tin_the_fatty weblog

Happy New Year!

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Excellent WordPress plug-in. This closes commenting for older posts, so spammers would have a smaller number of posts to inject their crap. I’ll see how it works out.
Update (3/1): Seems to work very well.

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This minor WordPress blog is being hit by spammer(s) in the last few days. A lot of these spams have been caught by the excellent Akismet service, but quite a few actually came thru, which was easily dealt with by the very smooth WordPress UI.
In this age of clever spam filters and coordinated spam detection [...]

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Ha ha.

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Concentration Diversion, on Tumblr.

Very slick UI. Lacks commenting system thou. Already got API, so it may be made to work w/ other blogging software, e.g. WordPress.

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I have just installed eAccelerator. Seems to work fine, and this site feels a bit faster.

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WordPress 2.3 is now out. Four WP installations to upgrade. Sigh.
Update (26/9): The K2 theme (even the RC1) appears to break WordPress 2.3, giving an error about not finding the table wp_categories, so I had to roll back after upgrading one of the WP installations I maintain. Maybe it would take awhile for all the [...]

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I have just migrated (long overdue!) James’ blog from MT 2.6x to WordPress 2.2.
I used Alex King’s mt-wp-redirect template when I migrated my own blog from MT 2.6x to WP. While it works reasonably well and most old links are forwarded to the equivalent new links, I have to keep the old site around, and [...]

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Previously running under Apache+PHP4 and then very briefly under Apache2+PHP5. I think I am settling on lighttpd+PHP5.
No noticeable performance improvement that I can tell, althou the site should seem a little slower overall, ‘cos this blog is now hosted in an overseas VPS.
Check Google on getting lighttpd to work with PHP5 using FastCGI (CGI is [...]

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The Textile2 plugin doesn’t work with utf8 characters. Fortunately Textile1 under the Text Control plugin works. Hurrah!

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I decided to make the final jump. Even got the old individual blog posts under MT redirecting to the new blog entries in WP as described by Alex King’s excellent MT template. Most of these work, althou so far I have found that for some strange reasons a zooomr.html post when being imported into WP [...]

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The Coop has just gained a capital investment of HK$1,000, which after some thoughts and discussion with one of the Coop members, I have decided to invest into another bar of 512MB to bring the total memory of mother to a whopping 1GB (WOW BFD!) and a large-ish HD to put into my home server [...]

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Mother died again a bit over an hour ago. Since the only thing I have changed on it is to install WordPress on it and tried to migrate my weblog over, the new software must be the cause of the problem. I am therefore shutting down WP for the time being and see how it [...]

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I am getting over 100 spam pings everyday. Adding the domain names into my spam database, deleting the pings and rebuilding my site, then deleting the notification emails are mechanical, and althou it only takes a few minutes, this is totally unproductive and certainly not fun.
There is no easy way to turn trackback off and [...]

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I have been tweaking the sidebar of my weblog.
I’ll be moving my weblog to another system, probably WordPress in the next few weeks.

I installed and played with MovableType 3. Althou I can run my personal weblog w/o purchasing a licence, I prefer WordPress’s GPL licence.

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Having solved the comment spam problem for this weblog w/ a CAPTCHA plugin once and for all, the damned spammers are returning w/ trackback spam.
Bastards.

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Q: How do you boost your Google PageRank™ to promote your presumably genuine website?
A: Whenever your write on a topic, google for a few keywords, seek out blogs that take trackbacks, and ping them all.
I have just received such a ping to my recent entry on the new 12-inches AlBook. The pinging entry contains a [...]

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This weblog is under attack of comment spammer(s) again. Among the normal viagra spams, there are a few hundred seemingly random spams, with random names, random email addresses and random urls (which don’t exist). These random spams don’t make sense, except to destroy the viability of the MovableType commenting system, and in effect also destroys [...]

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Effective spam control teaser.
It wouldn’t work for the visually impaired. AFAIK I don’t have any visually impaired readers. If I do gain any I could always give them an account or something. I know the author of this plugin is planning to implement a listen-then-type-in kind of bot challenger.

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Discussion on Slashdot.
The switch to WordPress is inevitable. James expressed his concern about the lack of spam control tools on this platform. In Slashdot’s discussion WPBlacklist and AuthImage were mentioned. Problems solved.

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