I like SPAM. It’s great with eggs on camping trips. However, I hate spam. For the last year or so, we’ve been targetted by someone with comment spam on our website. Originally it was links to very disturbing websites, but I stopped that with some nifty regular expressions. Then came the Viagra and Cialis ads. More regexs. Lately, it’s been more amiable it seems. They’ve been about prayers and novenas or stuff like “this is a really nice site”. It’s just junk that I can’t easily filter out with a regex. I’m sure it has been the same jerk all along. If I denied him the ability to post ads, he’s still going to punish me with junk. What a loser. Anyway, most of the bad comments were being sent to old pictures that are really popular. I’m convinced my beach picture has so many hits purely because of the loser spammer. As I sit here, I see requests for that picture hitting the logs. I have decided to shut off comments to pictures that are older than 30 days. If the spammer decides to try something else, then I have a few more options. I’m really trying to avoid making folks log in because it would be a big hassle just to leave a silly comment. I’d like to invite the loser to a camping trip so he could find out what good spam is.
Category: site
Downtime
Sorry mauter.com was down last weekend. I know our viewership was really hurt. 🙂 Anyway, we now have wireless Internet access in our home. As a result, the mauter.com server had to be reconfigured. Since it was an old version of RedHat that was no longer supported, I reformatted the thing and installed Fedora Core 2. Not everything is 100% functional yet. For instance, the bandwidth graphs and web usage logs are not correct yet. Complaints? Send them to /dev/null. 🙂
New and weird
Howdy. Between a new keyboard, new bedroom furniture, tons of weeds in the yard and us installing some gently used shelving in the garage, we’ve been busy. Did you know we’re listed as “More Resources for Painting-Interior Paint Colors”? We are. Just scroll down to almost the end of the page. Also, apparently Brian is a member of the “Dysfunctional Tendencies” volleyball team in the USA Volleyball Association’s Garden Empire Region. Weird huh?
Bandwidth Usage
We haven’t had an update in quite a while. We’re still here. I’ve got a few more plans for enhancements to the website. Expect them soon. I want to make picture navigation easier and I hope to allow everyone to rate our pictures much like www.hotornot.com. Hopefully it won’t be nearly as tacky. Anyway the big news for today is that you can check out our bandwidth usage within the last day. Open Source software rocks.
New site features!
Two new features are available on the website. As you can see on the left of the homepage, there’s a new list that shows links to the last five pictures added to the website. This should help our board of directors keep up with what’s new on the site. Also, mauter.com is proud to announce a new type of feature to the site. Users may upload pictures to our photo album! The editors want a first look at anything uploaded and pictures can only be 1MB or smaller in filesize, but your pictures will show up in a new section called uploads. Let’s see what you all do with this. Alex, pictures of certain body parts will never be allowed. Don’t ask. 🙂