The spam drought ended over the weekend. The gambling and pills people started sending comments – all blocked by MT Blacklist. The porn stars started sending trackback pings. A few got through but I have cleaned them up already, and updated the blacklist with their latest domain name and some other new strings. I installed an MT Plugin called DisguiseTrackbackURL which is supposed to make it impossible to identify the correct URL to ping for Trackbacks without actually opening the Entry in a browser. It sounds promising and it should work will work unless the spammers decide to read the default java script and train their bots to add the extra characters. If they still spam me I will have to think about customizing the Disguise script.
Category: Byte.me
Spam Drought
There hasn’t been much spam on my blog for months, because MT-Blacklist was keeping it out.
Snow Reports
This started as a post about shovelling snow and skiing, and turned into a rant about the quality of data available on the Web. I wanted to check the amount of snow that fell during the two storms of December 30 – December 31, and January 1 – January 2. The correct answer according to news stories published in the Winnipeg Free Press was 26 cm and 15 cm respectively. They seemed to have a reliable source – perhaps a meteorologist. The Free Press also prints a daily weather feature, and the snowfall information wasn’t there. Not for the last day, or the last week, or the last calendar month. I couldn’t get the information on the Internet either.
Firefox notes
I have been trying to see which browser functions are slower in Firefox than in Windows IE. Some of the interface with MT seems to be as fast as when I use IE, but some pages are slower in Firefox. Some of the administrative pages that build a list – the comment approval/editing list, or the Blacklist item list – seem to take a long time compared to the same page in IE. But Firefox seems to build an entry list very quickly. WTF?
Minimalist Blogging
Steve has simplified his blog by writing his own basic CMS. No trackbacks, comments submitted by php mail, no spam. Just content. He makes writing his own CMS sound as easy as installing MT. He could market his CMS to engineers as Nano-blogging. The word minimalism may not register with engineers. His choice to blog lite is appealing when I look at the grief Randy is having with his blogs after he upgraded to MT 3.121. Imperfect CSS, pages not displaying in any browser …
Firefox Redux
It was the ads. I became furious at the ads cluttering the pages I was reading. In the early versions of Netscape, I could turn off images to speed up page loads, which was handy when I was using a 14.4 K modem, and even a 56 K modem, on a dial-up account. That capability has disappeared in modern browsers, and setting a browser to ignore images would ignore content. There are hosts of pop-blockers but no effective ad blockers for IE. Ad blocking in IE is generally limited to blocking new windows (pop ups) and banners – images of specific size at the top of a page. There is a product called Webwasher which tries build a blacklist of banned sites which was promising but configuring it was a problem. There is a free classic version, with no help files and the full version is not cheap. Finding a real IE ad blocker on Tucows or the Web is just a nightmare. Lots of cookie-cutter pop-up blockers, lots of shareware from little.wannabe.dot.com ventures.
Missing Mozilla Firefox
After a few days of using IE again, I am missing features of Firefox. Tabbed browsing was good. I miss the Adblocker which showed the feeds connected to a web page and allowed very fine control. I could block a feed to one ad, or block all feeds from a source by wildcard. I had a problem using it on sites (eg the NY Times) which had several feeds because I had to reopen the tool for each block.
Goodbye to Firefox
After trying it for a few weeks, I have given up on the Mozilla Firefox browser. I have kept the Mozilla Thunderbird email program.