I haven’t been around here for a few weeks, and probably won’t be for the rest of the year. I’m closing out the books, getting some projects completed, and trying to prepare to relax some for the holidays.

See you next year.

… you see a car license plate that reads “666FEE” and wonder to yourself what color that would be.

I updated to the most recent release of Wordpress this morning. One of the features that had caused me to delay my upgrade was the post revision feature. I do a lot of revisions as I work on posts, and I really don’t care about keeping notes along the way. It just clutters up my database with unneeded content. I am not an editor. I don’t want to keep a history of changes made over the life of a post. Some of my posts exist as drafts for months and go through dozens of writing sessions before they’re ready to be published.

So as I was going through the upgrade I did a bit of reading on the web and found an article that discussed an option named WP_POST_REVISIONS that can be added to the Wordpress configuration file. The setting cannot be configured via the Admin panel which I think is an oversight. However, it is quite flexible. More…

Firefox has a lot of fans. That’s not a problem. I have tried it, and personally I don’t care for it. I’m not looking to be converted or convinced, so don’t bother leaving comments making the attempt. While I was on the phpBB team I took a lot of grief for using IE, and that’s fine. I always said that I use IE because it’s used in the corporate world where I live and work.

To digress a minute… I have Urchin statistics installed on my server. I had the package before, and ultimately I disabled it because of the amount of server horsepower that was required to keep up with the processing. It seemed that my log files were not being rotated properly, so when they got really large urchin started to choke on the volume of data. Since moving to my new server, I have been trying to get urchin started up again. I finally got it going this week.

As a result I thought it might be interesting to see browser statistics and how they vary from one site (audience) to the next. More…

In an effort to get some projects back on track (including this blog) I have resigned my position on the moderator team at phpbb.com. I have nothing but fond memories of my time on the team, especially the trip to London last summer to meet folks and get the opportunity to discuss anything and everything.

I have also completed my spring/summer conference season (which this year included trips to Orlando and Sydney, Australia).

The first project this summer that I have planned is to rewrite the PM system for phpBB2. It has been requested as a feature at phpbbrefugees.com and – believe it or not – after seven years of not having it, it has been requested on BOB, my largest phpBB2 board. So I will be able to write something up and use it for both boards. I will probably start that project in early July, and hopefully finish before going on vacation in August.

Yeah, life is busy.

I have not been able to do much of anything related to phpBB for the past month and a half, and I apologize for that. I am only now getting back to things and expect to ramp up activity here and at the Refugees site shortly. My apologies.

No more blog posts from me for the rest of the year, as I will be taking some time off. See y’all next year! Happy holidays, and wishes of happiness and success to you and yours in the new year.

Today I decided to check in on my “honey pot” board that I have running. I haven’t been there in a week or so but things were still humming along last time I looked. This time when I logged in I got a warning from my pop-up blocker. My initial reaction? I’ve been hacked.

PM Spammers

It turned out that the real answer was much more benign… it was the notification of new private messages popping up. More…

Today I got my first spam that successfully navigated the Checkbox Challenge. It was caught by Akismet, which shows the power of a layered defense. On phpBB2 boards we have seen an increase in manual spam. Manual spam is really hard to defeat because it’s done by humans. On the other hand, it’s more expensive for the spammers too. I will be watching this closely to see how things trend over the next few months.

I had a post scheduled to come out a few days back that was supposed to contain an IRC conversation with DavidMJ, one of the developers for phpBB3. For some reason that post was not the latest revision. I have corrected that now and it contains the full conversation, which is quite enlightening. The full post is out now:

Conversation with DavidMJ on phpBB3 Caching

I apologize for the delay in catching this issue, but I’ve been flat out sick for the past several days.