dom.blog

Hello and welcome to the brand new redesign! Now, it’s still in beta and there are a load of bugs to work out – especially in the first few hours as I get all the links working. So hold your fire if something doesn’t work!

1. They’ll be a beta test involving regular users with special logons and fancy passwords.

2. The new look features ‘Indian Red’

3. Everything will validate. Everything!

4. Current bugs include a chilling demonstration of Internet Explorer 6’s ‘guillotine’ bug – recently fixed in IE7

5. It’ll knock babble’s socks off.

Thanks to Elliott Back for this temporary solution while the Gravatar site has domain problems (it expired).

In NP_Gravatar.php, find

$this->createOption(‘gravatarURL’,’Gravatar server’,’select’,’wide.gravatar.com’,’Default|wide.gravatar.com|Alternative
|www.gravatar.com’);

and change to

$this->createOption(‘gravatarURL’,’Gravatar server’,’select’,’wide.gravatar.com’,’Default|wide.gravatar.com|Alternative
|www.gravatar.com|DNS|64.124.231.223′);

then reinstall the plugin and select ‘DNS’ as your option.

My wonderful hosts enabled FreeType support this morning, and as a result a Captcha has been implemented with the comment form. It’s simple enough – simply copy the characters displayed in the image to get your comment submitted. And if you mistake, never fear, your comment is not lost and you can just try again.

This should bring an end to my anti-spam woes, and consequently instant commenting has been re-enabled on all posts from the last 7 days. Older ones still need pre-moderation, for now, while I assess how it’s all working.

Thanks for bearing with me as the spammers descended. Message to the vultures – it’s over, go home. And no, you don’t get your ball back.

Overnight, I got 130 pieces of comment spam. Luckily, the first few started trickling in before I went to bed so, fearing the worst, I turned on pre-moderation for all comments. Unfortunately, this will now remain until I figure out a better way to deal with this. (For those of you screaming Captcha – my initial tests suggested it wouldn’t work on here, or at least not without fiddling.)

I think the main problem is that the master blacklist doesn’t seem to be keeping up. For now, I have put all the URLs spamming into a text file to download and I suggest that anybody relying on the Blacklist adds these to your personal list ASAP.

Ironically, since all links are tagged with rel=”no follow” the whole spam operation is meaningless anyway.