Another Opinion Among Many

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!

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 was reviewing a few of the spam comments that Akismet caught but insisted that I read before discarding.  Here are three:

“David”, from IP address sixty-six dot seventy-nine dot one sixty-three dot one eighty-seven wrote -

 I like your stuff, even though i came here by accident!

“Eric”, from IP address seventy-two dot two fourty-nine dot thirt-two dot one eighty-four wrote -

 To all the uninitiated out there - read this and take heed. This is good stuff. Thanks….

“Jessica” from IP address sixty-six dot seventy-nine dot one sixty-three dot one seventy-nine (David’s next door neighbor?) wrote -

 I came here by accident, but like it

Its so nice to know that you’re appreciated! Thanks, random robots! I feel much better knowing that my writing is feeding your souls.  Its been fun, but scram, now.

I have to agree with Eric, though.

So, I’ve actually gotten around to it. If you’ve been visiting on and off over the last few days, you may have caught a glimpse of this new theme as I tested it out with this blog. I’ve been working on and off on it for a few weeks now and its ready for public consumption, I think.

There are a few other things I’d like to refine on it, but this is the way that its going go look going forward. Its a tad different than anything that I’ve done before and some of the structure hasn’t been seen often at all. You’ll notice that there’s no traditional sidebar on the side. I’ve moved it below the first post and the treat from the past. I’m moving some of the clutter from the front page to its own page, such as my blogroll. I’ve kept it trimmed for a long time, although my bookmark list is looooong! So, I will get to work adding to it so that the links page is fleshed out. Once I learn how, I’ll probably change the template for that page (and maybe the archives page as well) to a two column design, like newspaper columns. That way the list of links (and older posts) will be lined up in nice neat lines to be viewed with pleasure.

I was originally going to try coding this one from scratch, which is why I didn’t have anything up months ago. If you want to know the inspiration for this theme, you should visit the site of J David Macor, who is the theme author that ported Deliciously Blue from Glossy Blue. I replaced the icons with the excellent free Drunky Love ones by Kevin Wetzels. I’ve left footer links so that you can go and visit their sites for yourself. This theme is sponsored by no one.

You’ll notice that this theme doesn’t look much like the original any more, either by color and artwork, or by design. But, if you dig into the code, you’ll see that I’ve left much of the code intact (even the css naming, which I will eventually clean up). Expect a tag cloud at one point or another and perhaps something in a big block at the bottom, once I figure out whether I want anything down there.

Tell me what you think. I really like how this has turned out - especially the double wordpress loop. I hope that you do too, as I have wanted to free myself of the sidebar for a while. If you see that something is missing, please let me know. If you have browser weirdness, let me know, especially if you use IE6 or IE7, as I haven’t done much testing with IE6 and I’ve resisted IE7 so far on my Windows computer.

Well, its late here (at least for the time I got up yesterday morning) and my eyes are barely still open, so I’m off to bed. Comments are still unmoderated locally. I’m just relying on Akismet and SSP, so you should have no trouble commenting and seeing the results immediately.

By the way, I’ve used the colors in the picture that you see above as my palette for the theme. Those leaves were plucked off a tree on the way to Caleb’s school.

I’ve decided to try something different for commenting on this site. As I have mentioned in a previous post (not too long ago), I have disabled “first post” moderation on this site, to encourage those who would otherwise not comment to do so (and please do). I decided to rely on the Bad Behavior Plugin and Akismet (I know, I know - I said things about relying on an outside server…). I’ve done that for a couple of days and its worked so far. The thing is that Bad Behavior seems to be blocking certain IP ranges since the ISPs host these spammers in droves. The problem is that its blocks legitimate commenters like hari and Sindhu. This is not acceptable in my book, so I’ve taken a different approach. So, after seeing this article at Weblogtools Collection, I decided to disable BB2 and enable TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter. I still have “first post” moderation disabled. I hope that this works. This would be great if SSF and Akismet blocked all the baddies and everyone could comment right away. I have my fingers crossed.

This doesn’t mean that I’m done.  I still think that this would work and sometimes I will just have to ridicule the bad ones.

In an unprecedented move, I’ve decided to allow comments to appear on this site as soon as you make them.  This means that if you’ve never posted here before, then without having to wait for me to get to approving your comment, it will appear on the site right away.  I’ve decided to do this, as I’ve been using Akismet in addition to my old trusty Bad Behavior 2 for fighting comment spam.  So far, every comment that’s really been spam has either not showed up at all or been caught by Akismet for moderation.  This doesn’t mean that you’ll get away with commenting in an abusive or demeaning way to anyone.  I will still either remove offensive posts or edit the content that I find objectionable.  This is my site, after all.  My rules.  That means try to keep it mature.

So, stop lurking.

I figured that I should throw one of these up, to be fair and accessible. Here’s the dirt:

This site collects your email address. Why? Its so that I don’t get tons of blog spam comments without some form of moderation. I used to moderate first time comments but I have found that a combination of Akismet and Simple Spam Filter are enough to keep the humans on the blog and the robots away. That’s all I use your email for.  If you can’t be bothered to provide a valid contact email address, then your comment is not important here, either.  My email address is posted on every page, so contact me if you have issues with my site.  If you’re a human (or a really cool alien), I will be happy to converse with you.  I use Simple Spam Filter and Akismet to moderate SPAM. If you get trapped, you’re considered a spammer and you’ll have to deal with it. What did you do? Spam me?

If you get stopped by Simple Spam Filter’s “you’re comment was moderated because it contained “…”, please prove that you are actually a human being and click the button to allow the comment through.  I add keywords that I find in my Akismet que to a “block” list.  Some may seem common, but spammers use them, too.  Just click the button.  If you don’t, I guess that you’re a spammer and you got caught.  I don’t moderate your comments beyond that (which means that YOU moderate your own comment).

 If you have to contact me, then use my email address, which is usually posted near the top of the front page and in the footer.  I will not give away your information to anyone for marketing or spam purposes. I hate those jerks more than you do! I have to moderate their crap off my website.

This is my site and I will decide what content is appropriate. Keep your comments on topic, or I will delete them. I do not tolerate sexism, racism, or any form of demeaning other commenters on my site.  Be respectful.  Anything you say can be said in a mature manner.  Do it.  I will respect your opinion.  I expect that you will respect the opinion of any other commenter on the site.    If you persist, I will ban your email address and IP from my site, if necessary. Try not to break your country’s or my country’s laws when you post comments on my website. I don’t appreciate it and neither will my web host, Friendlier.com, whose Terms of Service is here.

This site does not guarantee that it will be constantly available, as its my personal spot, and, at whim, I may pull it down and redesign it all. I do not guarantee that your witty input will be preserved, as I don’t always back up often enough. If it craps out and is gone, sorry. Life calls again, I guess. I could change this policy from time to time without notice.  Come back and read it once in a while to be sure, if you care.

That’s about it. Nothing big. Just respect me and I’ll do the same for you. Remember, my writing is ©me. Ask first or attribute. The same goes for you. If you see something that you wrote on my site and I have forgotten to link back to you, please email me with the post and content that should be attributed to you and I’ll fix it.

In case you’re the owner of a splog or spam site and you didn’t understand the above, that means don’t scrape my whole post and pass it off as your own. Delete it from your site and don’t bother coming back, either in person, with your feed reader, or your spider.

Additionally, I use a plugin that will display your Gravatar if you comment.  If you don’t have a Gravatar, you will be assigned the default, which is