Category Archives: Site News

News about my site

Your Comment May Have Been Deleted

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So I woke up today to find this e-mail in my inbox:

Dear Defensio user,

We have reasons to believe that a few of our api keys might have been compromised and our research indicates that your key(s) might be among them.

Don’t worry, YOUR ACCOUNT WAS NOT HACKED AND YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION IS SAFE. However, in order to protect your privacy, we thought the best thing to do was to regenerate new api key(s) for you.

As of now, DEFENSIO IS NO LONGER FILTERING SPAM on your website or blog. To re-enable it, please login to your account at http://defensio.com and then go to “My API Keys” where you’ll find newly generated keys. You should then update your website or blog settings with the new key(s).

When an API key is invalid, apparently it’s supposed to go to the moderation queue, but it didn’t for me which meant I got 400-500 spams overnight on my blog. Lovely.

So, I just spent the last few minutes deleting page after page of spams from my blog. I thought I skimmed through each page looking for legit comments, but I know I missed at least one (of mine specifically). If you found one of your comments from the last 24 hours has gone missing, please post it again. I probably accidentally deleted it. Sorry.

As for Defensio, I’m still happy with their spam accuracy, but I really wish they’d fix that bug in their plugin. It was hugely annoying to wake up to so much spam on my blog. That’s the whole reason I use Defensio — to avoid that. *sigh*

My Two Weeks With Defensio Anti-Spam

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For many, many years, I had been using Spam Karma 2 for comment, pingback, and trackback spam protection here on my blog and it seemed to do a decent job. The idea behind SK2 is to check for things like Javascript (few bots have JS enabled), the number of links in the post (spam obviously has lots usually), how long it took them to post the comment (bots post it nearly instantly), and so forth. Each property would add or subtract karma points from the comment until a final score was given. The comment would then be marked as ham (good) or spam (bad) based on that score.

It of course wasn’t perfect. Spam bots are getting smarter and a plugin such as SK2 alone just couldn’t be accurate enough. So, a year or so ago, I added an Akismet plugin for SK2. The idea is the plugin talks to Akismet and gets a ham or spam rating for the comment. This result is then given to SK2 to use in it’s overall score. It worked great, at least for a while.

However, even with the help of Akismet, SK2 just wasn’t cutting it lately. Akismet was too often saying it was ham when it really was spam or on occasion, the other way around (that ham was spam).

So, two weeks ago today, I decided to give Defensio a try.

Continue reading →

All Plugins Disabled

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I’m currently trying to debug a problem I’m having with my blog, so all plugins are disabled for the moment. So, if you were expecting to see all my posts on my archive, my weather, videos in posts, etc., you’ll have to wait.

Just thought I’d let you know what was up.

EDIT: Okay, everything is back to normal. Discovered the problem wasn’t plugin related.

Yes, My Site Is Finally Back Online

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Sorry for it taking so damn long. I’ve been really, really lazy lately when it comes to WordPress development, plugins, and especially my site (as you could probably tell). Playing a ton of World of Warcraft (my character can be found here) doesn’t help either and any free time left over from that is devoted to the odds and ends paid work that I do.

So yeah, everything should be back and working now including the forums. Let me know if not.

EDIT: Apparently the sidebar goes all goofy when the comment form is there. I haven’t a clue why (it used to work) and frankly, nor do I really care right now. This blog is pretty dead anyway, at least for now…

EDIT 8/20: Did a database server switch, so had a day or two of downtime while that happened. All is good now. 🙂

Will Code For A Design!

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Alright, I’m growing tired of this theme and I’m looking for something a little more Web 2.0 as well as possibly full width. Is anyone out there interested in working with me to create a mockup in Photoshop? I’d want to do the design to XHTML to WordPress theme part, but I can’t design for the life of me, so I’d need someone’s help to create the design.

I’d be willing to chip a little money your way or even better, code anything you need (WordPress plugin, theme, etc.).

Any takers?

Blog Upgraded

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This blog is now running the alpha version of WordPress 2.1 (i.e. the latest SVN). While upgrading, I decided to start over from scratch with what plugins were activated (I had so much crap in my /plugins/ folder), so let me know if any features of my site aren’t working (for example, if I missed a needed plugin) by replying to this post.

EDIT 12/02 2:34 AM: Whoops, just noticed I accidentally changed my post permalink structure. Put back to normal now.

Comments Are Working Again

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The Spam Karma 2 database table apparently got corrupted 2.5 days ago and all comments since then were automatically being marked as spam. I recovered most of the ones that weren’t, but a couple comments seem to have disappeared, so sorry to those who had their comments lost.

All should be back to normal now though.

Man Do I Love Google!

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Last night, I signed up for Google to handle my e-mail as well as let me sign into Google Talk with my domain name. It’s all thanks to the incredibly cool (but not really new) Google Apps for Your Domain. I only get 2 gigs of space (rather than the ever increasing space of regular GMail), but I get their awesome spam protection, GMail interface (with my own logo), threaded replies, catchall support, etc. Not to mention that I can have up to 100 e-mail addresses, so if my normal one ever actually gets full, I can just make a new one and forward everything to it.

Way cool.