Posts about this blog, or blogs in general — i.e. meta-posts. I’ll try not to do this very often.
I have a widget on my browser’s home page that shows me what’s going on on several other pages, and Geek Drivel is one of them. Today when I sat down at the computer, I discovered that it apparently didn’t have any posts whatsoever. As I’d had close to two thousand posts the last time …
On the afternoon of April 22nd, 2007, five years ago today, I wrote my first blog post. This will be my 1,663rd, for an average of a post roughly every 26 hours and 20 minutes. I’m not aware of an easy way to count the number of words in all of them, but I suspect …
That’s right: more than one out of every two hits on this blog recently are spam attempts. I say that because that was the percentage of the last 1,600 or so hits that were on a single post with very little content… not coincidentally, the exact same post that spammers have been pounding on without …
(If you’re reading this, then you’re on the new site. Congratulations. 😉 ) After hosting my websites with Total Choice Hosting (TCH from here on) for more than eight years, I’ve been forced to move them. The issue: lost e-mails. A few months ago, a friend of mine called to ask if I’d gotten his …
For some reason, when Geek Drivel’s hosting company upgraded PHP this morning, the server stopped handling PHP files at all. Any time I tried to go to a page on the blog, the server tried to send it to me as a download instead. Removing the “user defined MIME type” change that the company added …
I think the spammer registration problem may be dealt with, at least for the moment. Since I added the new layers of defenses, only one spammer account has gotten through the first layer of registration (which checks its information against multiple online databases of known spammers). It failed the e-mail confirmation step and was auto-deleted …
I got tired of the nearly one thousand spambot “users” on this blog and mass-deleted any account that had never posted a non-spam comment and had no optional user information. I also added a confirmation-link requirement, and auto-removal of any account that doesn’t complete the confirmation within seven days. Apologies to any human users who …
…so busy, in fact, that I’ve decided to take a blogging hiatus. I’ve written a post a day for nearly two years straight, missing only a handful of days. I like that pace, and I plan to resume it, but not until I’ve got the bulk of Project M finished. That may be a few …
Some spammer’s automated spam-bots have targeted Geek Drivel over the past few weeks, for reasons unknown. Well, okay, the surface reasons are obvious — but since they haven’t managed to get a single spam published, despite weeks of effort and hundreds of attempts per day, you’d think the spammer would notice and turn them to …
I’ve installed a new theme (F2, the successor to the Fluid Blue theme that I’ve been using for a while now), and made a child theme from it so I could include my icon. Let me know if you see any problems with it.