I finally got around to making some changes to how I combat comment spam. Now, you simply need to check a box indicating that you are not a malicious robot, and your comment will jump across the internet and straight onto my blog.
This will allow a much greater sense of satisfaction for you, and hopefully a greater sense of frustration for spammers.
I admit to being completely befuddled by telephone extensions on most corporate phone systems. At both my previous job and my new one, the system has been: you dial 5 digits to reach someone internally, or 9 + a regular phone number to call external numbers.
But at my last job, depending on which line you were using on the phone, you had to dial either 5 or 6 digits. I admit that sometimes I just hit 9 and dialed the person’s full phone number, even if they sat two cubes away. I like to think it’s just one of those things I never took the time to learn rather than something I couldn’t fully comprehend.
In other news, for some reason, my return to the blog was accompanied by a tremendous surfeit of new comment spam. All I did was change servers (and the necessary DNS settings) and install a new template. Apparently the spambots noticed the new layout and thought they’d try again. Fortunately, nobody made it past my spam bucket, so there wasn’t any visible pollution. But I may have been overzealous in my deleting, so if you left a comment in the last few days and it never appeared on the post, well… my apologies.
To the four people who read this with any regularity, hello again. It’s been quite a while, in Internet Years, since I posted. The only real reason (besides sheer laziness) for my absence is that I was on a quest for employment. Things weren’t exactly awesome at the old job, and that particular nomenclature should tip you off to the fact that I have a new job. This is not to say that going dark is necessarily a prerequisite for a job search; no, I had my specific reasons this time. Namely, I noticed visitors in my logs from the domains of the precise companies to whom I had sent my resume.
Coincidence? Probably not. And while I’m not deathly afraid someone will stumble upon this happy little place and know my innermost secrets, I do find comfort in controlling the first impression I make, er, myself. I can’t necessarily do that with my real name plastered all over the place and my thoughts spilling down the page.
In summary: Paranoia and Laziness dictate my mien.
A month and a half ago, Heather and I took a weekend vacation to Acapulco with my mom. The photos demonstrate the utter majesty of the view from the hotel where we stayed, but do not accurately tell the whole story. I’ll write more about it later.
I’m off to gather my forms together for my first day at the new job (Monday 3/13) and perhaps relax at the park for a while.
So, a couple things…
I’ve been absent for a while (and locked down my index page). I’ll explain why soon. When I come back, I’ll hopefully have a new design, which is cool, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll tell some stories. Like, how we stayed in the most beautiful cheap hotel I’ve ever seen. Or the trip to Italy we’re taking in May.
You’ll just have to stay tuned…
Soon, the web html-rendered form of this blog will fall silent for an unknown amount of time. If you’re an RSS subscriber, no worries; all you’ll miss out on is commenting (And let’s be fair, not a whole lot of you comment anyway). If you don’t use RSS or you’re not sure what that even means, please leave a comment on this post so that I can tell you what’s going on.
Here’s me, 4 months ago today, predicting that New Orleans will use eminent domain to their benefit in the aftermath of Katrina:
I wonder if any of the governments in New Orleans will take it upon themselves to sieze the flooded homes, since the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Kelo v. New London gives them every legal justification to do so. They could bulldoze everyone’s homes and sell them to condo developers! Thanks, Supreme Court!
Here’s the Washington Post, today, in an article discussing the rebuilding plan in New Orleans:
Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city’s recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt.
Besides experimenting with threaded comments (I know it’s clunky; I’m working on it), a dhtml Flickr badge on my homepage, and a dynamic blogroll in my sidebar, I recently added a simple chunk of PHP that will automatically close comments on any post older than X days. I’m experimenting with a 14-day limit. This should be a good balance of time to where all the discussion can play out, but once the posts really get fully indexed in Google, the spam-bots can’t get to them.
I’m torn over whether this is even necessary, since I’ve never had a single spam message hit my comments. See, I require that everyone’s “first” comment ever be approved by me before it hits the main page. When I approve it, you get a cookie that lets you post all you want without me screening anything. So any comment spam that I get just ends up in this moderation queue anyway. But some days I get 10+ spam comments in the queue, and it’s a little annoying. So, I’m closing commenting on old posts. Rarely do I ever get a comment on anything older than a week or so, so this would seem to be a good idea. And if anyone wants me to re-open comments for a particular post, just say the word and I’ll do it.
Edit: Actually, I forgot that I had already installed hashcash. This should be enough. I guess I do want to encourage comments, even on old posts, so closing all of them might have been a bad idea…
Ha! Ya make one post about something on the web and people think you’re the ultimate authority. Watch as some poor lady makes the quite uncommon mistake of confusing me for a restaurant.
So, I’m an idiot. I had comments enabled, but required commentors to register AND disallowed open registration, meaning the only person who could comment on the blog here would be me. That’s real smart!
Open commenting is now enabled. You’re welcome to register, but it won’t make a difference to me.
Oh, and one more thing. If you post a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, don’t worry. I have to approve your very first comment here, and after that you’re clear to comment all you want. Anti-spam and all…
I have transitioned all of my Public LJ entries and comments to my new blog here at http://blog.garrettvonk.com. It’s a work in progress; I’m not done with the style or the links yet. Livejournal is great, but I already pay for hosting and a domain name, and Wordpress is free and more flexible than LJ. If you link to me in blogrolls and such, please change the link to http://blog.garrettvonk.com
For those of you keeping track, this is the second migration of my blog. I moved from Easyjournal to Livejournal about 3.5 years ago.
LJ Friends:
Just keep 
gvonk on your friends list. Wordpress has a plugin that will continue to sync my posts here with the blog. I’m going to disable comments in the LJ completely, however, and each entry will have a link to the post on my Wordpress blog, where you can then comment as usual. This will probably mean the end of any Friends Only posts I’ve made, but I don’t think I made very many in the first place. I assume Livejournal will let me keep posting even after my paid subscription lapses next week. I forget what free users get since I’ve never been one.
RSS Subscribers:
My feed URL is now: http://blog.garrettvonk.com/?feed=rss2
Easy Bloglines Button:
Please update your subscription.