Been busy lately so I haven’t logged into the site for awhile… I logged in today and there were 468 comments all of which are spam. Thats in about 4 days… my site appears to be popular with spammers.
Category Archives: Stuff.za.net
Eish! She’s broken…
I was playing around with permissions on some folder and managed to break stuff.za.net. Of course I didn’t notice it because I’ve been neglecting this site the last few days as I’ve been busy with other stuff.
I think everything is back to normal, but I’m not entirely sure, a few things may still be out of whack… I am planning on upgrading to the new release of WordPress some time over the next few days and when I do that I’ll make sure everything is working.
Please let me know if you find anything that looks broken.
Holiday
Posts are going to be a little sporadic over the next 2 weeks as I’ll be on holiday. Things should return to normal (or whateva passes as normal round here) in January.
This doesn’t mean I won’t be posting, I don’t think I could go that long without using a computer it just means that I’ll be posting less than usual. Also means that there might be a bit of a delay before comments get moderated and approved.
If you don’t hear from me… have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Spam Comments on Posts with Pictures
If you’re running a blog and have posts with pictures you’ve probably noticed that you’re getting alot of comments that look legit but on closer inspection turn out to be spam. For example on one of my pages that I’ve got pictures of cats on I got a few comments about how cute the cat is with a link to one of those link farming websites with tons of links to stuff about v1aggra and r0l3x wtchs and other similar common spam.
I was puzzled how exactly they were getting comments that made sense and appeared to be written by real people and yet the links and email address’s were obviously spam ones.
Then I read this post on Mark on WordPress and suddenly realized whats going on, basically the spammers collect a bunch of blog posts with pictures on then display the pictures to people and ask to write a comment about the picture to proceed to there site or something like that… these comments are then posted as comments on my blog with the spammers url in the link field. It’s clever because the comment gets past the cursory glance that I normally give all new comments (I have have moderation enabled on my blog.) and it’s only if you actually look at the URL’s that you notice somethings a bit “funky”.
It’s like riding a bicycle (re-learning PHP)
So today I decided to fixup a few things on stuff.za.net and while I’m at it add a few cool plugins to wordpress.
One of those plugins was Now Reading which is pretty cool plugin that allows you too keep track of the books you’re reading. Of course once I added it I wanted to make a few “minor” changes to the templates so that it fitted in with the rest of my site better… that was about 4 hours ago. Continue reading
The New Server
Welcome to the new server and home of stuff.za.net…
As usual things didn’t go as planned, but I finally completed the move across to the new server today at around 3pm. Everything should work like it used to.. although I have updated WordPress and the theme I use K2 and added a few things (see below). Let me know if you think something is broken or gotten lost along the way.
I’m now running this all on Linux instead of Windows. It’s still on a shared host but that’s ok… for now anyway.
Changes that I’ve made:
(I’m putting these here so that I don’t forget them.)
- Put the Flexible Width back into the K2 theme. I use a 19″ and a 27″ Widescreen LCD’s at home so I like to have my website take up a reasonable amount of space. I also use a 12″ notebook so it makes sense to have the screen as wide as possible rather than high. I currently have it set to about 80% width which isn’t too bad.
- Next up I added the Extended Live Archive Plugin. I’m not sure yet if I like it’s cool and if it doesn’t cause too many problems I think I’ll keep it.
- Scrobbler Plugin with the Scrobbler (Last.FM) Sidebar module, so that you can see what I’m listening too.
- Now Reading Plugin and lots of hand editing the templates and style sheets to get it too look ok and do what I want.
And bunch of editing of template files, style sheets and other stuff to get it all to hang together and generally not totally suck.
Stuff.za.net is moving
Just to let you know that stuff.za.net is moving to a new server…
The new server runs Linux instead of Windows it’s with the same hoster though.
There shouldn’t been any interuptions but just in case… I’m letting you all know.
This should all be completed by tommorrow (9th September 2006)
Books, DVD’s, CD’s
You’ll see that there’s a new link on the header of this site labelled “Books, DVD’s, CD’s”. This is a list of items that I currently own, I’ll update the list as often as possible and hopefully in the future I’ll write a few reviews about some of the items on the list.
I’m hoping that this will help you my loyal readers get to know me a little better and it helps my friends and family buy me gifts *hint* *hint*.
Have your say!
So I’ve finally enabled comments on stuff.za.net, actually they’ve been working for a while but I haven’t told anyone yet. I’ve enabled them backwards too so you can post comments on any of the posts on my site.
So you can now let me know how great I am and further inflate my ego 😉
Please remember that the comments are moderated by me, so if I don’t like what you say or you decide to spam me I won’t approve the comments and they won’t be posted. Oh and you’re not allowed to comment on things like my spelling or grammarr… If you don’t like the fact that I can do this… too bad…
Stuff.za.net – A few updates and additions.
So I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.3, which basically is a maintenance update that fixes a few bugs and a few security holes.
I’ve also enabled the “Archives” page in K2 this means that you can now go back in time and read all the cool stuff I wrote in the past easily.