That’s the name of the game.

Category : annoying + internet + software

So I spent the better half of my morning today playing spam warrior. Apparently there’s an exponential upsurge in spam hitting everyone or I’ve been targeted. So far I’ve received a whopping 500 spam comments in the past 24 hours and as soon as I cleared it there were a dozen more. All of this has forced me to rethink some of the discussion policies due to the dramatic increase of retardation from people attempting to peddle boner medication, sex sites and everything in between.

A quick check on Akismet stats proves I’m not alone, and that’s only mildly reassuring. But still it has stirred me up enough to want to cause physical harm to the idiots behind a few addresses who’s servers are mindlessly pushing all this crap. Am I wrong in thinking that people don’t fall for this crap anymore? Or is this part of some larger endgame?

Because after over 900 failed attempts (500 of which occurred in the past 24 hours) at spamming me, they still persist. Two IP addresses – 81.95.146.227 and 81.177.22.236 – have been hitting non-stop commenting dozens of times every few minutes. And for some odd reason my rewrite rules to block them didn’t even appear to have much of an effect, which makes me think I need to check those rules for errors. Either way whoever coded these spam bots is a total fucking moron.

For the meantime I’ve pulled commenting and pings on older posts as I figure out how to solve this. I’ll leave the latest post open for comments to see what happens, based upon the trend I’ve seen it appears that a majority of the spam is targeted at older open posts. So there’s a good chance they’re only bottom feeders hitting on stuff that’s cached elsewhere.

Either way, it’s fairly pathetic that some advertisers and businesses stoop so low if they’re legitimate while trying to get their “business” noticed. I’ll admit that it’s noticed, but not in the good way. And if I were to have the pleasure of meeting the owners of this “business” and their spammy offspring I’d love to introduce my baseball bat to all their computer equipment.

+ TrackBack | Comments & TrackBacks: [4]

Gmail + Pop3 means fun

Category : general + internet + updates

200 mails fetched. 4172 mails remaining. More updates later, I promise.

+ TrackBack | Comments & TrackBacks: [X]

Feeling Reinvigorated

Category : internet + updates

I don’t even remember signing up for the beta or leaving an updated email address within the previous version, but it’s good to once again see Sean managed to get Reinvigorate running again. It was a small surprise considering I had not expected to see this project alive so soon. Then finding this among the contents of my inbox made my day.

From: Reinvigorate // sm
Subject: Reinvigorate // Private Beta
You have been invited to join the Reinvigorate private beta. Use the link below to get yourself set up.
…
Initially we’re launching with 28 reports and some very exciting new features. We hope you enjoy the new service. We look forward to seeing you.

sm
http://www.reinvigorate.net/

For those unfamiliar with previous versions of Reinvigorate, it’s a very nice and thorough site statistics monitor which tracks of all your visitors much like Google Analytics. At first glance Reinvigorate appears to compliment Google Analytics quite well by giving you more details on things like referrers and visitors details with a more simplified but highly detailed view like you would pull from your own access logs. But Reinvigorate really seems to pick up where Analytics leaves off by giving you the necessary and gritty details which any “webmaster” might be looking for quickly without having to drill several clicks deep into the interface which is quite nice.

Sean really only seems to be getting started here but I can’t wait to see what improvements come after the long-awaited IP-exclusion feature. Until I feel motivated enough to set up my own access log parser, Analytics and Reinvigorate are here to stay. Next to see which one earns its keep.

+ TrackBack | Comments & TrackBacks: [X]

WoopsPress

Category : annoying + programming + software

For those visiting last week, you may have noticed my extremely awesome “uh-oh” page informing you of my total screw-up. This happened after I decided to blindly take a chance and upgrade WordPress from 2.0 to 2.1. The entire experience was a bit like accidentally pulling your steering wheel off its column and throwing it into the back seet while driving down the highway. Somehow you still having most of the ability to steer but then only losing control and causing you to crash when the airbag on that steering wheel decides to magically deploy well after the fact.

What I suspect really happened was that upon upgrading, categories for all posts and links were merged incorrectly or not at all. This may have been the caused when I accidentally ran the WordPress upgrade script under 2.0.6 or 2.0.7 which caused those tables to get skipped upon migrating to 2.1. With a little luck however I had made a backup before this which contained 99.9% of the current database and it upgraded almost flawlessly. All that was left was fixing a small error in my template.

WordPress 2.1 also introduced a new template tag appropriately named “wp_list_bookmarks” to spit out the links from your blogroll. I decided to see if this worthy of replacing the MySQL query I’ve used this entire time found in the “wp_get_links” example. I was slightly impressed with it’s moderate flexibility on list items themselves, but the least desirable part is that there aren’t really any formatting options for the unordered list parent itself.

Given the minor amount of database changes, I simply tweaked existing query a bit and decided to also make it a conditional statement to make things backward compatible. While it’s not as elegant as a template tag, it works exactly as written because the output is entirely up to you. The only difference between this one and the original example is the query, and the obvious fact that it’s conditional. Simply, if “wp_list_bookmarks” is found as an option it assumes the version of WordPress is not 2.1.x and falls back onto the original. 

<ul>...
<?php

if (function_exists('wp_list_bookmarks')) {
/* Look to see if this is WP 2.1 */

$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results
("SELECT cat_ID, cat_name FROM $wpdb->categories WHERE link_count > 0");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {

...(...)...

} else {
/* If it's not 2.1 run the old query. */

$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results
("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {

...(...)...

}}
?>
...</ul>

If you don’t need a 2.0.x condition to fall back on, then all you really need to do is tweak the original enough to suit your need. Additionally, “wp_get_links” my have to be swapped out for just “get_links” depending upon how you like your output. If I can remember and find the time I may eventually just turn this into a friendlier plug-in if nobody has already done so. Otherwise feel free to steal the idea.

Happy Hacking.

+ TrackBack | Comments & TrackBacks: [X]

SiteMap