escape to insanity

I was getting hit pretty hard by spam comments for a while (thanks to the excellent Akismet Wordpress plugin, none of it actually made its way past the filters), so I ended up banning the IP address responsible for 99% of it.

Life was good.

And now they’re back. Different IP, but same base range. So, that entire range is now banned from this site. Don’t worry - most people won’t be affected (and by most people I mean the two dozen people that ever read this site). The IP in question is a fairly well known, fairly prolific spam center.

So goodbye, 85.255.117.* — you won’t be missed.

One of my e-mail addresses has started receiving more than a healthy helping of spam in recent days. I’m not really sure how, and it’s not important anyway. There are probably a few different ways it could have happened; it doesn’t really matter that much to me.

What does matter is that it’s happening, and that I want it not to be happening. So… in the interest of trying to stem the flow, I’m going to completely disable the account for now. I’m hoping that after a week or two of bounce-back undeliverable mail, somewhere along the line my e-mail address will get removed from whatever lists it made itself onto.

What that means is that anyone who has that e-mail as the primary address for me is going to need to get that updated. As of this coming Sunday 6 April 2008 - one week from today - I’ll be disabling my ‘admin’ e-mail. Most people I know should have some alternate form of contacting me - phone, or another e-mail address.

So… heads up.

See you on the flip side.

So I know it's not yet May, and that means it's not yet time for a Reboot, but I felt like changing things up a little. I was never really happy with the last scheme, but it sufficed. I introduce to you the new look of Escape to Insanity. The most significant changes are actually under the hood; I streamlined or completely rewrote the bulk of the code that powers the site, so it runs a little smoother and maybe a little faster. I know it's not an entirely original layout (it ended up unintentionally looking a lot like Jeff Croft's site), but I like it. If you don't like it, don't worry. I'm re-writing the script to let you choose whatever design layout you prefer (of three, at the moment), and remember — Reboot is coming up in a few months anyway.

Any thoughts on the new design? If you notice any bugs, please let me know as soon as possible so I can fix them.

Apparently the comment system was utterly broken lately. I don't know how long it's been broken, but I got suspicious when there were no comments whatsoever for quite a while. I'm looking at the code to figure out what I changed that's affecting the comments.

In the meantime, it's working again, but it's not perfect.

edit: D'oh! I think I fixed it.

I'm considering attempting to add some sort of tag functionality to the site. If you're not familiar with tags, go read up on them. The quick and dirty explanation is that tags are a way to classify and sort data. Journal entries are data. Tags would basically be quick keywords to identify the content of a particular entry. For example, this entry could be tagged with “php, upgrades, tags” just to name a few. The idea is that you could then search by any one of those tags to find related posts — say, any posts I've written about upgrading the site.

I don't think it'd be that hard to add tags to the entries themselves. The tricky part would be coming up with a search function to make use of the tags. I might give it a try sometime later this week when I get some free time and don't feel like doing anything else.

Since the initial launch of this site, every line of code has been painstakingly hand-written by me. Every little bit of it was hand-crafted to do more or less whatever I wanted it to do. It's evolved from a few measly lines of inefficient ASP to several thousand (in total) lines of PHP. I have a custom content management system allowing me to post entries and you to comment on them, allowing me to edit posts and comments, even allowing each new entry to update an RSS feed. I'm proud of it. It's my baby.

But it's still not all that efficient, and it's not very outsider-friendly. Any updates I make are painfully difficult to implement because I have to go through all my code and make sure everything still works. It's getting harder and harder to deal with comment spam, although I dare say I've done a decent job of it so far. So I'm considering migrating all my content to WordPress. I've got it installed already, and I've been playing around with the options. It shouldn't too difficult to switch over. Obviously it'll take me a while to get the theme of the site looking like it should, so I'll be spending some time with the CSS figuring things out. My biggest problem is going to be finding a way to move the entries from my existing database to the WordPress database, which takes an entirely different form. I'm working on that as I type — I'm taking a break from coding a conversion tool to write this.

Hopefully all this effort will be worth my time. If nothing else, it gives me something to do while I wait to hear back from my prospective employer (hopefully tomorrow morning).