Anti-Spam

Over the week we were away, d4d™ got hit by a bundle of comment spam. As in about 300 comments-worth of spam. It’s a pain in the arse, but it all got deleted on Saturday night.

Anyway, I did some research, and it turns out that the anti-spam tool I was using (Kitten’s “Spaminator”) was broken by WP 1.5 – it had worked in 1.5 beta, but was deeply duff in the full 1.5. Which, in fairness, explained quite a lot. So today I’ve done a bit of a search using the (thanks Gordon) nice new WordPress codex to find new anti-spam stuff.

So now I’m running Spam Karma v2. I had problems with the previous version of Spam Karma, but I thought I’d have a bash with the new, improved version. Also, it’s got an extra plug-in that means I should be able to resurrect any comments that SK has decided were spam even when they weren’t really. However, if your comments don’t appear, drop me a line and I’ll see if I can sort something out.

Oh, and I had to upgrade my installation of WP from 1.5 to 1.5.1 to fix some bugs and so on. Now, Gordon’s been on at me to say that now all the codex etc. is in place, the documentation is better etc., and that I should stop sniping about it. Well, I would, but during the upgrade my WP installation still got confused and went tits-up for about ten minutes. So no, it’s not perfect yet. Luckily this time I was paranoid, and backed up everything before doing owt, so I could resurrect files that WP had decided to “upgrade” to a version that didn’t work with my own intricate noodlings.

I won’t say that WP is necessarily all to blame, because I’ve done a fair amount of work under the hood of d4d™ which WP doesn’t really know about, so it tries to over-write it. But it still bugs me that a “simple” upgrade can then lead on to fifteen extra minutes of fixing the stuff the upgrade has broken…

WP Delays

As I’ll be away next week, I’ve been planning on doing some delayed posts. However, over the last few days I’ve noticed that WP seems to get hung up on these, and they stay at “waiting to be published” once they get to one minute before publishing.

Has anyone else noticed this?

And is there a fix for it?

Code – An Explanation

OK, it’s not really all that difficult…

1 <?php
2 if (substr($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],0,20) == “http://images.google”) {
3 header(‘Location: http://www.dummies-for-destruction.co.uk/404.htm’);
4 } else {
5
6 }
7 ?>

This entire lot just basically says “if the first 20 characters of the HTTP referrer are http://images.google then go to a non-existent page, otherwise do sod all” – and that’s all that’s needed.

The best thing is that this works for all Google’s Images searches, regardless of source country. Sounds good to me.

Code

Gordon was right, I really should publish the code for blocking referrers from Google Images.

At the absolute top of the code, add this :

<?php
if (substr($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],0,20) == “http://images.google”) {
header(‘Location: http://www.dummies-for-destruction.co.uk/404.htm’);
} else {

}
?>

It really is that simple.

An explanation will be added when I’ve got time!

Frustration – Finalé

Well, according to my nedstat page of referrers the script I put in place yesterday to block google’s image search is working nicely, and the count of referrals from that page is coming down slowly. It should be completely off the list by tomorrow, with luck.

I’m still debating whether I do a nice page saying “you’re looking at this from Google, which I’ve blocked. Now fuck off” or just to leave it as a 404 “Page not found”. The 404 error takes up a whole load less bandwidth, that’s for sure. So hmm, not certain yet.

As it is, I’m almost certainly going to get caned a bit on bandwidth again this month, as I’m already at 2Gb of my allocated 3Gb, so the odds are that I’ll go over. After all, there’s still three weeks of the month to go yet. I’m going to keep an eye on what else is referring to d4d™ and see if there’s anything else that needs blocking still. Now I’m happy with how the script is working (oh, and the reason it wasn’t working was because PHP spells referrer differently to how it should be spelt, and I tend to hand-write my code rather than using a muppets guide… Arsenuggets.) I can block out some other things if they’re pissing me off with how much bandwidth they’re hogging. But I think that removing Google’s image search is going to be the biggest saver going.

UPDATED : Yay, it’s now all gone from the referrers. To coin a phrase, “I love it when a plan comes together”.

Frustration – Fixed

Ha! Got it sorted.

