Sitestorms off the port bow!

I’m about to upgrade the theme this site uses. Anything could happen in the next half hour! The newer version should hopefully fix some pesky bugs that have been annoying me for a while.

I’ll try not to break anything.

Update: OK, that seems to have gone fairly painlessly. Had to tweak a bit of php to get things back to how I like them. The good news is that the new version of the theme has proper results for the “related posts” section, as opposed to random jumble, so I haven’t had to remove that section like I did previously.

The bad news is that it seems to have made my beautiful googlesearch blocks go a bit odd, with grey boxes around the individual parts. I can live with that for now, but will try to bring them back in to line.

Update 2: turns out the related posts code was still iffy with the new release of the theme, so I have tried to integrate another related posts plugin into it instead. I am horrible at php, but it seem, after about 20 tries, to look about right.

The Changing Face of Spam

I don’t know if this is just me, but in the last couple of months I have seen an extreme drop in the amount of email spam I receive. It’s not being swallowed by the spam-filter in my email software. It’s simply not getting to my computer in the first place. Perhaps it is being filtered out by ISPs, but I am more inclined to think that they’ve given up sending it to me.

At around the same time-frame that I saw the decrease in email spam, this happened to the comment spam here:

spamchart

It suggests to me a change in strategy by the world’s spamhauses. However, of the thousands of spam comments this blog received in the last month, only one managed to escape Akismet’s awesome filtering powers (And was duly deleted by me). The minuscule cost per spam-comment allows the spammers to cast their net extremely wide, but even so, I must confess that I don’t really understand how comment-spam can be an economically viable method of attracting customers. Instead of posting billions of gibberish comments a day, they would do a lot better to put that effort into writing in coherent sentences.

How to get an avatar in the comments section.

A friend asked me a couple of days ago why some people have avatars in my comment sections, and some folks don’t. A fine question!

This site uses Gravatars, globally recognised avatars. These are avatar pictures tied to the email address you enter in the comment box, and a great many sites use them now. By setting up your gravatar, your picture will follow you around the internet with no effort at all!

You can set up your free gravatar over at Gravatar.com.

Changes to comments.

Just a brief update. I’m moving house tomorrow, and still have some packing to finish!

From my logs, I can see that a lot of folks have been having trouble with the reCaptcha device I was using to prevent spam. Losing valid comments makes me sad, so I’ve decided to deactivate that for now, and try a spam filter instead. We’ll see how that works out.

While I pack, I’ll see if I can come up with something to say about the western leader’s response to the NIE that doesn’t involve strings of expletives.

A little later… I had a sudden flash of inspiration! Brought on by Atrios’ constant invocation of the King of Spain. I’m a genius, I tell you!

Thursday morning: The removal men will be here in an hour. Time to dismantle my PC. Cable gets installed at my new place tomorrow. See you on the flip side!

Weird site behaviour, and Firefox.

I’ve had a couple of emails about the site looking a bit strange since I switched to the new theme.

The sidebars on the right are *supposed* to be next to eachother. In certain circumstances Internet Explorer likes to stack them instead. Harmless enough, though it can make the page rather longer than it needs to be. IE also has the text input box for the comment recaptcha device slightly shifted over. Don’t worry, it might look a bit disturbing, but it still works! These days, it’s rather difficult to get a complex site to look identical in all search engines. Well, unless you’re a php wizard, which I am most certainly not.

Anyhows, the long and short of it is that this site works best in Firefox, though I do try to keep it neat looking in all browsers. It’s also the browser I use myself mostly, as it has the exceptionally useful firebug plugin, which makes debugging web pages massively more simple than it used to be.


Poor Barney.

Harpo asked in comments:

What is your avatar supposed to be? I can make out some ears!

Barney

It’s Barney! George W Bush’s long-suffering Scottish Terrier. Hate the dog-owner, love the dog.

Karl Rove once stated that “Barney is a lump”. Applying usual method of deciphering anything Rove says, we can assume that Barney is in fact a lovable ball of energy. And five times better a human-being than Rove or his master will ever be.

Trying out a new theme

I’m trying out a new theme. It has a lot more features than Tarski, and has an extra column, which is quite handy. I’m not sure if it doesn’t seem a little cluttered though.

What do you think? If this one doesn’t work out I can go back to the old one.