again though, as evinced by this post. I’ll check in again once I’m “done”. In the mean time, if you are looking for something on our site and you can’t find it, be patient, it will show up eventually.

Well, I’m still on the trail of the definitive WP2.0 theme for this site. Nothing that’s absolutely jumped out at me yet, but there are certainly lots of interesting things being done. I noticed that there is now a WP2.0 specific theme competition in progress over at kcyap.com. Hopefully, they’ll come up with something cool.

As you’ve probably noticed, I can’t decide what I want this site to look like. You’ll just have to bear with me a bit longer. Hopefully on the weekend I’ll find some time for this.

It’s actually pretty easy to add a picture to the site with WP2.0, but I’d still rather have the Gallery2 plug-in working. In the mean time, here’s a blast from the past added using the built in support:

Unfortunately, the old hacked style I was using didn’t make the grade. What I should do is actually design one of my own, but that will be a bit of a “learning experience” so it will have to wait. For now, this new style is quite pleasant — it just needs to integrate a picture of the castle.

The next step is to install the new-and-improved spam filter, and then re-connect Gallery2 (which may be interesting).

Update: As I suspected, WPG2 doesn’t seem to work with the WP2. I know that ozgreg it looking at it, so hopefully the 1.1 version of WPG2 will make everything right again. For now, you will see a few broken image links. Oh well.

I did a test install of WordPress 2 at http://mikew.ca/wptest. It seems to be working (at least with no imports of old content, and using the default theme) so the next thing to try is upgrading this site. Probably tonight or tomorrow.

I will probably take a stab at moving this site over on the weekend. Given how well it goes, there may be some downtime. (Yes, I’ll backup everything first.)

*sigh*. Time to ramp up the arms race against the spammers. The tool that has been successfully killing every comment spam for the last three months is now starting to fail occasionally. I guess I’ll have to get out the bigger guns.

Oh, and a quick message to the spammers themselves:

Hey, morons, I moderate every post to this site. No one but me will ever see your comments, and I don’t care what you are selling. I know you’re too stupid to just go away, but isn’t it nice to know that you are totally wasting your time. Have a nice day.