Posts filed under 'This blog'
I started getting undeliverable message notices today at about 4:50 PM, coming to various email addresses ending in “@igetsomad.com”. All of the original emails had been sent using a forged FROM: field, and were identical very-obviously-spam messages, which was an ad for a Russian pirated software website.
I setup an SPF record on my DNS server tonight, and I have reported this to godaddy.com, my hosting provider. As of now, I’ve received 119 NDRs (undeliverable notices.) So if 119 messages (so far) couldn’t be delivered, imagine how many of these bogus emails did in fact get delivered to people’s inboxes.
More to come.
January 12th, 2007
Something I wrote a year ago (click here to see it) was the subject of Drew’s Toothpaste For Dinner comic today (click here to see it.)
I would say that great minds think alike, but I don’t use cliches.
April 12th, 2006
7. Even the GoDaddy girl can’t get people to read it.
6. You posted “Someone reply, or I’ll kill myself!” a week ago, and you’re still sitting in front of the computer with a pistol to your head.
5. You go to that site that rates your blog’s value, and they send you a $1,200 bill just for asking.
4. You started a flame-war with yourself since you needed comments.
3. You can actually hear the echo as you type.
2. You’ve had caricatures of Mohammed posted for years, yet you haven’t received a single death threat.
and the Number 1 Sign Nobody Is Reading Your Blog…
1. Even George Bush decides it’s not worthy of eavesdropping.
==> From the funny folks at TopFive. <==
April 7th, 2006
To honor the return of the random Simpsons quote (on the sidebar at right), I have also made a small update to this site: Graphical titles, using the Simpsons font. Very pointless, but kinda fun.
December 10th, 2005
So I’ve done it again. I still have a few things I need to fix, but I’m really happy with the new look.
What do you think?
November 27th, 2005
I’m going to have a new poll every week, on the right side of this page. Why? No real reason, I guess just to see if I could make it work with this site.
Have fun!
October 17th, 2005
New subscription feature!
Continue Reading October 15th, 2005
Comment spam blows. I’ve seen it becoming more and more common on many blogs that I read daily, and it was also slowly increasing in numbers on this site. Back when I was using Blogger to manage this site, there wasn’t much that I could do other than simply delete the offending comments from the post. I understand that Blogger now has some sort of comment spam detecting system, though it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. Either most people aren’t aware of it, or maybe they have to manually enable it somehow, or maybe it just doesn’t work very well.
Since I converted my blog to Wordpress, I have only occasionally had to deal with comment spam. Recently, though, it has increased to the point that is almost unbearable. Wordpress has some basic comment spam detecting features built-in. I recently configured my blog to hold for moderation any comments that contained any links at all. The comments are first delivered to my email address, then I can approve them or delete them. There were several significant problems with this method. One, while I was on vacation recently, there were several legitimate (and very helpful, thanks RM!) comments that were held and didn’t get posted for a few weeks. I can imagine that the comment writers weren’t sure why their comment didn’t immediately show up.
The bigger problem with this system is that many spam comments didn’t actually have a link in the body of the message itself, so they were still posted without being held for approval.
So I had a choice. I could configure my blog to allow comments only from people after they register as a user, but I didn’t want to force people to do that. I know that when I want to leave a simple comment about something on a blog I’ve stumbled upon, if I’m forced to register with the site first, I’ll usually just click away, keeping my comment to myself.
I could moderate each and every comment. This means that I would have to approve every single comment that someone leaves, filtering out all the garbage comments left by spambots. I don’t get a huge number of legitimate comments, but I’ve been getting literally 35+ spam comments each day. I felt that this method was also unaccaptable.
What I chose to do is implement a Captcha system when leaving comments, using the SecureImage plugin. Captcha is a goofy acronym for an even goofier phrase that I’m not going to bother spelling out. What it does is pretty cool, though. When you leave a comment, you’ll be prompted to fill in the usual stuff like your name, email address, etc, as well as verify a random string of characters that is generated on the fly and presented in a graphical format that spambots can’t read. No registration required by you, no moderation required by me, immediate posting of comments.
Try it out now by leaving a comment on this post.
October 5th, 2005
I have a new photo gallery on line. I’m still tweaking it a bit, and getting it to fit with the look of this site. All the pictures from the old photo gallery software are here, though. One of the main reasons I changed to a different photo gallery is to have the ability for anyone to leave comments on each photo.
Click the link at the top left of this site to check it out, and be sure to leave a bunch of comments!
September 30th, 2005
It’s moving day, and I’m just about to take the computer down. We’ll be in the new place today, but we won’t have Internet hooked up until sometime Monday. This is the last post I’ll be able to write until probably Tuesday when things start to begin to slowly seem to maybe consider think about getting back to normal.
September 10th, 2005
We leave Saturday on our big road trip. We’ll be driving about 2100 miles in three days. Beaverton, Oregon to Cabool, Missouri. We’ll be visiting Kathy’s aunt and uncle, and staying with her cousin (their son). Then, another 2100 mile drive back home. It’s gonna be nuts.