Now, I could just send anything from Google Images to a simple “Page not found” error, or I could do a nice explanatory page. What do you think I should go for?

Oh, and if anyone else is interested in blocking Google Images totally, let me know. So long as you’re comfortable adding in a bit of PHP code to your page (I’m not sure how well it would work in (for example) blogger pages yet) then email me and I’ll see what I can do.

Frustration

Every so often, I get annoyed with PHP because somewhere along the line it’s not doing what I want.

Currently I’m working on barring a certain google image search which is screwing me over bandwidth-wise, and I’m getting about 30-40 hits per day from it. It’s all coming via google itself, rather than being a link out – the page first displays the “image” (which was never actually on the site, I just linked to it) and then in a frameset shows “where the image is on the original page”. At which point it downloads my full archive page. Which is – needless to say – bloody big.

So I’m trying to find a way to stop it from doing so, and at the moment I’m really not succeeding. In theory it should be working, but it’s not doing so.

So I’m pissed off.

CSS – minor bits

For a while now (OK, since the redesign) the comments box has been playing silly fuckers for people using IE. Basically, the comments box was too wide, and slipped under the column on the right, which meant people couldn’t see what they were typing in that section. Kind of unhelpful.

I think I’ve now fixed the problem. But I’d appreciate any feedback from anyone who still uses the piece of crap known as IE to let me know if the problem still exists.

Well, really to know on anything significant if there’s problems in their particular browser.

CSS Reboot

Like Pix, I’ve been thinking of getting involved in the CSS Reboot , which basically involves redesigning the entire site to a CSS implementation.

Then I thought “But I’ve got sod all time anyway, I redid a lot of this to CSS back at the end of ’04, and I haven’t completed changing the old pages here yet, let alone going through and re-doing it all again.”

So I’m afraid that come May 1st there won’t be a pretty new redesign here on d4d. I just ran out of time/ inclination/ inspiration.

Sorry about that.

Bandwidth – Yet again

Well, reducing the number of posts on the front page and so on really didn’t work. So I’ve gone for the next part of the plan.

One of my huge referrers every day is a Google images search for a link I did back in April 2003. For some reason I get about 15 referrers per day . So I’ve checked into it, and removed the link through Google.

With luck that should kick in today, and my bandwidth for May won’t be quite as horrific as it has been for April.

Bandwidth Arse

Fucketty Bugger.

I thought a while back that I’d reduced the number of posts on the front page, in a bid to chop down the bandwidth a bit. Well, fucking oops, I’d forgotten that I’d installed the Custom Posts Per Page plug-in, which meant it was over-riding the change I’d made in the options. Arsenuggets.

Anyway, I’ve changed that now – hopefully I’ll see an effect on next month’s bandwidth.

Downage

Apologies to anyone who had problems finding d4d™ this morning. According to 34sp’s status page something major went “fzzzt” and knackered lots of network connections within the host.

Anyway, all should be back to being well now.

Bandwidth

I waffled on a bit earlier in the month about the joys of bandwidth, and how my useage on d4d™ had suddenly shot up – which I then realised was primarily due to installing WordPress, as now everything goes through the site, rather than Blogger’s remote access joys.

During March, I ended up going just under 1Gb over my bandwidth limit. So that’ll cost me about £1.50. No great hassle, really.

Anyway, observant readers will have noticed that the other thing I’ve done is halved the number of posts on the front page of d4d™. Instead of 20 posts visible, there’s now “only” ten. The reason I’d had so many was because I couldn’t get the archives to display everything, but since installing the “Custom Posts per Page” WordPress plugin, that seems to have been fixed. So, back to a sane number of posts on the front page, and we’ll just have to see what that does for the bandwidth issues.

Reorganising

I’m not going to do it with most of the site, but thanks to the joys of CSS positioning etc., I’ve now made d4d™ into a “content first” page-load.

What this means – if you’re interested – is that rather than the standard way of loading the page in order (i.e. title first, then (in this case) the colour-switcher, then navigation, then all the content, it now loads in the order content, navigation, colour-switcher, title.

Having looked at that order, I may have to do a bit more twatting about – but that’s for later.

