Entries tagged blogging

I've set up and maintained a few blogs over time. I was even a part of a planet at one time. Remember those? Aggregators of multiple blogs in one. I had one for my teenager-focused online Linux User's Group. Maybe I'll sit down and write a memoir about that sometime.

It's been a while since I've felt the need to update nobody in particular about my life and thoughts and feelings. A lot has happened. I've launched a fairly successful career, got married to a wonderful man named Patrick, and with him, I have a mini Italian Greyhound named Violet.

I've had friends, fallings-out, hobbies, abandoned projects, weird encounters, new habits (some good, some bad, some eradicated), and I talked to a well-known conspiracy theorist at a Chinese restaurant with a mouth full of Mu Shu vegetables.

And you, internet, missed all of it. I'm so sorry. I'll start catching you up.

So my last name is Williamson now...

Tags: blogging, meta, personal | No comments

Been a while since my last post. Hardly 10 posts in and I'm already taking hiatuses. Well, in short, we placed 2nd in a chilli contest and carved Gaston from Animal crossing in a pumpkin. Then I went to Austin very briefly and bought five bottles of a most elusive remedy, melatonin in jelly-bean form.

So upon reviewing this blog, I see that I have actually received my first spam comment! I have removed it from the site, but I'm keeping the comment file for posterity -- one for the scrapbook! Here's a pastebin of the comment text.

Ironincally, it's a spam comment advertising a spam commenting service. I've always wondered how those script kiddos get business. It's like the internet version of those "Does advertising work? JUST DID!" billboards littering the highways, advertising nothign but themselves.

I've been meaning to take out some cheap ads for DFW 8mm, maybe I should give the Russian spammers a chance.

Tags: blogging, herewego, meta, spam | No comments

I've been having a bit of a spam problem on this blog. I really didn't want to do a captcha when I set it up, and I still don't. Captchas are always too cumbersome, if they're effective at all. Often they're more obtrusive to humans than they are to bots. Even good captcha can often be farmed out to humans after a trivial amount of reverse engineering. It can be very cost-effective to do this.

I think RBLs will be a little more effective for my use case, and be completely unobtrusive to most users. And it only took five lines of code:

#
# Check for spam on the Usenix RBL
#
my @ipa = split('\.', $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'});
my @ipa_rev = reverse(@ipa);
my $dnsbl_host = join('.', @ipa_rev) . ".all.s5h.net";
if (gethostbyname("$dnsbl_host")) {
        $COMMENT = "/srv/ephemeris/comments.spam/"
}

So it still saves the comment, but in a quarantine folder that doesn't get built with the rest of the site HTML. I might check it sometimes, maybe never. The spammer does not get notified that their comment was quarantined. So if you comment something and it never shows up, you can email me and I'll check it out. You might need to get your IP cleared over here (click the "rblremove" link -- don't refresh it too many times). However, you may have been listed because you have some malware on your computer or network that's part of a botnet.

Hey, spammers, if you're reading this, why do you only spam my Birthday Post?

Tags: blogging, internet, meta, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam | No comments