Scott T: The Blog

Decisions

Posted Sat, May 23, 2009 at 11:57pm by Scott
Tagged: spam, this-site
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I've recently picked myself up a Twitter account, and am currently investigating options to display it on this site somewhere. Current options are either to place it in a box on either left or right column, however I'm contemplating the option to inline with my blog stream as well. Any thoughts on this? Obviously the RSS feed will only show blog updates, however a separate feed with Twitter updates could be added later down the track.

On another note, I've noticed the spam count for comments has basically stopped for the last few months - the only thing I can remember changing was locking comments on one blog post, although these were re-enabled a month ago. Not that I'm complaining =P


Has it really been 2 months?

Posted Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:14pm by Scott
Tagged: spam, this-site
1 comments

It's hard to believe it's been nearly two months since the last post (you thought I'd forgotten about this place didn't you :P ). There have been a few small updates over the past few months which have been mostly backend related to make my job look after this site easier. Some are yet to be uploaded (such as a little bit of Ajax) while others have (such as the ability to manually close commenting on certain posts). Oddly enough, since blocking comments for one post which appeared to attract spam, no other spam has hit the site for close to a month. Not that I'm complaining at all.

I do plan to do several smaller posts over the next week or two which outline what's happened since my last proper post (see my December update) since I prefer smaller posts (both quicker to write and read) which are around the 2 paragraph mark. Not full-on blogging but not micro-blogging either :)

Do other people share the same views? Should I be writing long/detailed posts or are 2-paragraph updates fine?


Drastic Measures

Posted Fri, May 02, 2008 at 9:40am by Scott
Tagged: spam, this-site
2 comments

I must say Akismet rules, however I've been getting a little bit of blog spam recently (10 per day every few days - up to about 160 in total now and they seem to like 7th Guest). And I'm sick of clearing the queue. So it's time for me to take some action.

I don't feel the need just yet (or the inclination with uni and other more pressing matters) to implement any form of CAPTCHA (of any sort, be it math, image or "english" based) so I've now blocked ALL spam comments that Akismet picks up such that they get immediately binned. No moderation. No spam queues. Nothing. So if anyone trips the spam filter, you'll need to try again with a less "spammy" comment.

Hopefully it doesn't start trying to block all comments :p


6-month Round-up

Posted Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 11:16pm by Scott
Tagged: fires, spam, this-site, water
2 comments

It's now nearly 6 months since I got started with this blog, and although I though I would give it up after a month or so, I've stuck at it and come to enjoy it :) As such, I've decided to do a bit of a round-up on how things have progressed since that rather blunt "first post" in last September.

How things change! I started off with comments on changes to SSC where I had the time and other programming things but before long, uni started to creep in and that's where things really started to grow. Things progressed (both on and off-line) and before long the effects of the lake being cut off were becoming evident and just a few weeks later, a bushfire started not too far from home although it was contained a few days later. Into 2008, the water levels continued to drop (some pretty good photos are available here if you haven't seen them yet) and a fair bit of work was done on V3 of SSC before finally deploying it (with some teething issues - some still visible) last week.

Now for some interesting tid-bits:

Looking forward for the next 6 months :)


Comments

Posted Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 4:33pm by Scott
Tagged: spam, ssc
3 comments

I'm taking a bit of a leap of faith here - I've just enabled comments without any "CAPTCHA" on it...

Hopefully this won't kill the server, and hence my account as that would be bad so if things get too bad I'll probably head for something more like WordVerify since it seems less likely to impair accessibility. One thing I am doing however, is checking how well the Akismet service works for spam filtering.

Hopefully you can now let me know if anyone IS reading this and your thoughts on any future (or past) posts I make.


Spam Count 
  • 1908 spam comments
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