Anyway – this change means absolutely bollock all for most of the time. However, when you look at the site through a mobile phone, or a non-standard browser, it means you get to see the important stuff first. Always a good thing.

Mobile d4d™

I can’t deny that this post is utterly sad and geeky, but I’m still obscurely pleased with this. While out at a meeting today, I was able to link in to d4d™ through my mobile and read through to see if anyone had added new comments to anything.

I’ve realised that I need to have a look at what I can do with a CSS sheet for purely mobile use, so that it gets rid of things like the style switcher etc., but for now I’m just ridiculously chuffed that the entire thing worked as advertised. I suppose I’d be less impressed if I had a super-geeky phone or whatever, but it’s just a standard Nokia 7250i.

Twonk

Over the last couple of months, my bandwidth useage has shot through the roof here at d4d™. So much so that I’m nearly at the point of having to pay for some of it. And it’s only just occurred to me why that’s happened.

The smart amongst you will already be saying “it’s because you’ve installed WordPress, you twunt“. And you’d be right. When I was posting through Blogger, all the admin stuff, editing, changing sections etc. was done through Blogger, and thus didn’t affect the bandwidth allocation of d4d™. Now though it’s all contained within the site, and it all comes out through that bandwidth allocation.

It’s no great problem, just something I hadn’t thought of, or realised.

Twunt.

Book List

As yet it’s not comprehensive (mainly because I’m having problems remembering some of the stuff I’ve read this year – Alzheimers is slowly kicking in) but the book list I detailed yesterday is now up and running.

I’m still going to twadge about with the idea a lot more, I’m sure – but it’s a start, and a project in progress. And yes, the database worked fine first time. God I’m sad.

Inspiration

It’s weird where inspiration strikes. I know I’ve been reading Karen’s reviews on Uborka.nu regularly, but this morning I woke up and had the database schema etc. for my own similar system all mapped out in my head. That’s really sad, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’ve been working on it today, and while I know I’m going to expand on the functionality in it later on in the week/month/year (depends when I get round to it) but the ability is there now. I just can’t be arsed to code it all at once. Pathetic, eh?

It’s not quite ready to be added to the navigation – but it’s going to happen in the next day or so for sure. Some tweaking (and, if I’m honest, some adding of data into the database first of all!) is still needed, as is a little bit of testing.

But why on earth did I wake up this morning with it just there in my head?

Linkage

While I know I edited my .htaccess file so that any requests for random.html would get redirected to /random/index.php, I’m still quite surprised by how few people have changed their links from .html to the .php link.

So, in the aim of sorting out some of them, can I just point out that the address for this page is now

https://www.dummies-for-destruction.co.uk/random/index.php

Links can change accordingly. It’s just that if one day I screw up my .htaccess file or whatever, I’d hate to lose everyone overnight…

Comments

Well, following on from problems where once a comment has been posted, the entire page reloads in the comments pop-up, I’ve now stopped using pop-ups for the moment.

Of course, non-pop-up comments have their own pain-in-the-arse foibles, but I’ll see what I can do about those. In the meantime, I think this solution is possibly easier. We’ll see – and let me know what you think, and which method you prefer.

Thanks.

2,400

To reflect that this is the 2,400th post listed on WordPress for d4d™, I’ve done what I promised,and written the title switcher so it pulls out a random title from a database now.

It was even less difficult than I thought (with the exception of whenI made a mistake that simply proved that sometimes I can’t write code) and seems to work nicely. I’ll see how it goes as I add more items to the database.

Title Switcher – Revisited

Well, I liked the title-switcher working and changing each day – that was kind of fun. However, I’ve decided I’m going to go one stage further and go for a random title line each time the page is reloaded. Yes, I’m bored – what on earth gave it away?

The changes may not take place today – but then again, it’s equally likely that they will. We’ll see.

Additional Technical

I’m actually wondering at the moment whether I should come up with some fixes on d4d™’s styling within wordpress, and build my own template. Currently the hack I’m using to get round the templating issue is fine, but it’s leading to problems in other areas.

