29
Mar
I have made some changes to stop the spammers from signing up for accounts ’round these parts. I have enabled OpenID and set it so that new users have to have a valid OpenID to sign up for an account. You can still comment the same way you did before or use OpenID. It’s either or for comments since the spam controls I have on the comments work so well that hardly anything gets through. Since you don’t have to sign up for an account to comment this shouldn’t really affect anyone that’s already commenting here. This was more of a heads up in case something goes awry. I have had around 40-50 spam sign ups a week and would really like them to go away. I am deleting them as they come in, well weekly, so if I accidentally delete a real person’s account please let me know.
9
Sep
I cleaned up the mix tapes so that they are all here and none of them floating around on their own subdomains anymore. Not a ton has changed except behind the scenes. I have converted the three mixes that were still subdomains and will be directing all of the mix tape subdomains to the Mixes & Intros page and deleting the content on them and eventually removing them. It’s easier to maintain a single subdomain for the mixes and even that re-directs to the Mixes & Intros page. I also went through and added the artist names as tags for each of the mix tapes so that they might be easier to search for. I still have two mixes that are not quite the right format and one post that’s a playlist with a play button for each track I need to convert but those can wait a while longer.
I know my Categories don’t make much sense and they shouldn’t since they are arbitrary phrases I chose for no reason other than them sounding cool. However I am using each one for something specific and in regards to music Once more into the breach should get you all the compilations and intros as posts instead of a list if you are so inclined.
3
Sep
For some reason spammers have decided to test my anti-spam measures. I am happy to say that they are working flawlessly so far. The combination of tools I have in place is preventing between twenty and thirty spam comments a day! I have no idea why they decided to start now but they aren’t getting through my defenses. I guess it was only a matter or time before they started here. I just wanted to brag a little bit about the tools and thumb my nose at the spamming morons. I now return you to your normal programming.
20
Aug
Apparently this theme’s comment link wasn’t working for some reason. It is fixed now. You can comment easily on entries. I am working on allowing comments without registration but have to get some other anti-spam stuff in place before I turn that on. I’ll have it done before lunch most likely.
UPDATE: Non-registered users may now comment. In order to avoid spam you first comment will be held for moderation. Comments will automatically close on posts older than thirty days. And no captcha to annoy anyone!
UPDATE Part the Second: Gravatars are enabled and working. Yeah I know it’s kind of cheesy but I wanted them working so I made it happen.
10
Aug
While I really liked the whole voodoo theme it wasn’t conducive to actually reading the text. I played with the CSS but that’s sort of damn boring. I toyed with going back to the old Spider Jerusalem theme or the Shotgun theme but decided I wanted a new theme. This one is well made, open source, and easy on the eyes (at least for me) so the choice was easy. Since I have started posting stuff again I changed the twitter digest to a weekly post so it doesn’t clutter up anything I want seen on the main page. I wanted a way to have it post to its own page but that’s beyond what I am willing to hack on right now. So a weekly digest is good enough and the front page will be generally clean enough to read the stuff that’s not a twitter digest.
I have started, if you haven’t seen, posting intro mixes for people to get a feeling about my favorite artists and bands. I think those may actually move to another site soon and just be cross posted here and that will be a good thing. But posting those has sort of got me wanting to post about some of the stuff I have been thinking about or discussing with friends and so on. I have always been able to better work out my thoughts when I journaled. I can’t promise anything but I want to try and post a mix tape on Monday, current events on Wednesdays, and life management on Fridays with random geek stuff in between. I have done some pretty cool stuff lately on the geek front and really didn’t share it anywhere when I sort of should have. I know I mentioned life management but I am not talking about giving tips for managing your life but rather chronicling the struggle to get mine under control. I have no intention of posting any sappy-self-help-drivel.
UPDATE: I think I found a plugin to exclude stuff from the main page and if so I’ll set twitter back to daily digests!
UPDATE 2: Plugin works. I have recategorized all posts that were in the category that twitter tools posts to and switched back to daily. I even went all the way to start of this blog and added tags and re-categorized every post I have made. The categories make sense to me but not likely to anyone else.
