Tag: blog

Doing something about this blog

I’ve been a bit busy since – well, since 2012 actually. I’ve only posted here once since I resumed working in the computer industry, and that was only because I couldn’t let Darcy’s death go by without comment. I haven’t even updated my CV or LinkedIn to reflect the new reality. I have a one-track mind, I guess: I either live my life or I write about it.

This blog needs picking up and giving a good shake to straighten it out: a mobile-friendly redesign, a replacement of the photo (I don’t actually look like that any more). A slight change of direction; maybe a few posts about software engineering, even? With a bit of tagging and filtering to allow people to skip them if bored. Maybe next year.

Meanwhile, though, there is one thing I’ve been meaning to put online somewhere ever since it happened, and here’s the place to put it. So I’m going to post it here, and if I can work out how, it’ll be backdated to June, which is when it actually happened.

 

WordPress comment spam

In the past few days I’ve been inundated with comment spam. I suppose the spammers respond when an inactive blogger starts posting again. So I changed my WordPress settings to close comments automatically on postings older than 28 days (most of the spams were comments on old postings, not the recent ones). Sadly that seems to have stopped it displaying the old, approved comments as well! They are still there in the database but they don’t display unless I re-open the posts for comments. I guess this is going to require some hacking of my theme, and I haven’t time, so it will languish on the to-do list for now.

The site is the blog; the blog is the site

This website had fallen into disrepair. All the action (such as there was) was going on elsewhere.

This week I have taken a deep breath, installed WordPress, learned how to customize it (it wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d expected), imported everything from my old blog, and created new (back-dated) pages and postings as homes for all the odd pages and other bits of material I had elsewhere.

It will take a bit of getting used to, but I think I like this. It seems more in tune with reality. Everything you write is out of date as soon as it’s published. So why not admit it? Put a date on it, and let it recede into the past. The perfect definitive ‘finished’ site is never going to happen.