I’m actually really looking forward to it. We drive to southern California all the time, generally about once a year. Until recently, all of our immediate family (with the exception of brother Gabe) lived somewhere in the L.A. area. My dad sold his house in Orange County a few years ago (for a very healthy profit) and moved to the Phoenix area. Last summer, we took a long road trip to see his new place there, then continued on to L.A., and finally back home.
Besides that, this is going to be the first long road trip we’ve ever taken, and the first one where we haven’t already seen the same scenery dozens of times before. We’re going to be just like the Griswolds, except I’ll never be nearly as cool as Clark is, and, you know, I’m real. Come to think of it, there are a few other scary parallels there:
- Our minivan is green, like the family truckster (I don’t think the airbags are made from Hefty bags, though).
- I’ve plotted our course on the computer just like Sparky did, except I used Google Earth’s satellite imaging, not some blocky early ’80s Apple II graphics. Plus, Billy didn’t use Pacman to eat the family car.
- We’ll be staying at cheap motels each night, but I swear I won’t be ordering any drinks from the “pool waitress”.
We’ve got the portable DVD player and a bunch of movies, and I’ve got the DC to AC inverter ready to go, so the boys can power their Playstation 2. I never had this kind of entertainment for road trips when I was a kid.
I’m such a geek, I’ve even researched free wi-fi hot spots near each night’s motel, so I can hopefully upload photos and update this site every day.
August 18th, 2005
So as you can probably tell, I made a few changes to the site recently. I’ve set it up so Kathy can post things, I created an email address for her and put a link to it at the top left of the site, and I modified the style sheets so that our posts are different colors. I also reworded a few of the sidebar items to reflect the site’s new plurality (”we” and “we’re” replace “I” and “I’m”, “our” replaces “my”).
Next on the list is to import all of her posts from her old site, but I need to do some testing to make sure that I don’t inadvertantly wipe out all of the existing posts that are already here. I’m also going to make each of our names (under the title of each post) a link, so you can click on it to show only that person’s posts. I might do a few other minor cosmetic things too, like maybe round the corners of the boxes that surround each post.
What do you think so far?
August 16th, 2005
This is Kathy. I have decided to blog on Bill’s site. My old site is not going to be valid. I will have much more to say soon.
August 11th, 2005
So what do you think? WordPress is totally amazing. It’s a bit technical, especially if you want to move from another blogging tool (like Blogger). Also, you must have your own domain name, and the ability to run PHP and a MySql database.
But, when it’s done right, everything can be migrated completely, including all the comments. And, MAN, is it customizable.
WordPress uses what it calls “Themes”, which allow me to easily change the look and feel of the entire site, literally with a single click. Some of the links to old pages may have changed, so I’ll try to address those in the coming days. In the mean time, let me know what you think.
April 30th, 2005
So I’ve been toying with some ideas for a site redesign for a few days, and I finally decided to take the plunge and commit to the change. It was actually a lot easier than I thought. I created really simple buttons (to the left) to replace the text based menu that was there before. The site uses cascading style sheets (CSS), so I was able to just change the one stylesheet file that all the pages refer to for colors, fonts, object placemement, etc. Then I just had to change the code for the Google ads (to the right), and voila!
Let me know what you think. Does it look better? Worse? Same? Also, be sure to let me know if you notice any pages that don’t seem to look right.
April 9th, 2005
At first, it was fun, having what I thought was a fun and original site. I didn’t want to change the world or become rich and famous. I just wanted to have a funny, unique, interesting blog.
But now, everyone has one. My wife has one, my brother has one, his wife has one, even my 14 year old son has one. Well I’m done. I don’t want to try to compete anymore.
Thank you Rebecca Marie, Tabitha, Breanna, and everyone else for reading and leaving comments in the past, but it’s time for me to shut the site down. Maybe I’ll be back with a new blog, but if so, I won’t make myself known, I’ll be incognito.
Arrivederci
-Bill
April 1st, 2005
Here are some recent Google searches that brought visitors to this site. It’s interesting to see the weird combination of search phrases that bring people here.
caddy shack ribs lafayette
“expired pop”
fairytopia invitations
“fry’s ad” oregon
And my all time favorite:
teenage dirtbags bedrooms
March 20th, 2005
Anybody want a Google Gmail account? I have 50 invitations I can send out. Just send me an email (link is on the left), and let me know which email address you want the invitation sent to.
Between work, home and this website, I have more than a dozen different email addresses, but of all the free email sites I use (Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.), Gmail is the best. 1GB of storage, a pretty innovative way to file your messages, and Google’s excellent search engine to sift through it all.
February 24th, 2005
Well, it’s been a while. This is the third (and hopefully final) domain name I’ve used for my personal web site, and I think I like this one the most.
As you can tell, this is a standard blog site, which may seem so last year, but it is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’m going to try to update this much more frequently than the old sites, and with Blogger’s excellent tools, I should be able to do that; in fact, I expect to update it almost daily.
In the meantime, I have imported all of the text and photos from the previous site. I’m still not sure if I will transfer any of the RC truck videos from my first site. I guess I’ll have to see how much time I am able to dedicate to this.
It’s good to be back!
January 17th, 2005
