Blogging

I am so tired of having slow loading times because of other people’s crappy servers that I will spend some time this afternoon copying any images that are supposed to be hosted remotely to my server and host them here, with just the link to the other site, and then remove some of the items that are holding things up at load time. Some of the code I have to keep unfortunately, but it still should help out.

I can keep several of the items such as my blogroll on a separate page and then have them load via a lightbox so that you never leave the page. That should help things out a little bit anyway.

I put together several of the posts for today first thing this morning, and scheduled posting seems to work OK except for the fact that when Movabletype publishes the post it doesn’t bother re-indexing the site and so the post doesn’t appear until I have done another one or someone comments on a previous post. Very weird.

Updated – OK, I just needed to add a cron job in my cpanel to run the periodic tasks. I’ve never done that so it was sort of weird.

Since the actions that I took concerning trackback and comment spam didn’t work, I am using a plugin called Spam Firewall to curb the spam load here. Actually the comments and captchas worked just fine, but I got too many complaints from people.

Renaming the trackback script worked for all of about 24 hours before it was back to business as usual.

I don’t know how well Spam Firewall is going to work with trackbacks and the open trackback alliance, so if there are any problems, please let me know. In theory it should be just fine, I know it does what it is supposed to but I am concerned that it will block legitimate trackbacks as well.

I am also using a plugin called Blog Janitor (how fitting after the last post) to close all comments and track-backs on entries that are over 45 days old. I still get the occasional comment on the Natalee Holloway posts, but that is just not worth the hassle.

Unfortunately I woke up about five o’ clock so I had to do something with my time before everyone else wakes up. I may try to hit the sack again for at least a couple of hours.

One of the reasons that I have been looking at switching to another CMS package is due to all of the comment and trackback spam I get. I average several hundred to over a thousand spam comments each day, and around one trackback every two seconds. It’s really starting to bog things down here.

Rather than that I have implemented captchas (which I hate with a passion) in the comments as well as renamed my comment and trackback scripts. Hopefully that will help a little bit.

The other reason is a bit more stupid and I decided it wasn’t that important after all. I like Gravatars in the comments, but it only works about half the time for 25% of the people. I want to use mybloglog, but there is no plugin for Movabletype. I guess I just need to be patient.

There won’t be a huge amount of posting today. I am going to take a short nap. After that I need to make a trip to the dump as well as get a bit of grocery shopping done to get ready for the weekend.

I am sure that I will be back online later with my poignant (nod your head) commentary later.

I keep hearing more and more about twitter and am starting to notice it on some of the really big sites. I saw where one guy had it on his sidebar, and also inserted into a post and basically said “hey, now you can know when I’m scratching my ass”.

I have tried it twice and just really dislike it. That should be it for me. My choice whether to use it or not but am I missing something here? Does it do something else besides let me text message it and tell you when I’m going potty, or driving to work? Do you really care. I will be more than happy to put it back if everyone wants to know when I pick my nose or whatever. I could even set up Homeseer (my home automation software) to send an SMS message to it so that you know the second I arrive home.

Apparently I just don’t get it.

Technorati : Twitter

When I first saw and heard about twitter back in February I tried it out. Hey, I like bling and gadgets. I didn’t particularly like it. Recently it has apparently become all the rage again. I have been seeing posts about it all over the Internet. ‘five ways to be productive with Twitter’, ‘five uses for twitter in business’, ‘twitter is the best thing next to sliced bread’. Well, maybe not the last one, but the other two are real posts I have read.

I figured maybe they had done something else with it, so I would try it out. Right now it’s on two of my sites and it still sucks just as much as it did the last time I used it. Maybe I just don’t ‘get it’ but it seems pointless to me so it is coming off of the sites after I post this.

Technorati : Twitter

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