Web
Comment moderation
I haven’t been receiving email notifications when comments are held for moderation, so I didn’t release new comments for several days until I happened to check the comment moderation queue and discovered them. I think I’ve fixed it now.
Conflict of interest
A news item was submitted to MacMegasite announcing a new release of a product that competes with Computrace. Even though the site has no connection with Absolute Software and doesn’t represent the company or their products, I can’t allow it to be used to promote competing products.
DreamHost just got cooler
I didn’t see any announcement, but I just found out (thanks to MacInTouch) that DreamHost now supports AFP. I can now mount my home directory from the finder instead of using FTP.
Comment spam
MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet just got hit very hard with comment spam, about 50 on each site. Unfortunately there’s no way to mark or delete comments in a batch, so I just went into mysql and deleted all of them. I’m getting really mad and I’ll probably turn posting off on both sites. If this continues, I may even shut down both sites. I just don’t feel like dealing with the scum.
Under attack
WorldBeatPlanet is getting hit hard with comment spam. I just got 16 online poker spams from different IP addresses. After I marked the first few, the spam filter has been recognizing & deleting the rest of them.
Theme mods
I’ve made a few tweaks to my theme, inspired by some of the entries at Alex King’s WordPress 1.5 Theme Competition. Most notably, the page menu is now at the top of the page.
New Comment Spam
MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet both got hit with a new kind of comment spam I haven’t seen before. I only got two of them at MacMegasite, but I got 6 of them at WorldBeatPlanet. The author, subject, and content consist entirely of a string of hex digits, including the URL, which points to an online poker site. There were several different variants, and the sites were hit with two identical copies of each varient, both on the same story. The two copies both come from different IP addresses, which seem to be open proxies. When I checked the access logs at MacMegasite, I saw there were many failed attempts for the two spams they managed to post.
Gmail goes public
It looks like Gmail is one step closer to going public. Random visitors to Google are being invited to sign up. I still have 50 invitations left, which I can’t even give away 🙂
Amazon Items
I’ve added the Amazon Items module, which I’ve been experimenting with on my test site, to Macmegasite & WorldBeatPlanet. Related items from Amazon can now be added to any story. A good example can be seen here.