Ever since the move to WordPress, the server has been whining — and not in the silent, emo kind of way. No, it seems that WP is just too much of a strain on it. Suddenly I’m getting all kinds of problems, like hard disc problems and too little RAM and such… Neither were there before and now I’m looking into moving all web content to another server (kindly provided by my dad). Hopefully that’ll allow the old one to keep its job as mail server and stuff.
I was wanting to install X11 on Mac OS X, such that i could test the Synfig Studio port madsen [0] is cooking, as it depends on it. But was too slack to get out of the sofa (see pervius post; sofa’s are good for you) to go get the install dvd which holds X11, i though it would be just as easy and accurate to download the X11User.dmg from Apples site [1] which holds X11User.pkg and install X11 from there.
But no — check this picture:
Wouldn’t one expect to get X11.app installed by installing exactly that packages? - It’s what I’ve done the last time I installed X11 (to run Gimp, on a previous install of on another HD before it hard died). But now the installer can’t cope with something being too fresh. I’m happy that it don’t downgrade my (developer) sources, but why on earth doesn’t it just skip that and install the binary.
The install dvd didn’t have the same problems as this installer - thankfully.
Obviously things have happened to this site. Let me just mention the most important here — the rest you can figure out for yourselves.
First of all, there’s a new kid on the blog. Allow me to introduce Steffen (his profile will return 404 until he publishes something), whom many of you already know. I’ve been hoping to have him join this blog for a long time now, but my old blogging software wasn’t rigged for it. I’ve finally gotten over myself and installed a standard platform, which I’ll get into in a second, but first: Welcome to the blog Steffen, I hope you’ll like it here.
Now, this new standard platform I mentioned, is (as you may have guessed) WordPress. At first I was a bit hesitant to move to such a platform, but with the ability to easily write plugins, widgets, modify templates and stuff, there’s really no reason not to. Setting up WP was a breeze and the migration from my old system to the new was a matter of 2 really simple PHP scripts — one for converting the old entries and one for the comments. A million thumbs up to the WP developers for making something so accessible, simple and easy.
Apart from a new blogger and a new platform, other things have changed a bit around here. When migrating to WP, there were some decisions to be made. One of those were whether or not to move stuff like phpCF and DynDNSupdate to the new site and I ended up deciding that DynDNSupdate wasn’t worth moving, since I haven’t coded on it for years (and I don’t intend to ever again) and it didn’t appear to be all that popular anyways. So DynDNSupdate is gone. phpCF survived though, mainly because I still code on it every now and then (and I have some huge improvements planned) and because it actually has a future (where DynDNSupdate only had a past — not even a present).
Now, no migration of this sort is without problems and I’ve tried my best to make sure that no old links are broken and stuff, but should you encounter any problems, let me know.
On a side note, the site isn’t the only thing that has had an overhaul (1 and 2).
I was just looking through my logfiles (I tend to do that whenever I get a bit tired, but don’t go to sleep) and I realized that the number of spam attempts has decreased heavilly. From blocking more than 30 attempts a day, all the way down to 52 attempts throughout June and no attempts at all in August or September. Same goes for blacklist redirects (ie. blacklisted hosts being redirected to a customized 404 page saying that they’ve been blacklisted.)
I’m not quite sure what to make of this, because there are a couple of things involved and the decrease started just as I made some big changes to my anti-spam system. The following are some possible factors in the decrease and there may very well be some I’m overlooking.
Are the spammers running some kind of automated learning, so once they receive a 404, they stop trying? That would be weird, because in order to even see the before mentioned 404, they have to make at least 3 attempts at spamming. So automated learning would be indicated by a vast amount of blocked attempts compared to the number of blacklist redirects, which is not the case here - both numbers have decreased heavilly, though the number of blacklist redirects varies from zero to 5-6 a day.
If the spammers are in some way measuring their success-rate, then it must mean that phpCF is working great, because no spam has gotten through in a long time. But this would also be strange, because how would they measure the success-rate? Googling? I think not.
I’ve finally blacklisted each and every spam-bot on the planet! Yay, for me! :-p
Actually, this would explain the small number of blocked attempts compared to the larger amount of blacklist redirects. But still, somehow I don’t believe that this is the reason.
Last, but not least, there may be outside factors causing the decrease (even though I’d like to think that I came up with the “cure for the cancer”). Maybe Google-bombing has gotten harder, or the spammers are getting more cautious - or maybe blog-spamming just isn’t profitable enough…
… and then there is all the stuff I can’t think up right now because it’s 8:46 AM and I haven’t slept yet. If you have any ideas, experiences, thoughts … anything! Please, post a comment or drop me a mail. I’d be more than happy to know what you think.
Yeah, I’m there too… lillesvin@gmail.com - that would be me. I’m looking forward to the release of a Linux-client. :-) If I should say one bad thing about Google, then it’d be that all of their apps are Win-only, so why should I believe them when they say “We look forward to offering support for more operating systems in the future.“? (src)
