Not in code

Since I created this blog in 2003 I’ve faced an ongoing deluge of comment spam. I tried to address this by manually approving each post, but this turned out to be time-consuming and led to an annoying lag between the comment being posted and appearing on the site.

I then tried to automate this process using various spam filters including Akismet but they turned out to be useless with too many false positives.

I’ve finally fallen back on a “prove-you’re-a-person” image which seems to be working well so far. I’ve had no comment spam since installing it, though I’m unsure if I’ve missed any genuine comments. So, help me out - post a comment in response to this entry so I know I’m not missing any and let me know if you’ve got a better idea for dealing with comment spam.

I finally managed to find the time to fix a couple of issues with the website. It should no longer crash when you post a comment. I do however moderate all my comments so please be patient if you don’t see your comment appear straight away. I do this mainly to prevent comment spam from appearing on the site.

While I was playing with the blog engine, I thought I may as well change the theme. My new theme is Hemingway. I particularly like its simplicity. What do you think?

And oh yeah, I’m back in Melbourne now. About not blogging while I was in India - it’s amazing how easy it is for priorities to change when your environment changes :) The trip was fantastic even though I didn’t do much traveling. Perhaps I’ll blog about it sometime in the future, but given my track record I’m not going to make any promises.

If you’ve visited this blog more than once and plan on coming back, please register using the link on the sidebar so I know who’s reading my rants. At the very least knowing someone’s actually reading might improve the quality & frequency of my posts :)

Some of you may have noticed that the dates on my blog are a bit strange ( I didn’t even have a blog in Dec 2003!). This is because the textpattern import script bundled with WordPress is a little buggy. When I get a chance I’m going to fix up the script and re-import my old textpattern entries, until thenI apologise for the confusion this may have caused.

That’s how long temperamental google took to reorganise it’s index and bring me back to the top of the list when you do a search for my name

My website mysteriously vanished from google for a while after I changed to a blog. Yahoo picked up the change almost immediately.

In other recent news, I’ve just posted a couple of comments to this thread that’s about developing a comment-spam prevention/moderation measure. Do you have an opinion on the subject?

I did a search for my website in a few popular search engines and found this cached page in yahoo which indicates that Hiremaga.com was in the Top 50 sites with the longest running systems (without a reboot) in May 2004 according to Netcraft

Hiremaga.com used to be hosted on a Red Hat Linux 9 server (that I administered myself ad hoc). This server hosted my site and various other websites running on Apache, PHP, Tomcat 5 etc with MySQL as a DB. It was generally up2date with the latest patches and I was somehow able to get through almost an entire year without needed to reboot the server.

Hiremaga.com is now hosted on an Windows Server 2003 box which has been restarted atleast 3-4 times since it was first setup about 3 months ago, mostly to install operating system updates which needed a reboot.

I concede that I was pretty slack with the old Linux server, in that I did not install any kernel updates (I’m only say this now because I’m no longer on that box). This probably had something to do with why it never needed a reboot, however it’s still an impressive(interesting?) achievement. The contrast between the two operating systems is worth noting – this graph for medical-entrance.com.au is worth taking a look at. Hiremaga.com has run of the same server as medical-entrance.com.au for the last few years so the graph is also valid Hiremaga.com

I’m not really drawing any major conclusions from this because it’s a pretty one dimensional comparison, however the stark contrast between the need to reboot on the two operating systems is interesting. I’m not really a qualified systems admin so it’s entirely possible that I didn’t reboot the Linux box when it actually needed one, having said that I’m not exactly clueless when it comes to Linux and I never found the need to do this :)

My early impressions of Windows Server 2003 have been very positive, especially compared with it’s infamous predecessor. I’ll try to blog a bit more on Windows 2003 and how I feel it’s rates against Linux as a server OS (for my needs anyway), sometime in the near future.

I will end this post with a brief list of “some”(not all) of my reasons for switching from Linux to Windows Server 2003:

• Red Hat stopped supporting Red Hat 9 and I was forced to choose a new OS or upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise
• The other techs who would be doing some of the server administration had never used Linux
• Almost all of the reviews that I have read about Windows Server 2003 have been positive
• We use Windows on all of our servers at work and I wanted to develop my administrative skills a bit further with this OS (almost all my prior admin experience is on Linux)
• The person who the server is primarily for was considering ASP.NET as the technology platform for some of their web applications and I’m not yet convinced with the commercial viability of MONO
• I was very curious about how it(Win2k3) would stack up against Linux in real practical use as a Server OS

It’s come to my attention that some people may have issues emailing me at my usual email address because my ISP (www.zoneedit.com) may be blocking emails sent from certain Telstra mail servers thinking they’re spam. I don’t really have much control over zoneedit’s spam filters so I can’t really do much about it at this stage other than hope that the Telstra’s techs get their servers removed from whichever blacklist zoneedit’s using.

I do have an alternate email address that people can use, so if you’re one of the people trying email me and getting blocked try ahiremagalur [AT] gmail.com instead. It would also help if you sent me a copy of the bounced message so that I can try and follow up the issue with the appropriate ISP’s.

Ok, I’ll admit it’s nothing fancy but atleast the website looks semi-presentable now (courtesy of DWMX2004).

In addition to the cosmetic change, you might notice that I ‘ve added a search box and a list of links on the right side of the page. I’ve only added them because I’m finally venturing a little deeper into the functionality offered by textpattern. I think they also makes the site look a little less plain which is definitely a good thing. I haven’t had a chance to add too many links as yet but I plan on doing this sometime in the very near future. If you’d like to suggest any just add a comment to this post or email me.

Now for some pizza from La Porchetta and Sunday night TV…

I apologise in advance for the state of the site… I am experimenting with new templates…

Ok so it’s been 3 weeks since I installed textpattern and I still haven’t posted anything significant. The site is still bare and I haven’t really given anyone who’s been here a good reason to come back.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I have been consumed by assignments in recent days and this is my major excuse. I’m finally done with my assignments for the semester but exams start next week so it looks like I won’t be able to address the appearance of the site till mid-June.

Sigh…