Category: Internet

As you can see, I’ve installed [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.com). I hoped it would be easier to get things like comments and trackbacks working. Plus I can check out the very promising [MarsEdit](http://ranchero.com/marsedit/) for writing posts. And now my blog looks less spartan and more… well, more like every other MT blog. But hopefully that can be addressed too.

After my experience with WordPress, I installed MT to use Berkeley DB rather than MySQL, but since the dynamic publishing capabilities seem to require MySQL, I may have to switch over again. Probably I should do that before I get too many entries here.

…speaking of which, I seem to have changed over just after [Nick](http://www.nickbastin.com/archives/000146.php) became the first person to link to me. And now I’ve gone and broken those links. [Edit: I made an effort to see if I could fix this with an appropriate set of RewriteRules, but that way lies madness, so I guess Nick will just have to fix his links.] Sorry, Nick.

Comments closed

About a month ago a coworker offered me a Gmail invitation. Although I prefer to use a regular IMAP mail client to access my mail, I figured I’d take him up on the offer and reserve a reasonable email address.

The next time I logged into Gmail was this morning. Of course I had no new messages in my inbox, which is not surprising since I’d never given this address to anyone.

I did, however, have a piece of spam. Received less than three weeks after creating the Gmail address. Which (to repeat) I never gave to anyone. And which uses a different account name than the one I normally use (at which I get about 750 pieces of spam a month).

By the way, Gmail’s filters had caught the spam. Good to know, and no less than I’d expect, really. So if I post a feedback link to this blog, I may well use that address instead.

But really, the whole thing was quite breathtaking. They say 75% of the traffic that crosses the Internet these days is spam. I’m beginning to think it’s time to chuck SMTP and invent a new, fully authenticating mail protocol.

Comments closed

The events of the past week having motivated me to restart my weblog, I decided to take a look at WordPress, which seems to be getting popular and looks like it has some nice features.

So I downloaded it. Gee, it requires a MySQL database. Now I’ve got a lot of software experience, but it happens that SQL databases is not one of those things I’ve ever needed to use before. OK, so it’s easy to create a MySQL database at my webhost, and the WordPress setup automatically creates all the necessary data structures.

So now I figured I’d change the auto-generated password. And here my troubles began. The new password didn’t work. I clicked on the “lost my password” link. WordPress sent me a new password. That one didn’t work. Oh well, I thought, I haven’t really done anything I can lose, yet, so I deleted the database and recreated it, made a test post, and went to bed.

This morning there were seven pieces of comment spam waiting for moderation. I’d made exactly one post, with commenting turned off, and apart from a reference in a set of PyCon notes, nobody even knows I have a blog. I can’t be having this…

…but, not ready to give up, I deleted the spam and tried to make a couple of new posts, figuring there must be something in the WordPress community about this. Then I tried changing my password again. Bad idea; same problem. I checked the WordPress websites. Hey, it’s a known problem, and there’s a way to fix it — edit the database directly. Boo. Hey, my webhost supports phpadmin. Yay. Hey, I can’t log into my own database with any password I can think of. Boo.

People, I’m sure there’s something obvious to do at this point, but I’ve got a job; I’ve got a family; I’ve got a life; and I’m pretty sure a simple weblog doesn’t really need a freakin’ SQL database. It’s just words, right?

So I’m back to Blosxom for now. (Sorry, Ted, Pyblosxom wasn’t looking very stable for me last spring; at that time, even one of the developers had switched his own blog to WordPress or MT or something. I’m sure it’s better now, but I’m not interested in hacking a blog; I just want to write.)

Also, no comments for now. If you want to comment, (a) get your own blog, or (b) send me an email (I’m not posting my email address, but you can probably deduce it) and if it’s cogent or worth a reply, I’ll post it.

Comments closed