Spam comments to my site have reached ridiculous levels over the last few weeks; in the last two weeks there were over 35,000 messages awaiting moderation and another 10,000 or so marked as spam.
I don’t have the ability to moderate that kind of volume, so I’ve taken a couple of steps to deal with it.
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I mentioned last week that I wanted to work on “better bookmarking” as my next coding project, basing my approach off of my own thoughts and recent Mozilla research. Now I want to examine what that project might be like.
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I wrote a JavaScript utility that lets you create a rectangle on a web page by dragging your mouse cursor, and then toggles the state of all checkboxes under the cursor. If you’ve ever had to deal with forms that have lots and lots of checkboxes, you’ll know why I decided such a thing was necessary.
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Since my primary server died in February this year, I’ve been running tadhg.com on a cheap virtual machine. That’s worked fine, but the original server came back to life quite some time ago, and today I finally completed the process of moving tadhg.com back to it. The move is now complete, and hopefully you’re not seeing anything unexpected[1]. This post is about what’s involved in that move and what I’ve tried to improve along the way.
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A discussion of common and custom blog features, and candidate applications that might provide them.
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I often come across unwieldy select elements, and it’d be awesome if every site used Chosen to make them more usable. In fact, I should probably look into using GreaseMonkey to make Chosen ubiquitous for me.
This is an excellent post/rant about Facebook from Jason Scott; one of the key aspects of being a proprietary walled garden is that it’s very easy to be an information black hole, with the attendant ill effects on historical archiving.
Through the seven weeks of the CrossFit Open, plus an additional week or so to allow for the system to settle on a reliable ranking for me, I’ve been focused on my own performance and hitting my goals. But it was impossible not to be very aware of the significant mess that CrossFit HQ made of the event, and the problems in the community this exposed.
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I’ve been struggling all week with a JavaScript issue that’s either caused or uncovered by Internet Explorer 9, and while this video has nothing to say on that front, it’s still fascinating to me:
I upgraded this blog today, the first time I’ve done that in over a year. Everything looks okay.
I’ve become slightly less paranoid about it; I still back everything up first, but I no longer preview the upgrade in my development environment, instead being prepared to restore from backups if something goes wrong. This might not be wise, but I’ve been lulled by the smooth upgrades the past few times.
I received a kind of monetization offer for this blog today, one that I hadn’t encountered before: a service that would pay me to put up articles that they would provide. The kicker would be the links at the bottom of these articles (no porn or gambling, they assured).
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I hate giving up on projects. Especially projects that I’ve spent a lot of time on, that have had some success, and that have come close to being finished without making it the final, crucial steps. I really wanted to get a new version of sfmagic.org written, in Python, with good web development practices from top to bottom, but it’s far past time to let that go.
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I’ve recently been doing some online banking reorganization, and have realized just how inconvenient a lot of the services are. The main issue is that they’re all different services, where I want centralization.
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I once again had eight goals for 2010, and it’s not too likely that any more of them will be accomplished before the end of the year.
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The rate of spam comments I’ve been receiving has gone utterly nuts recently, and as a result I’ve decided to try out adding reCAPTCHA to the comment forms on the site. I apologize for this, because I know it makes adding comments a pain and I’d prefer to make it as easy as possible to add them, but the wave of incredibly annoying spam comments is just too much to deal with right now. Please let me know if you have any serious problems with it.
Yes, clearly my progress (or lack thereof) needs quarterly reports. And here’s the first one for this year.
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Rather widespread, apparently. When a ReadWriteWeb article on Facebook’s collaboration with AOL became a highly-ranked Google search result for “facebook login”, hundreds of Facebook users descended on that article and used the Facebook Connect button on that screen—which ReadWriteWeb provides so that people can leave comments using their Facebook account—and then became extremely confused, not understanding why they weren’t being brought to their usual Facebook home screen.
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I’ve been a big fan of jQuery more or less since it came out, and I’m happy to see the launch of The jQuery Project. I’ve used jQueryUI a couple of times and find it fairly useful; I haven’t tried Sizzle yet but it looks great for situations where you’re really concerned about keeping file sizes low but need decent CSS selector support; and I wish QUnit had been around when I was writing a lot of client-side code.
I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.9 today, and it appeared to go entirely smoothly. Please let me know if you notice any breakage.
Happy New Year!
Once again, my goals for the coming year.
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I had eight goals for 2009, and all of them that I’m going to get done I’ve already completed. Time to review.
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Earlier this evening Gever suggested a service dedicated to shortening URLs that had geolocation data in them. My immediate responses were that a) this was a great idea, and b) that I wanted the shortened URLs to still be human-readable in some sense—specifically, I wanted a person to be able to look at two URLs returned by this service and have some idea of how close to each other they were.
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