Category: Admin

Spamwich

I knew that having a blog that supported comments was going to invite spam, I just never expected it to be like this. Up until last weekend, it was pretty benign: a few trying to post ads, a few muttering nonsense. Harmelss little things that popped up once in a while.

I woke up on Tuesday morning to find 37 new messages in my inbox. Surely they couldn’t all be Amazon ads. Over the last three days I’ve been hammered with over 100 spam comments. And they’re all the same thing: all “people” with legit looking information and a silly message about how much they like my site. Only most of the messages are in broken English, and often they’ll say “what a great read that was” on a post that’s just an image. Also, the website of evey one of them ended with a 2K. While I knew they were all fake, that would have been the tip-off for someone less in-the-know.

So I’ve rigged my system so that you have to sign up to comment. I know that will dissuade real random visitors from commenting, but it must be done. It takes a long time to trash all those alert emails. I’ll try to find a better way, but for now that’s the best compromise I have between legions of spambots and disabling comments completely.

It makes me wonder though, what is the point of this kind of spam? There are no penis enlargement ads. Maybe the sites they claim to be from contain malicous things, but who clicks on those anyway? It’s pointless aside from wasting my time. Unless of course wasting my time is the point. In which case: well played, spammers. Well played.

You want an update? You can’t handle an update!

So I’ve been powering through my archives whenever I can find a few spare minutes, and now the entirety of 2003’s news posts have been carried over. There’s an exception for a single post that was one sentence stating that I’d uploaded a new article, but that’s the only omission. Course, I still have to finish with aught-three’s article and Chat Radios and whatever else, but I’m getting there!

Holy crap this is a news post from 2003. Let’s talk about something other than blog stuff.

I’m going to be spending the bulk of this weekend (seven hours a day) in marriage preparation class. I have no idea what to expect, and no idea how many other couples are going to be joining us. I like to imagine that it’s going to be all fun partnership-building activities, but I feel like it’s probably going to be considerably more boring. I actually know someone whose sister took the same (or a similar) course, but keep forgetting to ask about it. At the very worst, it’s two free breakfasts and lunches.

We also got our engagement photos back… sort of. They’re in an online album on our photographer’s website, but we’re still waiting on the disc. They turned out pretty fantastic, and I’m glad to report that I don’t look nearly as fat in them as I feel. Hooray! If you want to hit them up, go to the website half of BlairJPhotography.com and click on the “clients” tab. I’m not sure if sharing the password with the whole internet is OK’d on our contract (Why wouldn’t it be? Because photographers have lots of retarded rules about what you can do with the pictures they take), so just shoot me an email if you’d like to se them. They’re pretty great!

Consequence

Two weekends ago, I sat down and I started archiving news posts from previous versions of TE. I was excited about WordPress and how it would make everything I’ve written look all neat and samey. Back in the day I thought it was neat to make every article stand out visually (for better or for worse…), but at this point I feel like the streamlined look is where it’s at.

I miss the creativity and colour of the old ways, but let’s face it: that made it look like it was done by a twelve-year-old, and I was totally sixteen when I started. Huge difference there.

Anyway, I’m looking through my archives for 2003 alone, and dreading how long it’s going to take to stick all that garbage in here. I know I could cut out the hundreds of stupid little posts saying that I fixed a typo or that I was maybe considering thinking about typing an article, but this is supposed to be a definitive work. And to that extent, I feel it must be complete.

And so bitch about the amount of work it’s going to take, I shall.

I suppose when I started, I was just thinking about how sparse 2008-2010 were as far as bloggeties go. It may have cooled off even earlier, I don’t really remember. I just know that I consistently felt bad that I was neglecting my $70-a-year webspace.

It’s just… when I look at all of those tiny posts that really don’t have anything to say, I wonder why. I considered posting all the updates of a month (for the Page of Death years) in a single post, but decided against it because “how bad could it be?” Once I get past the point where the updates are a single sentence, it probably won’t feel quite as much like a waste of time. That gets halfway into 2004 though, so I’ve got about a year and a half of tiny, worthless posts to re-post.

On the other hand, I feel like I’m really going to enjoy the bulk of the rest of it. Maybe my writing isn’t great, but at least I’ll get that wonderful nostalgic feeling. I fairly consistenly rummaging through old posts for old links or other stuff, so I’m kinda looking forward to going through it all again. It’s really the perfect excuse to read my entire archive without it feeling like a huge waste of time.

And yeah, that’s about all I need to complain about for today. Yeah, this post is mostly as useless as all those one-sentence ones I’m complaining about, but if a personal blog isn’t for whining about stupid things, what is it for?

On photos and blogging about them

I guess I’ve been photoblogging more than usual lately. Kind of offsets that couple of weeks there where I just put up solid walls of text with nary an image to accompany them. Kind of.

Truth be told, I just have a buttload (a term I’ve been using way too often lately) of random images sitting on my desktop and phone that I needed to do something with. So there are more to come! I spent almost no time at my home last week, and I don’t know how much I’ll be there in the days to come, but there will be another onslaught of photobloggery sometime in the future.

I’m also trying to get Stephanie set up on here so that she can join in the fun. I sold her on the photoblogging idea, given that she just loves to take pictures. So that’s going to happen too. Get ready for the picturepocalypse.