The archives thing is still being a twat, and I’ve no idea why. And Quelle surprise the WordPress support forums are still as helpful as a kick in the conkers. Also on the comments pop-up, I’ve got something wrong where once a comment has been posted, it tries to reload the entire d4d™ page into the comments box. Pain in the ass.

There’s one or two other little bits that annoy too, so I’ll possibly work on splitting down the bits of d4d™ into that templating system that WP foisted on to version 1.5. Goody, that’ll be fun.

co-proxamol 2

Hey, scary – after last week’s post about Co-proxamol (or coproxamol if you prefer) I’m currently number 2 in google.co.uk for ‘co-proxamol’. I must still be doing something right after all…

Title Switcher

Since writing the little piece of code the other day for it, I’m pleased to see that the title switcher seems to be working fine. I know, it wasn’t complicated to do, and really it was only about ten or fifteen minutes to write it, test it, and make sure all was well. It’s nowt fancy, it’s not going off a database of title tags at random, or anything particularly funky like that (although hmmm, maybe for version 2…) but still, I always like seeing a bit of code that works properly first time…

Title-Bars

In a fit of boredom, and in a similar vein to the changing of the top image on d4d™ according to certain important days, I’ve now also bunged in a little bit of code to change the D4D title (at the top of the window) every day.

It’s nothing overly special, and just changes it once a day, but what the hell, it was a couple of minutes work. PHP makes things like that really really easy.

Makes mental note of needing to get out more.

Possibility of Downtime

Just a quick notice – d4d™ may be inaccessible between 9 and 10am today, as 34sp are doing some behind-the-scenes server-type work.

Twunting About

Well, I’ve fixed a couple of problems that had been pointed out to me – most of which I knew about anyway, although the problem with the green stylesheet was a new one on me. Still, that’s fixed, as is the problem in the comments boxes where the comment text box overflowed loads.

The problem with the archives is a right fucker. I’ll figure it out, I know, but for now, well, I can’t be arsed. It’s a job for sometime over the weekend. Or next week at work, when I get sick of figuring out helpful error messages like “Exception occurred”. Light relief, and all that guff.

For now though, I’m off to watch some of the shite TV that TiVo (or Herself) have decided I should watch.

Header Graphics

Well, I’ve finally got the date switcher working on the header graphic, as yesterday showed. It’s actually a dead easy bit of code, I’d just never got round to it.

So anyway – what other dates should I change the header graphic? Obviously d4d™’s birthday is on the list (or will be when I make the actual graphic, but hey, I’ve got ’til August) as is World AIDS Day (ditto).

But what others should be on the list?

Fixed

Well, turns out the fix was simple. So why wasn’t it documented in the update process? *shrug*

Anyway, if you’re in the same position of suddenly being thrown into the shit by WordPress Templates, what you need to do is this :

In your index.php file (i.e. the file your blog runs from) right at the top where it says

require(‘./weblog/wp-blog-header.php’);

add in

$wp_template_redirect = false;

so that it looks like this :

$wp_template_redirect = false;
require(‘./weblog/wp-blog-header.php’);

That’ll fix it for the moment. Well, until WP decides that’s shonky, and well, why would anyone NOT want a WP template?

Thematic

OK, having done a fair bit of research, I think I’ve found a few ways to get the theme sorted and/or restore d4d to its former glory.

Because of the way the style switcher works/worked, I think it’s more likely to need a retrograde step instead of a progressive one. But it’s still a pain in the arse that it needs doing at all.

As Gordon points out in the comments to the post below, yes, WP’s Development Blog kind of mentions themes. Back in December. And that’s fair enough. However, what’s not fair enough is that the upgrade instructions don’t mention them at all, nor how much they’re likely to really fuck up the blog’s appearance ’til you figure it out or think “Oh fuck it, I’ll stick with that theme for now“, which is what I did.

Now, without blowing my own trumpet too much, I know what I’m doing when it comes to websites, PHP, databases, and the like. But if Joe Public were to try upgrading WP the way I did, he/she’d be right up shit creek, with no hints or pointers towards a clue at all.

And that’s not the way to do business, or to keep users.

