If you don’t see anything here, don’t dispair. I’m just cleaning up after that nasty “visitor” I mentioned a few posts ago. I don’t know when I will do this. It depends on a bit of help from my host, the most awesome Friendlier.com. But, if its necessary that all goes dark, I’ll be back shortly.
Archive for the ‘Site’ Category
I tried something interesting to see what would result. For one day, I turned off the Simple Spam Filter plugin, written by the most excellent Tan Tan Noodles coder, Joe Tan. I wanted to see how much SPAM it was actually prefiltering. Now, my site gets pretty low traffic, as far as sites go. Depending on the stats program I use, either 160ish or 700ish visitors came to see me per day on the highest traffic months. My total bandwidth usage has grown to about 3.5GB per month (thanks in part to the low number of videos and pictures that I host).
After entering some new keywords into the “banned words” list, I stopped having to moderate any comments at all through the Akismet moderation panel. Anybody who has commented has probably been stopped by SSF and asked if they are indeed human at least once, as there are some pretty common words that show up in spammers comments as well as normal ones done by humans that care to engage in a REAL conversation. I hope that you’ve enjoyed my attempt at humourously presenting the verification button to you.
What I was worried about was that legitimate commenters weren’t getting their point accross, as no spam to moderate is a bit strange. Hopefully all you real, live commenters realize by now that you just have to click the button to have your comment appear without any further moderation.
So, what was the result? Of the comments that came through that Akismet hasn’t learned yet and auto-deleted, I got 48 comments in my spam moderation queue. There were no false positives. I turned SSF back on and the spam comments stopped getting through. Thank you, TanTan Noodles!
Well, I found a directory on my Wordpress install that I didn’t install the contents of. My wp-content/uploads/ folder had a directory /2007/12 in it, which, in itself, wouldn’t be much to raise concern, but it wasn’t “owned” by me. My web host confirmed that all files should be owned by me. I couldn’t delete the folder, it seems. I sure wanted to, because it contained 100s of html pages that were all redirects to scummy splogger sites. So, I guess that I got hacked. Folks, upgrade your Wordpress as soon as you’re advised of a security release.
When I changed my cPanel password, some wierdness occurred. If you were browsing my site this afternoon, you might have caught the moment where there was no database connection. You see, when you change your cPanel password, it changes your mail, ftp, and mySql passwords as well. It took a minute for the system to all get working again. When I was checking the mail to ensure that it still worked, I noticed that I had almost 8,000 emails sitting in my default mail account. I’ve not actually configured an email account, as I use Google’s Gmail redirect service, where I can forward mails received by corey@ to my Gmail email and send as corey@. Why not use their spam filtering, rather than manage my own? So, these were the emails that were being sent to any whatever @coreythompson dot com since October. I am sure that all of it was SPAM, so I set up squirrelmail to show 1000 mails per page and used “toggle all” and sent them to my trash folder and then purged the folder. I then set up my mail settings to bounce all email to addresses without forwarding with a “no such recipient” message. Hopefully, this will keep the unwanted emails off my server.
What a sucky happenstance.
Wow. Somehow, over the weekend, the visitor count just topped 50,000 unique IPs, which means at least 50,000 different IP addresses visited my site since I set up the counter, sometime in 2006. So, that means my little ole site could have been visited by at least 50,000 people. Thanks for coming to my spot, everyone! BTW, the counter says 51,051 at the moment.
Hi everyone.
I’ve been thinking about tweaking a few things on my site as far as how it looks. I’m not looking at a total redesign. I just want to do a few edits to make it more visually appealing to those who don’t read it in their feed readers.
Is there anything about the layout that I should consider? (I really like this simple two-column design but am open to suggestions)
What about the colors? Links? Text decorations? If you have a color suggestion, could you indicate the hex color# or RGB value so I can see what you mean?
Are there any features that should be here that aren’t?
I’m open to suggestions. And, remember that I don’t moderate comments actively. If you get past Simple Spam Filter (which means you can write anything you want, as long as you click the button to prove that you’re human) and Akismet, your comment will show up right away.
Thank you. I await…
I had to mention this, as I’m sure that its not always or even usually the case for most.
Merry Christmas to our Landlord. Ever since you bought the building that I live in, you’ve only shown that you want to establish a long term relationship with your tenants through your immediate and continued improvements to the building. Thank you for doing the unexpected and dropping off a fruit basket to us. We appreciate this gesture more than you likely think.
Merry Christmas to the team at Friendlier.com, who host this site. Not only have you instilled confidence in my assessment of your abilities as a host and your forward-looking vision of producing a quality experience for a reasonable price. You have also proven that you sometimes actually do get what you pay for. And, thank you for sending a quick email to wish a Merry Christmas to me (and likely your other hostees). Most of us still do care about the small things and this small gesture has proven that you are looking forward to a long term relationship with your customers by actually paying attention to them once in a while.
I’m just writing to advise anyone on a WordPress blog to check out your Plugins page in your Dashboard and review the ones that you have to see if they’re up to date. If you’re running version 2.3 of WordPress, you will be told which ones are update, as long as the plugin author uses the WordPress Plugins site to host and track their work.
As I did today (which I do about once every two or three weeks), why don’t you take a moment to ensure that your plugins are up to date. This will ensure that you are running the least buggy and most secure version of your favorite plugins.
