gallery integration test

so this should be humphrey: scratch/humphrey.png

and this should be the wedding album: wedding/

hooray, it works! the WPG2 plugin seems to be working fine. All I needed to do was adjust it slightly because it insisted on embedding Gallery in my blog, which isn’t what I wanted.

I fixed it with a mod_rewrite rule in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(v/.+) http://gallery.jamesoff.net/$1 [R,L]

which just redirects gallery-type URLs here to the correct URL (needs to go above the other WPG2 stuff in .htaccess). Not sure if I need the R flag in there or not, but it works so I’ll leave it.

blbl.org kills my stuff

Unfortunately, blbl.org (my BLog Blocking List) is generating a lot of load on my poor colo’d machine, and is causing general slowness and at times outright failures of my other websites.

Also unfortunately for blbl.org, I like my other websites being up more than I like blbl.org being up, so this means one of several things:

• I shut it down
• I move it to another machine that can handle it
• I change it so it generates less load

(more…)

boooom!

http://b.oooom.net is now live! This is the rewrite and proper deployment of my old quickjump thing I had on jamesoff.net.

Yes, it’s just another URL shortener :P

b.oooom.net supports redirect pausing, where you can see the URL you’re about to be sent to before you actually go there. You trigger it by adding /pause to the end of the URL (e.g. http://b.oooom.net/70/pause). You can save your pause setting in a cookie (I promise it’s not evil) so that all URLs are paused automatically - good for work!

URLs can also be marked NWS by the person adding them (and only them) which will pause on redirect every time with a warning that it’s dodgy material (also good for work). Of course, you can set a cookie to skip the NWS warning at home.

You can shrink URLs by putting them into the form on the website or by hitting http://b.oooom.net/shrink/<your url>.

I shall shortly create eggdrop and irssi scripts to make it easier to do URL shortening by IRC.

Gallery Integration

Let’s see if this works… I’ve installed the WP-Gallery plugin which lets you easily link to gallery items…

Mitzi/IMG_1481

If that worked there should be a picture of Roz and Mitzi above :)

Upgraded!

Hooray, upgraded to WordPress 1.5. While my theme seems to sort of work with the new version, something isn’t quite right so I’ve stuck with the default theme for now until I can take another look at it. I’ve upgraded SpamKarma too so let’s see how this goes (especially when combined with my spamtrap blog for the RBL).

More RBL preparation

I have set up a quick homepage for the RBL on rbl.jamesoff.net, and I have released Check RBL 0.2 (hooray!)

• Can now set comments to unapproved (need moderating) instead of deleting
• Sending of notification mail can be switched off
• Added rbl.jamesoff.net to the default list

This version should be a little less destructive in its default mode (it moderates rather than deletes). Noone sent me any bug reports for 0.1 so I can only assume my coding was perfect \o/

Grab Check RBL 0.2 here, rename it to “rbl.php” and bung it in WORDPRESS/wp-content/plugins, and enable it in the Plugins page. If you’re already using 0.1, it’s safe to overwrite your old version, but don’t forget to check the new settings.

Comment spam out of control

Yesterday I cleaned out a load of comment spam… and I just had to clean out another load. 25 in under 24 hours :( This is getting out of control, and it’s happening on the forums too with spam account signups.

I’ve found this thing called babycart which lets you interface SpamAssassin with Wordpress to mark comments automatically for moderation based on their spammyness. This has the advantage of also using the URI testing in association with SpamCop.

I might install it later, and I might set it to refuse comments that are too spammy too.

Another type of spam

Is nothing sacred? It now seems that people are spamming by creating users on my forums, with the URL of their spamvertised site in the URL field of their profile.

No doubt this is done in some kind of batch fashion. To prevent it for now I’ve enabled email-based authentication on phpBB and I’m deleting the accounts (about 20 of them) manually.

Fucking spamers :(

Comment Spam

Comment spam on my blog is getting worse, and Roz is getting some too now :(

I shall sort something out for it this evening, I think. A custom solution using one of those “enter the text from this image” things should do it, because if it’s non-standard (or uses randomly named form fields or something) the spammers won’t be able to auto-parse it. As for them figuring this out and reading the text out of the image… I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.