Tossers

I really can’t explain how furious I am with WordPress right now. The upgrade instructions simply say

Upgrading
Before you upgrade anything, make sure you have backup copies of any files you may have modified such as index.php.
Upgrading from any previous WordPress to 1.5:

1. Upload the new files, and be careful not to overwrite anything important
2. Point your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php
3. You wanted more, perhaps? That’s it!

And that’s fucking untrue. Because of the way they now do it, the “themes” seem to have been split off into a seperate section, you have to split up the old index.php file into all these new pieces, and then figure out how the stupid bastards have put it all together. Sounds easy? Trust me, it isn’t.

Not only do you have to do that, you have to figure out just how they’ve coded the themes, and then work out how to register your own. Right now I want to find a WP developer, and rip their bastard throat out.

To coin a phrase, thanks a fucking bundle, WordPress, you utter utter cunts.

Anti Spam – the Saga Continues

I’ve now installed a different anti-spam plug-in. We’ll see how this one goes. If anyone feels that their comments have gone astray, or that there’s a problem with how it’s working, let me know by email, sending it to lyle2 at the domain name. ( i.e. @dummies-for-destruction.co.uk ). Cheers.

Anti-Spam fuckup

Well, Spam-Karma was an interesting experiment, but ultimately flawed. Possibly because I’m still “only” on WP1.2 instead of the nightly 1.5 and so on, I’ve discovered that once SK had decided a comment was Spam, there appears to be no way to get it back. And frankly, that’s shite.

My apologies to Anni and Gordon (and at least one other contributor) whose comments were nicked by SK and shoved into some weird ether database. If I can recover the comments then I will, but for now, ’til I figure out what the fuck it’s doing, SK has been killed off.

It’s a pain, because it was doing a nice job on the other stuff…

Comment Spam

Following on from attacks over the last couple of weeks, I’ve got round to installing Spam Karma to see how we do. Frankly, if it even halves the amount of shit littering d4d™’s comments, I’ll be happy.

Supposedly, WP1.4 or 1.5 will have a lot more anti-spammer stuff in it out of the box, but well, we’ll see.

Corners

A couple of days ago I was whittling on about rounded corners when you view this site in Firefox, and as Caitlin rightly pointed out, there were a whole lot less rounded corners than I thought there were. Ooops.

Anyway, I’ve found the problem, and will be fixing that too over the next few days. The blue colourscheme already has them, if you’re interested.

Moving Over

Not content with moving house (and yes, that’s still being finalised this weekend. Can’t wait) I’m also slowly moving over pages to their new stylesheet and .php extension. It’s a slow process – mainly because I forgot I’d done some already and that they were on the laptop.

Those pages got moved over yesterday, and the navigation got changed to send you to the .php page instead of the .html. All the base pages linked to in the navigation are now using the new style – and all use the stylesheet as selected here in d4d™

I’ll move over the other pages as and when I get round to it. But it’ll be sooner rather than later, I’m sure.

UPDATED : Well, the stylesheet holds on all browsers except IE. No idea why, but I’ll look into it tonight.

UPDATED AGAIN : Ah, it now works on IE too. What I’d done was fuck up how the cookie that holds the colour selection works. Buggery. Anyway, you may now have to re-select your preferred colour-scheme on this page, and it’ll then be sorted on the new pages too. Sorry about that.

Hacks

I have actually found a way to write posts for d4d™ while at work. The log-in problems with WordPress still exist, which is an utter cunt and no-one seems to be able to explain why it’s happening at all. Oh, and yes, the support forums are utterly abysmal.

Anyway, I realised that I can actually add in posts by the simple move of writing them directly into the database. I know my way round what WordPress does, and how it holds the data, so why not? And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

It’s not an elegant way of doing things – given the choice I’d much rather be doing it through WP’s front-end, just in case things go horribly wrong – but for now it’ll do as an alternative. Maybe that’ll change when WP releases a fix. But ’til then well, what the hell, if there’s stuff I want to write about during the day then I’ll do it this way.

Geeky, but true.

Validation

At long flaming last, the XHTML code for d4d™ now validates. It’s taken effing ages to get round to sorting, but it’s now done.

