lite pollution

I asked myself that very same question. Where’d the last two months of posts go? This is the second time I’ve mysteriously lost data. It’s starting to piss me off… alot. I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 and intend to take full advantage of their database backup functionality.

Of course, this provides a good opportunity to think about seriously revamping the site, reinventing my online presence yet again. Hmmm…

While this isn’t really an update to the site, it fits in this category. Seems the internet did not like my post about cats or blogshares.com. Those two posts from yesterday have now disappeared into the ether. If anyone has an RSS feed of my site from yesterday, the full text of the articles should be in there. If not, enjoy the fact you got to read them, ’cause they’re gone now.

I upgraded to the stable version of 1.5. So far, it’s working quite well.

One change you will notice is subscribe feature over there on the right hand navbar. If you want to be notified by email when I update this thing, it’s a handy feature.

I upgraded my Wordpress install to practically the bleeding edge of current development. Say hello to WP 1.5-beta.

It’s nifty, from what I have found. It actually has the ability to write static pages which are removed from the normal flow of the weblog. I haven’t decided what I’ll use that for, but I’m sure I will come up with something.

I also like the default template. It’s different from WP 1.2 so my old stylesheet doesn’t exactly funciotn corrently. Guess I will have to get off my butt and fix that sooner than I thought. Good news is that the rss feeds are working again.

I abso-fucking-lutely despise spammers. The latest exploit they’ve found is to trackback to a blog from some crummy IP somewhere and insert a shitload of comment spam. Spammers need to die a firey death in the bowels of hell.

(To help combat this problem, I have set the comments to close after 21 days.)

I’ve done a few things the last couple of days that you may have noticed.

1. I added a style switcher down on the menu. This is mainly to facilitate my pending upgrade to the style of the site and not wanting to have to manually switch back and forth all the time. For you, the user, it means you can view my site several different ways, including my favorite, the ‘golf’ theme.
2. I upgraded the code to Wordpress 1.2.2
3. Most importantly, I eliminated the need for a login to post comments. Instead, you need only type in a number from a random graphic and then you can post. This should stop the spammers dead in their tracks. Thanks to Matt for finding this spam fighting plugin.

Next up, changing the overall style. While I’m at it, I’m going to switch up the categories and clear out the stagnant ones.

Seeing as how Wordpress has been having comment spam problems recently, I’ve made a change. In order to post comments, you’ll have to be a registered user and logged in. If you’re not, the commetn form will be disabled and there will be a nasty red message letting you know to log in if you want to comment.

If you are a fellow Wordpress junkie, you should implement this hack to get the same functionality in your blog. My friend will be happy to see there is a solution to his problems.