James Galvin

Any Irish bloggers hosted on Blacknight, be warned that they have decided to clamp down on the issue of servers getting overloaded by popularity surges on Wordpress-based sites.

As far as I can tell, Blacknight have always been good on traffic spikes, and whenever some guy gets dugg or stumbled it was well handled. Michele recommends using a different blogging platform like Movable Type, or else installing a cache plugin. One thing to note - I had Wordpress wp-cache plugin enabled in my installation for a long time, even upgraded it when there were new versions. Didn’t realise that this isn’t enough, and I had to edit a line in the wp-config.php to actually activate the caching.

As per our Acceptable-Usage Policy, we might have to suspend any site that causes issues like this. Putting it simply - if you’re not being a considerate neighbour we might have to shut you down until you behave.

This is definitely a fair policy, but Michele, I hope I don’t need to point out what is wrong with this sentence from a “how to win friends an influence customers” perspective.

Apologies to anyone who’s comment hasn’t made it onto this site in recent months. I’ve spotted a few false positives in my Akismet spam list lately, which makes me wonder how many I’ve missed in the past (because I usually just ‘delete all’). The inability to sort by “spamminess”, as Techcrunch puts it, is a glaring omission in Akismet’s functionality. It would be OK if I had 10 spam comments a day, but with hundreds of messages in the queue, I could never have time to check them all.

I used to filter e-mail with SpamAssassin. Any mail with a “spam score” of between 5 and 8 (higher probability of being spam) was held for moderation, and anything above 8 was just automatically deleted. A score of 5.01 means there’s a (relatively) good chance that the email is legit, while a score of 7.9 is almost certainly spam. Sorting by spam score meant I could quickly and easily identify false positives, and 90% of them would have a score of 5.x.

Matt et al are very secretive about the way Akismet operates behind the scenes, but if there is some fundamental reason why future releases won’t have this functionality, then I would see that as a fatal flaw. I might try out Defensio this week. If their spam filtering can get anywhere close to Akismet’s accuracy, then the ability to easily find false positives will make all the difference.

I changed the theme a few times over the past couple of weeks. Never realised that the last one I had actually didn’t work in Internet Explorer, which probably explains why my site traffic has plummeted. I was alerted to the fact that something was wrong when I stopped getting my usual €0.05 per day from the Google ads. All those guys searching for naked night elves no longer end up in the archives of this site. At least I’ve still got all those slightly disturbed Irish people searching for the “Bank of Ireland pixie” (this one).

Tired of having someone else’s theme break on me, I made the Kanagawa theme so that in future I only have myself to blame. Based on the Great Wave off Kanagawa. And I have decided to forsake anyone who still has less than 1024 x 768 resolution. Please let me know if you find any bugs.