I could do the CSS too – but there’s a couple of things I like in it (such as the rounded corners on borders when viewed in Mozilla/ Firefox) that don’t validate. So bollocks. I could get ultra-picky, but frankly I can’t be arsed. Life’s too short.

Adding on Work

You know, sometimes I wonder about my own sanity. The documentation project I wrote about yesterday has – well, it’s changed. Originally I was going to be building up a site-map for each site the company does, documenting how it all worked, and making it understandable for all.

I’m still going to be doing that.

However, I’m now doing the entire thing in its own database, looking at how to map stuff back out of the database, and generally making it into a far more useable tool, but increasing my initial workload by about 500%.

Smart move or what?

Broadband’s Back

In other news, now that the main PC has moved homes to be back with me, we’re now sorted for broadband etc. Well, technically speaking it’s semi-broadband, a 300Kbps service, but for what we need, that’ll do fine.

I find that I’m less and less interested in downloading music and films etc. – the 300Kbps will be purely for data, email, web-browsing and the like, and quite honestly the “slower” speed will do just fine for that kind of thing.

Now I’m off to sort out new email accounts, new mail server names and the like. You can tell I’m not a pure techie by the fact I’m not actually running my own mail server.

Oh, and next step is to put it all back to going through the router/firewall box. That’ll be fun, but it’s a job for the morning. In the meantime, it’s all getting turned off again. Can’t think why…

Under Attack

WordPress has recently been under attack by a worm. For more information about it, look here. In the meantime, if you are running WordPress, add the following code at the top of your index.php page, just after the < ?php line.

if (strpos($REQUEST_URI, 'visualcoders.net') > 0) {
exit;
};
if (strpos($HTTP_USER_AGENT, 'wp-trivial') > 0) {
exit;
};
if (strpos($HTTP_REFERER, 'myhost.gb.com') > 0) {
exit;
};
if (strpos($HTTP_REFERER, 'mall.uk.net') > 0) {h
exit;
};

Apparently, it stops the attacks dead. Sounds good to me.

Upgrading

In general, I must say I’ve been pretty impressed with how WordPress works. The log-in thing is a pain in the arse, and still no-one seems to have figured out what’s going wrong with it. Still, once I’m sorted today, I’ll simply sort out new admin passwords for the two home PCs, and then leave any other hassles with it ’til the new year.

Over the festering season™ I’m probably going to do some work on getting some more of the d4d™ sections into the new stylesheet. Now, should I have the colour-switcher section on every page? Or should I just leave the others to get the information out of the cookie from the blog page? That little lot likely won’t be uploaded until either sometime between Christmas and New Year, or alternatively in early January. We’ll see.

I’ve been pleased with the way the colour-switcher works too – it was one of those things I knew I wanted to do, and I figured it all out myself. In fact I think the only time I needed the reference books at all was in how to write the cookie to the browser, which was something I’d never done in PHP anyway. But I do love the things that challenge me, and getting the idea and writing the solution was definitely a high-point.

In fact, WordPress is kind of cool on that score – I like the fact that if something annoys me, I can write/edit one of the files, and get it to do things how I want them done. But sometimes it’s a complete pain in the arse, and things that should be obvious somehow aren’t.

One example is the sweary/non-sweary filter. I know how it should work, but it’s not quite there yet, because of the way WP handles things. Again, I’m probably going to spend some time geeking around when I get the chance, and see what I can figure out. And yes, that does mean I’ll have a PHP book with me over Christmas. Pathetic, isn’t it?

In general though I’ve been pretty pleased with the way it’s all worked out so far. We’ll see how I feel about it after a few more weeks.

WordPress Problems

There’s one thing where I’m currently getting really pissed off with WordPress. The login section seems to be – frankly – utterly fucked.

Currently, ’til I get something figured out and/or fixed, I’m having to reinstall it every day, so that it gets a new admin log-on. That means that I’m needing to backup the database, delete it, and start from scratch before installing the DB again. The WP forums have been – frankly – fuck all use, despite posting the problem, and keeping on following up with new stuff I’m figuring out.

I’m almost at a point where I’m considering going back to Blogger ’til WP is more sorted.

Does anyone else have this problem with WordPress?

