The World of Stuff .com

Behind the screens

Well, April is upon us, and you know what that means: Lifeapalooza!

Get Carded‘s annual organ donation awareness concert was on Thursday night, and unlike in previous years, I had an exam at the same time and couldn’t help out for most of it. All I had time to do was set up and clean up. Go figure. But I was around to witness us reaching our goal of signing up 50 organ donors. At least, I think we made it. If not, we were very close.

My exam was the crucial second exam in my accounting class. (I’m taking it for my business minor.) To give you an idea of what my accounting class is like: during the first week of class, the TA asked us, “How many of you have heard this class is hard?” Most people raised their hand; I didn’t.

Back to Thursday. I was setting up for Lifeapalooza around dusk, when the insects come out to play. Some of them decided to bite my face, and then they decided to bite my face some more. So I took a two-hour exam with an itchy face. After the exam, I needed to show my student ID to one of the proctors, so I shoved my hand into my pocket, opening a cut on my finger and causing it to bleed profusely. Despite those bad omens, I did better than I thought I would on the exam, and a B remains within sight. My weekend has also been pretty mixed, but I’ll get to that in a future post.

Right now, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that I just upgraded WordPress, including my database and several of my plugins. If you notice that any aspect of the blog is broken, please contact me right away.

I’ve been using WordPress for over five years now, but I’ve always hated upgrading, so I rarely do it. The official instructions tell you which files to delete and which ones not to delete, but I always feel like I’m going to accidentally delete something important. It wouldn’t be a big deal because I always back my stuff up before upgrading, but still, I just don’t like it. It’s awkward and painful. I liken it to pulling out your own teeth. Not that I’ve done that, of course.

But if upgrading WordPress the regular way is like pulling out your teeth, then upgrading with Subversion is like having a sexy dentist cart out the laughing gas and take care of everything for you. Essentially, Subversion allows you to download all the updated files with a single command. Pretty sweet. Hopefully now I won’t be as lazy about upgrading.

For a long time, I had some measures in place that eliminated automated comment spam but let manually posted spam right through. The manual spam was never a very big problem until recently, so I have some new anti-spam measures that you should also be aware of. For years, I’ve been too lazy or paranoid to install Akismet, the premier anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Well, I’ve finally installed it, but I’m not using it the way it’s normally used.

Normally, Akismet checks an incoming comment against its database and puts it in the blog’s spam queue if it thinks the comment is spam. That’s all fine and good, but I get dozens if not hundreds of spam comments every day, and I’m not going to sift through them to find false positives. Fortunately, I’ve discovered a helper plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA. Now, if Akismet thinks a comment is spam, the submitter will be asked to fill in a simple CAPTCHA. If it’s filled in correctly, the comment proceeds to the spam queue, where I can approve or reject it. If not, it is summarily deleted.

With these two plugins working together, automated comment spam is still zapped instantly because Akismet generally recognizes it as such and because robots can’t (or don’t) solve the CAPTCHA. The spam queue will hold what we might call false negatives (comment spam posted by beings intelligent enough to solve a CAPTCHA) and false positives (the hopefully very few legitimate comments that Akismet thinks is spam). Of course, true negatives (i.e., normal comments) will be merrily allowed through as always. Nothing is different about that.

What’s the advantage of all this, you ask? Now, the blog has a defense against both automated and manual comment spam (as long as Akismet can recognize it, which it almost always does). Also, when I mark comments as spam or not spam, the Akismet system learns from its mistakes. Pretty cool. I can teach it that anyone who violates my plainly stated no-advertising policy is a spammer, so don’t even think about linking to your irrelevant web site where you sell stuff, or you could be blackballed from other blogs too.

By the way, my roommate Andy suggested the title of this post. Thanks, And-Man.

Just one link, since this is getting pretty long. I don’t normally like so-called 8-bit music, but MOON8 is pretty cool. It’s what Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon would sound like on an original Nintendo. (Via waxy.org)