Sean's Blog

This past week I’ve been checking my Firestats, and noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic for two of my articles about VB6. Unfortunately, all the traffic has been from one IP address, 64.22.107.90, and it’s all through the same Google search term of ‘vb6 protection’. A quick Google shows that I’m not alone in noticing the garbage traffic. Some sites apparently lack any sort of spam filter, or don’t bother to clean up the spam, as you can find some sites with multiple posts from different people using the same IP. Sure, people on the Internet don’t always have the same IP, but the fact that the comments that are posted tend to have nothing to do with the actual content.

Fortunately, I have Akismet protecting my site, so I didn’t get any of the comments added to my posts, but as I stated above, not everybody appears to be as lucky. With that said, I did all I could do, which was send an e-mail to the abuse e-mail for the IP’s provider, GNAX.net. With any luck, they’ll actually try and resolve the issue instead of just hoping or waiting for it to go away.

I’m curious what ISPs due when they get enough complaints regarding spam or malware traffic? Being the ResNet Coordinator at BGSU, when we get complaints we tend to block it (if it’s a large enough issue) but then we also try and get out there to take a look at the computer to get it cleaned up. I’m already operating under the assumption that the computer at that IP is actually infected with something that is making it send out the spam.

• Does the ISP simply cut the connection and send them a letter or phone call stating why? I doubt it, as they are a paying customer, but I also don’t see this happening as then what’s to stop the customer from canceling the service and going elsewhere? All that does is change the IP that the spam is coming from.
• Assuming they block access and tell the consumer that it’s been done, does the ISP then tell the consumer what they saw, traffic-wise, coming from the computer? This could help the consumer in trying to contact someone to get it resolved, but I’m guessing that this is something that isn’t done either.

So it goes. All-in-all, it just comes down to it being a regular day on the Interwebternets.

I found, or I should say re-found, that del.icio.us has a feature to automatically post any new links added to your delicious account as a post titled “links for year-month-day”. This is either going to be something I like, or get sick of, so we’ll have to see. Until then, enjoy seeing anything I’ve decided is worth keeping track of.

The issue I always run into with different styles is that most styles are not, apparently, made for those that want to display code that doesn’t then bleed onto other content. The solution always requires adding something to the .css, which tends to be like such for me:

pre {
 font-family:monospace;
 display:block;
 background:#eef;
 white-space:pre;
}

code {
 font-family:monospace;
 display:block;
 background:#eef;
 overflow:auto;
 white-space:pre;
}

I should be fair, cause I didn’t check the posts in the VB6 category until I switched from the default K2 style to the headless style, which is interesting, but I don’t know if I want to keep it or not. I think the lack of a header forces the site name (and optional description) to be only as long as it needs to be. That, and instead of having a banner image, you can use a 210px x 300px image, which give you more options.

Anyway, in order to get the code to display properly, I need to use the Code Markup plugin, which appears to be compatible with WP 2.3 (from what I can tell). I guess my only issue with it is that I have to write the code with <pre><code> at the beginning and </code></pre> at the end, but I guess the way it has to be for now. At least there’s a plugin available to resolve the issue.

I saw Jim’s site and got inspired to change mine, as well as update to the new version of WordPress (2.3). Despite the fact that it’s been released for only 2 days such far, I dove in. However, there appear to be some issues with the new theme I want to use, so this entire process will probably take a week or so.

Let me know if anything doesn’t work right.

I’m also trying a different comment/tb spam blocker; hopefully it works ok.

The conversion from Drupal to WordPress worked, just not well. One of the more interesting things was the joining and porting of the posts from one to the other, and while doing so, I noticed the slight differences. For example, Drupal tracks time and dates as Unix timestamps (1173237728) whereas WordPress uses more conventional means (2007-03-06 22:22:08). Also, they record data in different ways. Drupal never saved the local and GMT of when I made or edited a note, just the local, whereas WordPress records both. In this case, I noticed it when I went to port my RSS as notes into Facebook and I was getting creation times of 11:00 AM Wednesday, December 31, 1969.

I know for a fact I dind’t make a note at that time. However, if I really did, I am aging slowly and gracefully, as I do not look like I’m 38.

I also saw that the way WordPress interpreted the timestamps was horribly wrong. I know for a fact I did not post about the fire in Founders at 5:25 in the morning.

Well, the new site has been ported over, but I’m not quite done repairing everything, so you may find some things don’t work completely right now. Leave a comment and tell me what you think.

toothpastefordinner.com

For quite some time now, I have been becoming less and less thrilled with Drupal as a platform for me to use for a blog. It has certainly gotten the job done, but the method for updating it when there’s a new security patch has been tedious, there have been a handful of things that haven’t worked right and I can’t determine why, and the fact that I’m on 4.7, and most module developers are focusing on 5.x, which means I would probably have to upgrade in the next handful of months anyway. While it wasn’t as bad, I had a similar issue when I started with 4.6.

I debated between WordPress and Movable Type, and WordPress has, for all intents and purposes, won. When I started configuring and checking out the test install, I found it to be a better fit for what I wanted. What was better was finding some instructions on migrating from Drupal to WordPress, which helped a lot with importing my old posts.

My only issue with the MySQL given on that page is that it didn’t get blog entries, but that was a very simple fix.

Oops is right.

I’m not quite sure what I was thinking, but I accidentally deleted the forums. I thought I was just deleting associated categories. Oh well. It’s not like that much was lost as a result. So for now there will be one forum called “IT Redux”, and that will be that.

Minor additions to the site.

• added an About page
• added a site map page (still working on that)
• added the ability to have registered users rank (1-10) movie, book, and forum nodes
• changed the links up top around a bit
• added a footer
• made images for the footer (via Button Maker)

Things I plan on doing:

• redoing the categories
• finding random modules that would be nice for the site
• stealing ideas from Langemark’s Cafe

I’ll be driving to Cleveland area tonight.