Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

I had to do it. No really, I had to. I had 350 spam postings today. All went in the moderation queue, so none of them appeared on the site. I couldn’t take it anymore. In the last week, I’ve deleted well over 1000 spam postings. It is a huge waste of my time, and my inbox gets filled with notifications of this stuff. Hopefully the blacklisting features in 1.5 will make a dent in the whole thing. I certainly hope so.

Work and home are keeping me very busy — I’ve been wanting to do this upgrade for a couple of weeks, but I haven’t had the time. I hope to find more time to post soon.

Someone is having difficulty seeing the gallery. I am getting a lot of 404’s in the weblog that don’t make a whole lot of sense. It looks like a browser may be interpreting the stylesheet incorrectly, but there might be some other problems as well. I haven’t had time to dig into which browser is generating the 404’s, so if you are having problems with missing images, let me know what browser and version you are running. Thanks!

Halloween, or as everyone seems to be referring to it now, Harvest Party time, is nearly here. My father carved a pumpkin for Morgan.

Lisa has been busy uploading the pictures we took of the pumpkin, and Morgan’s costume as well.

If you are curious, you can see the whole gallery here.

I was quite astonished when I backed up the gallery images the other day. We are pushing 10GB of images within the gallery. I believe this is due primarily to the purchase of the digital camera. There is no cost to taking pictures, unlike 35mm film. As a result, we take a lot of them. Some of them we actually print out. Some of them we get developed at Costco. It all depends on how many we want. We are in the midst of a digital transformation in terms of imaging. Pretty nifty eh?

I have been mucking around a bit more with Wordpress. I am evaluating it because Moveable Type’s pricing makes it prohibitive for me to upgrade. I have been getting regular spam type messages here, and Moveable Type’s default interface for comment elimination isn’t great.

All in all, I have found WordPress pretty easy to use. It was really painless to import all the MT entries.

I am becoming more familiar with CSS, which seems to help too. I had a couple of difficulties regarding the install.

1. The install.php file came up blank initially. I solved this via some hints in the WP forums.
2. All comments were initially being moderated. I solved this by removing a blank line in the words to filter. I guess everything matches a blank line.

I haven’t figured out an easy way to map the RSS feeds to the same URLs they were before, so I’m not going to bother. I’m hoping self discovery solves the problems. Now I just need to learn a bit of php, and I should be good to go!

Well, I am in the process of moving to Wordpress. It was fairly painless, although not completely. Whoopee!