Simmons Consulting, the Website of Toby Simmons

Archive for March, 2005

Is this a comic strip writer’s idea of an April Fool’s joke?

31
Mar

I got a serious case of déjà vu when I read today’s version of "Get Fuzzy" and "pearls before swine." Notice anything similar about the following two comics?

EDIT: 2005 April 2 — Looks like I was exactly right!

Get Fuzzy, by Darby Conley, for April 1, 2005
pearls before swine, by Stephen Pastis, for April 1, 2005

4images photo album and comment spam

23
Mar

I use the 4images – Image Gallery Management System to drive my photo album and have anonymous comments enabled. Comment spam started showing up about a week ago (I was getting lots and lots of comments about poker and drugs). I avoid comment spam in my blog (WordPress) by using Elliot Back’s plugin called wp-hashcash. Essentially, this plugin forces a commenter’s browser to perform a time-sensitive computation in order to post comments. If someone tries to post a comment using something other than a browser, their comment is refused. Since implementing this plugin, I have gotten exactly ZERO comment spams to my blog.

Since Elliot’s plugin works so well for WordPress, I decided to port it to 4images. Since implementing this mod, I have received ZERO spam comments in my photo album. Plus, I am tracking how many attempts are being made to post spam to the photo gallery and it looks like I’m blocking 20-25 attempts per day. I’ve written up the instructions on how to implement this mod.

Fixing WordPress 1.5 on Windows 2000 (IIS 5) Updated

13
Mar

About a month ago Back in February, I posted a fix to the problem of not being able to log in to your WordPress admin panel if you are running IIS as your web server. That fix has been superseded by the excellent work of the WordPress folks. I have created a zip file with all the necessary edits made to the required files. You should be able to simply download the zip file and extract them over your current 1.5 install.

The fix is now easy. Download version 1.5.1!

Building and Using RSS Bandit plugins

11
Mar

Building and Using RSS Bandit plugins