Really, just testing my changes to use Wordpress for image hosting since my gallery is gone (sniff).

I’ve taken my photo gallery offline. It’s seeing constant comment spam attacks, and there appears to be no easy way to stop them. I’ll probably move the content elsewhere, either on a platform that allows disabling comments effectively, or move to the “cloud” via flickr or some such crappy site.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this attack – the legitimate traffic on my gallery is between 10-20 hits a day – almost nothing. The comment spam bots hit it with 2000 hits a day. What’s worse, is that this loads the mysql server at media temple such that they’re requiring that I pay an additional $20/mo for a mysql “container” – some sort of extra virtual machine. I run a Captcha, and I’ve turned off access to comments. There must be some
hole in Gallery 2, as I’m still getting spam.

This is all because of spammers attempts to get page ranking on their scam sites by inserting links in comments on my gallery. The fact that Google is onto this gaming, and the comment spam has no effect doesn’t matter.

So, I’m annoyed at having to take time out of my day to address this, and ultimately lose the ability for independent participation on the Internet via my photo gallery. The Internet as an open, independent, non-commercial medium is at risk without regulation and enforcement to stop these chilling effects. Without regulation, all the internet will be is Google, flicker, Facebook, and MSN, soon to be mega-merged into a single AOL-like “service” .

As much as I like the look of red courier font on a black background, I finally had to admit it was impossible to read, particularly stretched across the whole screen. I’ve switched to “deep-silent” by MIF Design. I hacked in my logo, made a few other minor changes, and here it is. I really would like to design my own theme. I’ll add it to the list.

I’ve changed things so that this blog is the new front door for Atomic Spatula. Atomic Spatula users will note the “Web Mail” link in the left column. Let me know if anything is hard to find.

I added this nifty plug-in/theme from iWPhone. So this blog should be a lot easier to read
via those fun little Apple gadgets.

All I need is to re-color it retro-hacker red and black.

We’ve got e-mail problems here again. Media Temple is working on it.

Edit: It seems fixed.

I’ve updated wordpress to 2.3. Let me know if there’s any funny business

I’ve returned to the grid today, and it seems little has changed.  Nagging problems continue with e-mail.   Tonight, I am unable to send e-mail – it looks as though something is amiss with Media Temple.  I filed a support request on it.

Tommorrow, it’s back to the grind.  I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, and I’ve got to prioritize the irons.  I can’t say that I missed the grid when I was off of it.  Priorities off the gird were things like going for a walk, stacking wood, keeping track of the kids playing in the snow, and getting in some reading time.

I’ve added a page for the archives – old content I’m not sure what to do with, but want to put somewhere. For starters, I put a site that we did about our wedding back in 2003.

9316As of this afternoon, I’m off for the Holidays, which means I won’t be at work and I’ll be on-line a bit less. All the sites and e-mail accounts have been moved, though I still have a few things to clean up.

One issue I’ve run into: what do do with old content? I’ve been running atomicspatula.com since 2000, and I’ve got various old web sites and other material. They’re out-of-date and perhaps only interesting to me. But if I leave them in a tar file on some backup CDs, won’t I lose track of them?

This also marks the end of running my own physical server. I started doing this back in 2003, when I ran a small business and got a SDSL connection with a fixed IP address. My first server was a 100 MHz dell running Windows NT and IIs. I switched to Apache after it was hacked via those nice exploits Microsoft makes available. After a disk crash, I bought a copy of Red Hat 9, and moved it to another cast-off Dell desktop.

Following the closure of the business, I moved the server to DVD Labs, and soon after they bought a new Dell server for me to run on, which I set up with Fedora FC3, as Red Hat had gone all Enterprise.

Now, we’re on Media Temple’s Grid Servers which appear to be some sort of Debian Linux using virtualization.

So far, so good.