Still To Do – WordPress Migration

1. move other sections to new CSS styling and PHP
2. figure out some of the font issues (Firefox, for example, seems to have some issues)
3. sort out sweary/non-sweary styling
4. put some of the other stuff back into the right-hand side-bar
5. redesign that “navigation image” – it’s shit, but it’ll do for now
6. sort out a script for putting in the titles on posts that don’t have ’em
7. upgrade to 1.2.2 from 1.2.1 – please god it’s painless (it was!)

Still Chuffed

Bloody IE.

I thought I’d got the column problem sorted out, with the menu and links not over-writing the other stuff. And I had, in everything except I-fucking-E.

Rethink is needed. In the meantime, I think I’m going to turn off the side-bar. It’s more hassle than it’s worth.

UPDATED : Hmm, interesting. I think I’ve now fixed all the spacing problems cross-browser (including fucking IE). How did I do it? By letting the browser work out more stuff instead of using defined widths for a couple of the columns.

Now I just need to sort out this letter-spacing issue. (and probably loads of other things too, I know)

The Move

Well, on some things I have to say that WordPress is an utter, utter bastard. I’ll get there, I’m sure – and in general it’s a nice bit of kit, but it does have certain aspects that are utterly bastardish.

• only using index.php – I’ve blethered about this already, but it’s still a pain in the arse.
• Templating – I’m going to have some problems with the sweary/non-sweary idea because of the way it does some things. Thought is needed.
• Log-in problems – I’ve now had to rebuild four times because the changing of log-in passwords is – shall we say – volatile. I’m hoping that the upgrade to 1.2.2 will iron out some of that.
• This may be just me, but it seems to be a lot slower than the Blogger-driven system. Although, in fairness, the “upload” takes a shedload less time

I’m sure there will be other things as well, but for now, that’ll do.

Comments and Search Engines – My Response

Dear xxx,

If I can be of any further assistance, or provide any more information regarding NTL's Search filters etc., please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Sincerely [etc.]

Comments and Search Engines

I got a comment today that raised my eyebrows a bit.

Having read just a small portion of your literature, what the f*** are you doing placing this website with those that advertise childrens toys. I am not at all adverse to bad language, I use it myself, but not in front of my son who has just learnt to read, and was looking on the net to decide what he would like for xmas!!!! Thank god he is supervised. Be a little more responsible and who knows, you might get a larger following???? Amusing you are! Responsible you are not. When you’ve moved your site let me know ‘cos I’d love to visit it, just not when my son is around!!!!!!!!!!!!

The commenter left his email address too, but I’m not going to add that in

Now, OK, I know I’ve been abusive of late about the POS masquerading as Toymaster’s site, but “placing this website with those that advertise children’s toys“? Funny, thought I. A quick check in Nedstat showed that I’d been linked to by NTLWorld’s search engine if you do the search for that brand of toy shops. So no, I hadn’t intentionally associated myself with it.

I did a bit more checking – NTLWorld has a “search filter” you can set to None, Medium (explicit images only will be blocked), or High (explicit words and images will be blocked) – even on “High” the d4d™ result comes up, which is – frankly – a piece of utterly naff coding on the part of NTLWorld.

Now, I could change the way I write – but why should I temper my phrasing simply because NTL can’t write code worth a toss? However, it’s definitely time to start seriously looking at the new template and a couple of the ideas within it. For now though, I’m going to write an email to this commenter explaining why it came up, and that the link wasn’t my choice, along with suggesting a complaint to NTL about why their search filters don’t work (oh, and by the way, why they only work at all in IE, try swapping it in Opera and the thing doesn’t work at all).

I’ll post up the emails, and any responses, as and when they happen.

Mambo

Over the last 24 hours I’ve been playing with Mambo, a PHP content management system. Not here, but on one of my other sites. It’s on Open Source bit of kit, which is always a bit of a minefield when it comes to things like documentation, and/or “why is this bloody thing not working?”

Anyway, it’s taken three attempts to get it working, but it’s finally there. Who knows, if it works OK, it may end up being the back end for d4d™. Don’t hold your breath though. Currently I’m still erring on the side of “sack of shite”