James Chamberlin » Site

SPAM

James — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:20:51 +0000

One of my last entries before disappearing without a trace for a while was about SPAM and when I decided to return to my lolely little blog, I was greeted with some four hundred SPAM alerts.

Once hesitant about Akismet, I have nothing but good things to say about it. It’s turned out to be a lifesaver. I no longer need to babysit the AdminCP of WordPress. Akismet takes care of it all for me.

The Irony Of It All

James — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:49:31 +0000

I’m afraid there isn’t much to report right now. I’m just busy working.

Regarding the title of this new entry, I had an old post about blog spam which is suddenly attracting you guessed it: blog spam. It’s getting 5-10 spams a day right now. It’s hardly a big problem thanks to Akismet, but I just found it to be ironic that that specific post was getting 95% of my blog spam.

Another Upgrade

James — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:30:13 +0000

Just when I get my blog updated, WordPress has to come out with another security release. You’d think they would learn to be a bit more thorough before putting out a release which fixes security holes.

Upgraded and Backed Up

James — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:02:36 +0000

There isn’t a whole lot of news to offer up this week. The tomatoes aren’t looking good this year. It looks like they’re suffering from some sort of blight. The plants really look sad. I don’t believe there’s any hope for them to last through the summer, sadly enough.

After dragging my feet, I upgraded my blog’s version of WordPress. It didn’t take too long, but it would have gone a little quicker if I hadn’t unnecessarily deleted the upload and theme folders. I quickly had to re-upload those. Remember, kids: back up your data.

WordPress Updates

James — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:49:57 +0000

I don’t track WordPress development very closely, but it’s annoying to have installations out of date. WordPress puts an annoying banner at the top of the Dashboard which alerts you of this fact. I find most of my installations are now three or four versions out of date thanks to the small fixes released in the last few weeks. I updated one of my blogs, but it’s something I don’t enjoy doing because I have to back up everything. Oh, how I hate backing up data. What a pain in the ass.

New TV Review Site Needs Writers

James — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:16:58 +0000

I’ve been trying to get this done for a while now, but I finally managed to export all of the TV-related content from this blog and have built another site for it.

TV-Reviewed was recently launched and contains most of my TV content. Some of it was deleted because I didn’t think it should ALL go there… some of it didn’t really fit with the site in my opinion.

Anyway, the new site will be more of a full-fledged TV review and news site, though it’ll be primarily be a place for television episode reviews. I’ve recruited two people to help contribute reviews, but I’m looking for more authors to help with content. If you are interested in reviewing television episodes, email me.

Giving up on Google Analytics

James — Sun, 04 May 2008 00:31:55 +0000

One of the tools Google has developed for webmasters to obtain information on their visitors [where they're coming from, browser type, etc] is their Analytics program. I was impressed by its demo a long time ago and signed up for it immediately. It seemed to work well for a while, but I’ve been having problems with it recently.

I don’t recall exactly when it began happening, but my account seems to lose website profiles all the time. For those not familiar with the service, Google gives each site you work on its own section [profile] and tracking code. Well, I seem to lose two or three of them all the time. The system seems very unstable and I’ve found similar complaints from other users. I don’t know what the problem is, but Google should fix it.

I intend to stick with the stat scripts that my host provides for free. They’ve never given me a reason to swear out loud. This is the first time Google has really let me down.

Backup Often

James — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:37:52 +0000

A few days ago, I was working with another WordPress installation which is for another project. When I downloaded the config file to update it, I noticed the formatting was screwed up. So I fixed it up so that it looked like it should, uploaded it to the server, and WordPress had a fit. Whatever little changes I did screwed everything up.

I didn’t have a backup of the config file, so I couldn’t just undo the changes. I’m usually pretty good about making backups of some things, but it looks like I’m going to have to backup the WordPress files a little more often.

In the case of that install, I just re-installed everything. I didn’t make any posts, so I didn’t really lose any data. It’s just a pain in the ass to deal with things like this sometimes.

Akismet Still Catching Spam

James — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:56:41 +0000

When I initially activated the WordPress plugin Akismet, I was a little apprehensive. I didn’t know if it would slow down the site or even catch the spam my little blog seems to attract. But after a few months of running, Akismet has caught over seven hundred spam comments and trackbacks… 711 to be exact. In the past, I received an email for each comment. Now, Akismet handles it all for me. I don’t regret installing it one bit.

WordPress 2.5 Flash Image Uploader

James — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:06:21 +0000

I’ve had nothing but trouble with the image uploader ever since 2.5 was released. For some reason, the developers felt it was necessary to use Flash to upload the images. I kept getting HTTP errors for some reason and judging by many of the other WordPress users, I’m not alone. I found a lot of blog entries about this, some of which proposed solutions, but I decided to use the plugin made available on the official site which disables the flash functionality.

I activated the plugin about five minutes ago and I uploaded a test image just to see if it works, and I haven’t had any problems. I’m guessing WordPress 2.5.1 will be released pretty soon, either to remove the flash functions or to actually fix it. Personally, I see no reason why Flash was needed. I suppose somebody felt it had to be used just to keep things new and fancy… but that didn’t work out so well, now did it?

There’s an old saying… if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. WordPress developers should have listened. Now they have to fix what they broke. Nice job, guys.