Tag Archives: blog

Upgrading to latest Pyblosxom

I’m currently upgrading my blog to PyBlosxom 1.4.3. I apologise for
any broken links or entry flooding.

Update: I’ve finished playing now. I’ve upgraded to
1.4.3 and I don’t think I’ve broken anything yet.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to add a couple of plugins to add
tagging to entries and added the obligatory tag cloud to the side bar
rather than the list of months. I’m going to make some changes to the
comment plugin later to add OpenID support. I’d be interested to know of
any other pyBlosxom plugins you find useful.

I did manage to make a mistake by using vim to edit entries to
add some tags rather than my wrapper script to keep timestamps the same.
This is where I’m glad I have a database table with the metadata from
all my entries to hand. A quick touch foo.txt -d 2006-06-07
19:02:57+01 later and everything was fixed. Hopefully not too many
people got bitten by the few entries that had new dates for a few
minutes. Please let me know if you notice anything broken.

Dealing with blog spam

Julien,
the majority of comment spam can be dealt with very simply by including
a turing test. On my blog, when I first started getting comment spam, I
added a check box asking if the poster was a human. For a human, it’s
not a massive inconvience to tick a box, but for an automated tool, it’s
a major problem. Was implemented in 3 lines of html and one line of
python. Since I added it, I haven’t recieved a single piece of
spam.

I don’t believe it’s had a major effect on people commenting,
although I currently can’t tell. I could change it to hide posts that claim to be non-human
until I’ve checked them. If spam tools work out this simple problem, I
could change the nature of the test to randomly change between “I am a
human” and “I am not a human”. After that I could include a simple sum
or some other simple question. It also has an advantage over captchas
that it is accessible.

It is a simple change which massively reduces spam by increasing the
cost of spamming and I’m surprised that most people don’t do something
similar.

Livejournal Sucks. No really it does.

I’d like to apologise for those people reading my blog via Livejournal. I did a bit of
reorganisation last night, but made sure that both PyBlosxom (used on
my website) and Planet (used on Planet Debian) didn’t consider
them to be new posts. Sadly it appears that livejournal wasn’t so
clever and managed to mark them as new and spammed people’s friends
page.

Sorry. I won’t do it again in a hurry.