Just discovered a bug in my new anti-spam WordPress plugin that made it impossible for anyone to comment. It’s been fixed, but this of course brings to the front the critical need for a proper testing environment!
29 September 2009
16 September 2009
Trying Some new Anti-Spam Techniques
If you’ve been paying attention to my Akismet counter on the sidebar, you’ve probably noticed the number trending upwards quite rapidly over the last week. Apparently the spambots have found me.
Akismet’s done a superb job of preventing you fine folks from seeing the spam. And WordPress similarly does a superb job of providing a single-click interface to purge all that spam. But I’d really rather not have to be bothered with that.
So I’ve just implemented a quick-and-dirty plugin that uses Tornevall’s DNSBL service to bar these spambots from posting at all. With any luck none of you will be affected or even notice at all, but do let me know if you find yourself unable to post comments (assuming you have another way of reaching me, that is).
Coincidentally, this is providing a handy lesson in writing WordPress plugins. In the dive-in-headfirst-and-hope-you-can-swim sort of way…
12 September 2009
India or Bust!
So, I’m going to India. When? Dunno – 3 or 4 weeks, maybe 5. How long? Dunno – 2 weeks? Maybe as much as 4. Why?
Because the company I work for is expanding into the Indian market. We’ve got a potential client, but to give them the best we can we’re working with an Indian development company to branch and then customize our product for them. It’s a great opportunity to expand and grow our product and our company.
I’ll be heading over there to train the developers on our code base and our development practices. Should be fun.
I’ll be in Trivandrum, for those who are curious.
8 September 2009
Apache on Windows: Serving Files From the Network
Recently I had a problem: Without going into the “whys” here, I found myself on a Windows XP system needed to parse and serve PHP files in Apache from a network share. Sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, the obvious answer didn’t work, and hours of Googling turned up countless suggestions, most of which didn’t work at all. I even found some very detailed step-by-step instructions that turned out to be based upon a premise that doesn’t work at all.
As it turns out, this is a problem with a very simple, yet unobvious, solution, and today I will share it with you. With any luck, Google will start serving up this post to others looking to serve files in Apache on Windows from a network file share. (more…)
1 September 2009
The Day the World Ended
nickmccabe
RT @jennispinner 2000yrs ago we lived in tents and had to catch/kill our food. Now, we curl up into the fetal position when Gmail’s down.
I’m sure you already know Gmail went down today. Well, to be precise, the web interface went down. IMAP, POP3, and the API remained available, however users who hadn’t enabled access for the former 2 options (such as myself) found themselves cut off from all access to their Gmail. Many of us rely on Gmail for our work, so it was more than a nuisance for us. (more…)
