Archive of posts with tag 'website'
Oct 2022: Site Redirects
When I migrated my site, one of the things I very carefully generated—and forgot to put in the right place—were the redirects. Before, I’d used the WordPress common default of year-month-day-title, which, for a blog that’s been as inactive as this one has been, is frankly hilarious.
Sep 2022: Website Migration
Website migration. Some years ago, WordPress started changing its format to their GUI editor, which I hated. And then I discovered that WordPress claimed to store Markdown (plain text) files, but actually they were absolutely not even remotely plain Markdown.
Because of these issues, I didn’t want to add to an already large blog problem by making it bigger. So I stopped blogging altogether.
Apr 2015: Apologies for the Overly Aggressive Spam Police
I don’t view my WordPress dashboard very frequently, so I’d missed that the Stop Spammers Registration plugin had trapped 75 registrations/commenters it shouldn’t have, some of whom are regular commenters here.
Nor did I know where the UI was for that. (I do now and have whitelisted all 75 of you.)
I’m sure 75 sounds like a lot, but let me give you context here.
OpenID Change
A while back, I switched from one openID plugin to another because the one I had been using was not being maintained. The new one apparently let through a lot more spam registrations than the previous one did—to the point where that was more than half of my email.
Then I installed the Stop Spammer Registrations plugin. Blissful quiet.
Stop Spammers in total has stopped 33,680 spammers since 2014/02/26.
And, unfortunately, 75 legit folks. (As well as possibly more who didn’t say, “Hey!”)
Almost Half Were Cache Problems
There’s a joke in computer science:
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton
My host sometimes needs to service machines and switches me over without me noticing. This invalidates cache, and Stop Spammer Registration latches onto that like a fierce little puppy and growls.
Why? Because invalid cache is a security attack vector, unfortunately.
An Added Bonus
Ever looked at your Akismet spam queue? Even after setting it to delete the worst, I used to have 50-100 per day. Now I get 1-2 per week.
Though…
I’m going to look at the settings and see if anything needs to be tweaked.
Jun 2011: Theme Change
First, a side note. I feel compelled, given how many people mispronounce my name, to mention: “Sounds Like Weird” is a pronunciation hint for both Deirdre and Saoirse.
While I loved the photo-blog theme of autofocus, it constrained me too much as not everything I wish to post would highlight a photo. Thus, I’ve changed my theme again. I had been intending to wait until after Westercon, but a bout of insomnia meant I needed something to do that didn’t require undue brain power.