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Blogging about blogging

My, that is a lot of spam…

I have been running a personal blog for many years- arguably since about 1997.  I think I switched to WordPress in 2005 after previously managing with a static HTML page and then a PHPNuke website.  I started getting comment ‘spam’ shortly after I started using WordPress: like email spam, spam comments are irritating messages that aren’t really created by actual people who have something meaningful to say.
NewImageThankfully, the folks at Automattic who make WordPress provided something called Akismet to ‘block’ or filter spam comments.  I activated Akismet, and managing spam became more or less a memory… but the numbers, goodness… the numbers are huge.

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It’s full of post_content…

My site has been plagued by odd characters in some of my old posts for a rather long time.  The most common is the seemingly random appearance of Â characters in the midst of some of my posts.

I know the basic cause: one of my WordPress / MySQL updates in ancient times (circa 2008) ended up producing a character set mismatch.  I long ago fixed the cause, but all the existing bad characters persisted.  Until today… I hope

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Server OS Upgrade

I shut down the site over the weekend and upgraded / migrated to a new server operating system.  Kelly’s World was running on Mandriva 2008.1 prior to today.  As of now, the site is live on a Fedora 16 server.   My main reason for performing the migration was to get an OS in place that could be updated more consistently.

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A million visitors in 8 years

I looked at the banner of my site today and see that Kelly’s World has broken the 1 million hits mark.  Whoopee, and so forth.

I would like to imagine that this number represents some count of real people visiting, but the reality is less pleasant.  I’d guesstimate that about 99% of the visits to my site are some combination of spambots and web crawling robots.  For those of you reading this who can comprehend what I’m saying: thanks for being a real human being taking an interest in something I have to say.

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Getting tough on spam users…

I run a simple little blog here.  I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive.  I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments.  The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else.  Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.

Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed.  Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress.  There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs.  Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.

never_underestimate_stupid

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Hooking Facebook into my Blog

I’ve been using Facebook (or “Bookface”, as my nephew Shane calls it) fairly regularly lately. Today I decided to see what could be done to integrate my blog and Facebook a bit. I read the “how to” guide by Thiemo Fetzer, and now I have Yet Another WordPress Widget in the left nav of my site.

Nothing has changed for “normal” users of my site. For folks who regularly use Facebook, however, you now have an option. You can click on the “Login using Facebook” option, and your authentication will be handled via Facebook (i.e.: you log in using your Facebook credentials). KellysWorldBlog will be added to your application list once you’ve logged in once. Assuming I understand the application correctly, you won’t automatically receive anything from my site simply by using your Facebook login. I (or any visitor) can, however, click the “facebook share” icon to share individual blog posts on my wall.

What benefits does this give? Well, I guess you don’t need to remember your ID on my blog any more, and your Facebook icon will now appear next to the comments you post. But the main thing this does is allow for easy sharing of my blog posts with your friends.

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