Comments and Trackbacks are temporarily offline, sorry.
Archive for the ‘Housekeeping’ Category.
Back Online
I had to get my webhost to fix the Internal Server error. When they migrated servers last summer they did something special to make the CGI work, I think that was blown away. At any rate, they got it fixed relatively quickly, so I’m happy.
After that was brought up, I think my autoban script blew away the .htaccess file. But I fixed that as well so the default doc is back.
Its pretty late, I”ll see about posting some actual content tomorrow.
Typekey
I set up typekey authentication for the blog. Typekey is a form of authentication that can be used at many sites. Currently its set to require email address when posting a comment. It seems kind of funny to require that of people posting in a somewhat authenticated manner but still allow the quasi anonymous posting.
So for now you can do either. The main advantage is it allows me to “trust” certain commenter so they aren’t moderated. For now I’ll trust myself, and anyone I know personally. We don’t get a lot of legit comments, so its not really a big deal. I just figured I’d point out the change.
MT Changes
I played around with Movable Type and made some changes this weekend.
To conserve space on the right hand column, I converted the Monthly Archives links to a pulldown menu. I promptly re-used that saved space by adding a blog roll. A blog roll is merely a list of sites (in this case infosec and information technology) that I view regularly.
I added a back arrow on the calendar over on the right hand colum. It takes you to the Monthly archive page for the previous month. I am thinking of adding the calendar view to the Monthly archive page. That calendar slows down the site build, but I like that I can easily see my post frequencey. I shoot for 5 days a week posting. As you can see, I’m not keeping up.
I registered for Google Analysitics. That may give me a more accurate count of visitors. Currently, I’m a really high unique visitor count thanks to blog spammers. Unfortunately, this method will not count the RSS readers unless they click through to the site to read the article. Since I put the full article info in the RSS feed, most readers won’t do that.
index.rdf 404
Looks like last year Movabletype stopped updating index.rdf. I’ve deleted that file so if your RSS reader is looking for that and getting a 404, you should update to a current feed.
Test Post
This is a test post, upgraded to MT 3.33 today.
Trackbacks
Since a server migration, I’ve had nothing but trouble with trackbacks. The webhost support team resolved a problem with the cgi. But now, I seem to get so many spam trackbacks that Movable Type is throttling further trackbacks when it reaches a certain number per hour or per day.
All of the junk tracks are correctly tagged by the spam filter, but they still count against the throttle quota. The spammers are wasting their time since in addition to an effective spam filter, I am also moderating.
Its not as if people are beating down the door to send me a trackback ping, but I’d kind of like to actually receive it instead of having legitimate pings (including my own pings to older articles) throttled. Movable Type currently assigns a numeric trackback address to each post. This allows a spammer to send me a ping, without previously visiting the site. I hope this has been resolved in the new version of the software. I’m thinking about implementing a plugin which will rename the trackback links, and put the spammers in a tar pit, but I”m worried about the consequence.
Trackbacks back up
My host fixed their issue that was breaking my blog’s ability to receive trackbacks, which I mentioned here.
Inbound Trackbacks
Looks like inbound trackbacks aren’t working correctly. Comments are working though.
My webhost recently changed servers causing the problem. We’ll see if we can figure out how to fix this.
Mississippi AG Blog of Interest
After working at getting the site back to a point where I could post updates, I did a search over at search.msn.com to see who is linking here. The Mississipi Attorney General Cybercrime Center has a Blogs of Interest page (also titled Computer Security Blogs).
Guess whose blog is on it? Yep, this one. How about that!
