Well thanks to AuthImage my comment spam has gone from a minimum of 40 a day to nothing over night!
I am dead chuffed by this and hope that the spammers don’t find a way round this, or at least realise that the effort involved really isn’t worth it for my little site here.
Well I decided to do a bit more about comment spamming when I was greeted by 195 comments that needed moderation due to being caught by the blacklist plugin, so I’ve added a very cool little plugin (which isn’t so cool to install) which may, with luck, quell the uprising.
The most annying thing about the spam is the fact that the links don’t actually go to a real site, so its just a rather massive waste of time. Makes me pretty angry and the only words to describe the people that do this rhymes with bucking fastards.
Anyway, hopefully the authimage plugin will come to my rescue. Damn clever little thing if it actually works 🙂
Well the Make love not spam website seems to be down for whatever reason and the screensaver no-longer seems to work. Whether this is becasue the makers took it down due to legal reason or the spam sites fought back we may never know…
I only had one day of anti spam battling, bit of a disappointment in the end.
The ‘Recent cool stuff’ section of my links isn’t working properly, much to my annoyance, so I’ll just quickly blog about these two sites I’ve found.
The first is mildly interesting, it’s an anonymous online confessions service, where anyone can look at whats been ‘confessed’, but you don’t know who said it. Some are fairly shocking but most are just normal. It’s an interesting thing to read to pass the time if yu’re bored and also helps the vast majority of us realise that our lives aren’t that bad and we aren’t as screwed up as we thought we were. The address is rather nice too: grouphug.us
Now the next site I’ll mention is just plain fantastic, as can quickly be deduced from the address: thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com [things-my-girlfriend-and-I-have-argued-about].
This guys humour is not just up my street, its standing outside my door bearing gifts in the form of chocolate covered treats. This I discovered this lunch time, and since then have decided must be only read with an empty mouth.
Not that it was a total disaster, but I narrowly avoided the embarrassing situation of spraying a partly masticated sandwhich all over, and in the vicinity of, my computer. This wouldn’t have been a cause of embarrassment simply becasue of the mess. No, It would also have been awkward when relating the particular passage that tickled me so, knowing full well that it would have been greeted with – at best – luke walm chuckles, and at worst blank stares, from the rest of the office.
If you’re that curious the section in question was as follows:
The Terror Of Lids: Yes, the rewards are high, but it’s a game where the price of defeat is savage. Sometimes Margret, after grunting with it herself for a collection of ‘hnggh’s, will hand me a bottle or a jar that has a screw top along with an impatient, ‘Open that for me.’ If the gods lie content in the skies above England at that moment, then what follows is a rapid flick of my wrist, a delightful ‘click-fshhhh’ gasp of surrender, and my handing the thing back to her FEELING LIKE A HERO OF NORSE LEGEND.
It of course goes on to tell of how this is so rarely the case.
Having a program called Urchin hidden in the background of this website is rather cool for the reason that it tells me what search terms people used that resulted in a hit to randomtask.co.uk. Some are fairly predictable, ‘Silly tasks’, ‘Random ock’, ‘the health benifits of apples’ and things along those lines that could be quite easily related to this site.
However some of the other searches that have lead here really do highlight how far search technology has yet to go. For example:
‘Pictures of a dogs reproductive system’… Or ‘Striptease classes’? Well these people were quite obviously disappointed when they clicked on the link to this site. In some ways this makes me feel slightly guilty, I feel that I should have some kind of disclaimer ‘If you came to this site via a search engine it’s quite probable that there is nothing of interest to you’ or something along those lines.
There was a stage when I was tempted to take ideas for my posts from the searches that led here. There was a good example of this when a search that led here was for ‘endorphins in exercise’, or something similar, because this is something that I know a bit about and would be interested in finding out more.
Well as you can see I have yet to do anything along these lines, partly because of the close relation it seems to have with stable doors and a definate lack of horses.
Well I was rather shocked this morning to check my email and find that comment spam is finding its way to my little corner of the internet. To be honest I thought that blogs had to be around for a lot longer and be more popular before this kind of thing happened, as you can see I’ve only been blogging for 3 months and 7 days, and I have a readership of approximately 4, all of whom are my friends (hi guys:)). This whole spam thing is rather rude but at least the content of the comments is sometimes rather good:
I’ve installed a spam blacklister, this should hopefully let me moderate the comments before they come through, but let my reader base comment as normal (all four of you).
Who knows, if I get enthusiastic enough I may but a ‘random spam words of wisdom’ section in the side menu, that’d be like a quote for the day kinda thing.
It is unlikely but still, it’s also an idea.
Well, I upgraded the stats counter (behind the scenes stuff) to 0.4.4, which didn’t go quite according to plan. It was failing to record any visits after the upgrade so I decided to set the BBC_DEBUG flag so I could see what ever messages were coming up. Unfortunately I accidently set the BBC_KILL_STATS flag first time round… and incase you can’t guess that means that all the previous visiting information has been wiped.
On the positive side I did get the counter working again (was a file that hadn’t copied across properly) and there is still a different counter supplied by united hosting which still works and has all the stats.
So not really that much of a problem, I’m just glad I didn’t blunder with something more important!
I hope you keep an eye on the ‘Recent cool stuff’ section of my links bar as I try to update this with, well with recent cool stuff I’ve found. I try to update this fairly often, the most recent cool link to make the grade is CDdance.com, a UK based dance CD music specailist. I know at least one person that’ll be interested in this link 😉
Well, looking back over some of my posts, I noticed that not only am I terrible with spelling mistakes, typos and grammar mistakes in general, but also, I have completely failed to follow my own advice.
In this post I stated that I would blog more about my thoughts than my actions… Well I’ve blatantly failed to do that, I also recal tempting fate by suggesting I’d share my comic genius with the world (couldn’t find that post, and also ‘Yeah right!’).
So where does that leave me?
Well I have had ideas for random and hopefully humerous diversions, but I’ve not had the time or been in the right frame of mind when I do have the time… you’ll see what I’m on about if it ever happens.
As for blogging my thoughts: Seems I haven’t had many of those recently. Hopefully soon though!
On a completely separate note, I’m off on a pub crawl with ‘the students’ tonight (yay!) and its pissing down with rain (boo!).
I have recently finished reading a book about punctuation. Now you may be thinking that this is quite possibly the dullest subject imaginable, but Eats, Shoots & Leaves (book of the year 2004) is a good read being humerous, light, and informative.
When I was at school, all those years ago, I didn’t get any lessons in grammar or punctuation, not that I remember anyway. This book has highlighted how little I actually know about the subtleties of english grammar. I have, thankfully, been able to pick up most of the basics from copious amounts of reading, but this has still left me quite wise in the art of proper punctuation and grammar.
“Wise?” I hear you ask, well if you accept the idea that wisdom is knowing that you know nothing, then yes, I am very wise.
While considering this fact on the train a thought struck me; if being wise means knowing you know nothing, surely wise people are also pretty negative?
Perhaps there should be proactive wisdom where you might say: ‘I know I know nothing and I’m going to do something about’, a scholarly wisdom if you like.
There would also be, I suppose, lethargic wisdom, where your thoughts would stray more along these lines: ‘I know I know nothing and I’m going to watch TV’, where you can feel safe in the knowledge that you are unlikely to learn anything from television and if anything remotely educational comes on then you can quickly change the channel.
I like to thing that I am proactively wise, although I must admit this activity is restricted to subjects that grab my attention.
What kind of wisdom do you have?
Are you wise at all for that matter?
Notice how I’m trying to insight a lively debate of sorts.
Feel free to correct my grammar and punctuation, it’s the only way I’ll learn. 🙂
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