Tag: Site Information

Oh Flickr

Well, ever since flickr went online I was pretty intrigued on its use. So, I signed up for a free account. Well, this is where the addiction began.

Since my free account, I have purchased a pro account which allows me unlimited viewing bandwidth, 1GB upload per month, unlimited photosets, and unlimited pages viewable in my photostream. I’m pretty addicted to it because of the tagging aspect of it. Plus, the community part of it is pretty rad too. I kind of wish that the limit on free accounts wasn’t so low, as to facilitate more group photosets, but I still love the service.

I’ve updated the gallery link in the navigation to point towards my flickr photo page since I’ve been putting just about everything from the past year or so on it. Now, one of my reasons to move from my site to flickr was that I could upload a lot of pics and not have to worry about the space. Well, that is cool and all, but then my host has to all go out and triple my disk space and bandwidth for free. Thus, kind of making it a moot point. Right? Well, I don’t know. I’ve uploaded about 700MB of images so far. So, I’m still sticking with flickr for the time being. That and I paid for it!

So, if you’re curious just sign up for a free account and check it out. I like it alot and I’m uploading images right as we speak. Yeah, it is pretty addicting. It makes me want to take more photos. If you have questions for me about what I like and dislike about it, leave a comment and I’ll let you know.

Trackback Spam Solution

After reading a post on photomatt.net on what options are left to combat spam I have decided to add Kitten’s Spaminator to my blog. We’ll see how this does against the current wave of trackback spamming that has been going on. If you are legit and your comment doesn’t post, send me an e-mail. I need to know if people are not able to post comments. But, for now I have disabled all pingbacks on all of my previous posts.

Gallery Added

Since I needed a place to add my digital photos online I went looking for something to manage them for me. I took a look at flickr for a while and I decided that since I was paying for this webspace that I might as well use it. But, I do really like flickr. Maybe I’ll take another look at it one day.

In its replacement, I found a package on SourceForge called gallery. It runs on only PHP; no MySQL needed! So far, it has been working out pretty well for me. My only concern is running out of space with all of the pictures that I have on my PC (*insert snicker on how I don’t have that many*). As with all of the other content on this site, I just need to find a place for this and what I want to use it for. But, for now, you can check out the link in the navigation, or click here.

Spam Karma

Since I was getting fed up with all of the spam comments coming into my blog, I decided that I needed something more than a shell script to fight thest comment spammers.

As many of you with WordPress can attest to, there has been this large wave of comment spamming going on. Some soulutions are to home brew a script to shut off comments on posts that are over a specific date. Mine was to write a simple PHP script that would do the most basic of basic SQL queries to delete all of the moderated queries. Hell, I even had some fun with it and made a simple little graph to display how many I got each day. But, I got tired of having those comments in my database. So, an alternative was needed.

This is when I found out about Spam Karma. I just installed it yesterday and it has been working very well. I get an email digest of all the comments that it deletes and I haven’t had one spam comment get through. It doesn’t let them enter the database, it checks the comment before it is even posted. I’d try to explain it more, but I’m not an expert on what it does quite yet. But, if you’re looking for a simple solution to this problem, I’d say go and check this out. It is a simple WP plugin and the directions are easy to follow, so try it out if you need help with your comment spamming problems.

Edit: Yeah, ok… false positives galore. Looking for new alternative.
Edit #2: So, I’m trying it out again… let’s see if it works any better.
Edit #3: I gave up and thankfully Jamie had my old wordlist.

Hotlink Categories

As many of you know I frequently post links on this site to random things on the web that I find interesting. However, as of late, I have been struggling on whether or not to assign these links a category other than “Hotlinks.” I have been adding them to other categories recently because the Hotlinks category is so all encompassing that it is easy to loose some of the good stuff that I post in there. Mainly, I don’t want to lose articles about web design, or things that are useful. Things that are in the news, or are just funny I can live without, but they can go into their respective categories.

My current thinking is that they should be applicable to a category that I already have. So, apply it to that one first. Then, since it is just a link and a blurb, add it to the Hotlinks category. This is kind of where I am leaning. However, I don’t want to have a large and robust categorization scheme. It would just get out of control eventually.

So, what I am in need of is a muse. A muse that will inspire me on the path that I need to take. But, what I need to know is if this will make a difference or not. For me, it is just annoying to have them all in one category (this is my INFO coming out). I’m sure I’ll go over my blog during break and fix my hacked up taxonomy of categories. But, I am curious. Should I put another category into the hotlinks that I post? Or does it not matter?