Vermin spammers! Over the weekend they figured out how to get by the older versions of WordPress with older versions of Akismet spam filter module/plug-in, so I came home from dance competition to discover hundreds of spams in my WordPress blog’s moderation queue and thousands that had been blocked.
Making things worse a few guest blogs I help friends run had the same problem. So I upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 (thanks to DreamHost for making that a “one click” per blog install) and huge thanks to the WordPress team for including the upgrade to Akismet plug-in 2.0 in that install. I am hoping that shuts down the vermin.
Makes one glad that LJ handles all this stuff for you… My LJ blog was completely un-impacted by the burst in spam activity over the weekend. Yay LiveJournal!
There’s quite a lot of confusion over the issues of “Net Neutrality” versus “Hands Off The Internet” on the talk shows, news blogs, and a very confused mainstream media. Part of the problem is that both camps have chosen extremely poor names for their own causes.
In case anyone is wondering I am wholeheartedly endorsing the “Net Neutrality” side of the argument, and here is exactly why:
1) when I first heard about the cable and telephone industry attempts to lobby for additional fees that they’d charge content and web service providers, I wondered “Why?” because Google, Amazon, AOL, and CNN already pay for all the bytes they deliver with very high bandwidth consumption rated fees. As more and more consumers stream video from YouTube or CNN - their fees go up already. (more…)
Well, after weeks of shopping around and days of fiddling with RedHat 9 and Centos (linux distributions) I decided to host my personal website at DreamHost. They have an excellent deal allowing you to host several domains on one account for only $9.95/month ($7.95/month if you sign up for 2 years), and that includes a free domain name registration for as long as you are paying them.
So I moved my home pages and Blogger web log to scottnolan.org and scottnolan.org/blogger.html and copied all the files off Erci’s vampyr.org servers at Interland. Erci will be moving her site and blog over to the DreamHost systems soon too. Interland had great support and connectivity, but their billing was per domain, and as we are adding more domains soon, it was getting expensive. We’ll talk to the folks at La Belle about moving too, but they are paid for quite some time at Interland, so there is no hurry yet. We’ll be standing up a few new domains too (Arthur Murray DC and SGI Fortune District).
One of the other nice things about the DreamHost accounts is that they let us do imap/webmail with SpamAssassin protection and Mailman mailing lists (it’d be really nice to finally get the La Belle and Fortune District mailing lists set up properly for a change). They also have one button installs of things like WordPress, Drupal, TextPattern, MySQL, and phBBS - which will make our lives a lot easier.
