Wow, that was a fun little adventure we just went on together wasn’t it? Started in wordpress, moved to a different host, then to different software, then back to wordpress but a new and updated version, which you won’t notice unless you’re me and get to look at the admin interface.
Let’s relax now.
I’m tired of emitting bits of political outrage stolen from the loathsome and infuriating Reddit.com to a Wordpress blog with an irrelevant list of categories I never use and a blogroll two years out of date. I want to change something.
I want to set up some new and different kind of blog, doing something new and different with it.
What, where, how?
I don’t know yet.
Thomas Dolby’s out touring again with a new CD and all, and he’s got this video podcast called The Sole Inhabitant (a phrase from his song White City, and also the name of his current tour), and I have been subscribed to it for a while and I only just got around to watching/listening to it, and wow. It’s footage of Dolby performing live, with a small commentary intro/outro. You get to see practically every keystroke of his performance, and realize that all that electronica is very, very live. Dolby’s rocking the chrome-dome these days, and he looks like some kind of character from a cyberpunk story when he performs — a head studded with gadgets (but practical ones — e.g, wireless earphones, mic, and what appears to be an iSight strapped to the side of his head, footage from which is edited into the podcast) and in one video he’s wearing this weird oversized trenchcoat.
So geeky. So cool. Dolby is the man. I want to be him. I want to be a tenth as cool at my coolest moment as he is while flossing.
Between Bad Behavior blocking most spambots from even reaching the site (look at the bottom of the page to see how many it’s blocked as of now) and Akismet screening out the trickle that get through, I seem to have the comment spam issue covered. But what about legitimate comments? Is Akismet going to mistake them for spam, so I have to comb through them to find gems of real humanity? If you’ve got nothing better to do, help me out here with an experiment. Drop a comment from you, a human being (or equivalent sapient entity) reading this, and I’ll see which ones if any get misclassified as spammage. I’ll report what happened in an update on the post.
I’m dreading checking my comments, because, as I mentioned, they seem to get sicker by the day. I’m going to try to cut back on some of the worst offenders, by outright banning words that I imagine will be far more common in the urschleim than in real people’s comments. Comments with these words in them (even as partial words) will drop straight into the primal ooze, instantly deleted without even being queued for moderation. I think probably banning the f-word will get rid of most of them. Going to give that a try. Apologies to friends leaving posts with casual profanity who get them deep sixed for that reason. Try to clean up that pottymouth.
I had several other words that seemed obvious candidates for banning but many words are really nasty in one context but perfectly normal in another. Or they may occur as parts of innocent words or phrases. A friend named kept getting her emails returned by a corporate email filter and experimentation eventually proved it was objecting to her last name, Van Dyke. That kind of thing. If I ban the most common slang term for micturation, as I was tempted to by a particularly vile comment spam, I will never hear of anyone “pissing and moaning” in my comments, which seems like overkill.
I think I’m probably safe putting the kibosh on “shemale” though. Let me know if that inconveniences anyone, kay?
UPDATE
I think I’m going to give some plugins a chance before I try to come up with words to block myself. Starting with Akismet and thinking about Bad Behavior. So if you want to use naughty words in comments you should be cool if you’re not an evil spambot.