Three things I like that start with “P”

1. Pepsi

2. Pita Pit

3. Posting bloggety stuff in advance through WordPress. The last week of blogging? All written and posted on the 21st. I almost want to go back to 2002 and stab past me in the face for not figuring out how to use this. Or, at least, past me whenever it was that I bought webspace. I don’t think Angelfire would have supported WordPress back then. I’m not even interested enough to find out if they do now.

My pop is about to brain

It took all damn day, but I’ve archived every single word I blogged this year here on the WordPress powered site. When I first approached the task, I figured it would be a piece of cake. Now that I know what I’m doing, using WordPress makes blogging life so easy! Turns out I had a rather impressive buttload of stuff to move over though…

By the end of the year, I intend to get everything loaded up on here, creating what will be the definitive version of my website. I probably should encase it in carbonite and hang it on a wall or something at that point so I don’t go and ruin it.

Also, over the last couple days, I accidentally started a Minecraft Let’s Play. Yeah, I don’t know how it happened either, but It’s there, and I feel like I have to see it through. Here’s the little art project that set the whole thing in motion:

I started a new world in the game, because I do that when there’s a major update (hey, did you know there was a huge update on Friday?), and I was plopped on an island in the middle of nowhere. You’ll get more details when I start making the LP posts. Oh, and don’t worry, it’s a screenshot LP. I only dream of being interesting enough to do video LPs.

Fancy Pants

Just kidding. I have pretty regular pants on right now. But look at this website! It’s pretty fancy now!

Um, yeah. I decided to move over to WordPress because it’s easier. If you visited during the course of the day, you may have seen this space filled with all sorts of sweary words, because figuring everything out (without reading any documentation) was a little tough. But it’s all good now!

Now there’s just the matter of moving stuff over. I doubt it’s gonna happen though. 6 years later I still haven’t moved all the Angelfire content to my own webspace. Oh well. We’ll see. For now though, just enjoy the article I uploaded below this post (assuming you’re on the home page).

All aboard the Learning Train!


This is broken now that I’ve moved to WordPress! Now come back in a few hours and see if that greeting has changed. I made up (re: stole) a dealie that makes it change based on the time of day. Hopefully it works right.

The point of this exercise -aside from seeing how little function you can get from as many lines of code as possible- is to play with JavaScript a bit today. The code I used is really not complicated at all, but it took me almost half an hour to get that greeting to the point where it would show up on the page. I don’t much care for JavaScript; I cannot foresee any reason why I would use it. Alas, to learn XSLT properly, one must also know XML. And to learn XML, a firm grasp on JavaScript is highly recommended. So today I’m learning about JavaScript. It’s going slowly.

I don’t really think that it’s useless or anything. It’s just like, I’m reading and there’s these cool things you can do but then I turn around and realize that there’s no reason to. Sure I could put a self-updating time stamp on the site, but why bother? You’re probably reading this on a computer, and the time and date are right there on the bottom-right corner of your screen. I can do algebra on my page with JavaScript, but I cannot imagine any situation where it would be useful. Even if/else is just if/then’s dropout cousin for webpage content. I’d make stuff up just for the sake of learning it, but really, that would amount to making homework for myself. Mind you, I’m in the JavaScript tutorial equivalent of kindergarten, so maybe there’s better stuff beyond the horizon.

Let it all out

I’ve been up all night learning how to integrate XML into my website. The short version is that I don’t think it’s going to work.

The long answer is a little more complicated. XML will work fine for my article pages. The only thing that it’ll inconvenience is the little “related” tab I have on the navi bar, but I barely fill that out properly anyway. I still have a long way to go before I really understand this stuff, but it seems like it will not work at all for the blog. Essentially, all that goes in the XML files is the body text, and HTML tags don’t work there, so I can’t type up a post in my blog.xml and call it good. I’d have to go add a new set of tags to the xsl file too, and that makes the process slightly more complicated than the copy-paste-replace routine I do now.

But maybe I’m missing something? It doesn’t look like it, but I still have a lot of reading to do. I managed to mock up a new xsl index page, and I did it all through trial and error. Just took an example page, and started figuring out how it worked. That’s exactly the same way I learned to do HTML (which is why my coding skills are so limited).

In any case, I’ll be using XML for my upcoming project. It’s still a week or so from launch, which means I’m way behind, but I’ll have plenty of time to work on it next weekend. Hopefully it works well. For now though, bed.

It’s been such a long time

*ACHOO*

Augh, this place is absolutely covered in dust! I know I kind of abandoned it, but the maid’s been on payroll all this time. Did she think I wouldn’t pop in every now and again to see if it’s keeping up? Oh, she is so getting fired!

Poor housekeeping aside, I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I’ve been getting all nostalgic about how I used to love this site back in the day, and I’ve been considering coming back to it, if only for myself. Well of course it would be for myself. I mean, why would anyone still be checking for updates? I miss writing. I miss being creative. I miss having an outlet to bitch about all the things I dislike without anyone to make me feel bad about my opinions. Maybe I should blog again.

I also have a lot (well, a couple hours a week) more free time on my hands these days, and once I’ve caught up on my video game backlog (which has grown to an epic size) there will be nothing to do but blog. And play old games again. Because I have no more money for games. But that’s another story.

Anyway, yeah, I think I’m gonna come back to blogging. I just hate not having a written record of what’s going on in my life and my mind, and diaries are for little girls. So blog I shall!