Blessed by the Potato

Posting has been light, but I have been spending time on the site lately, just mostly fiddling with the back-end. The spam comments have crept up from nearly 100/day to almost 200/day over the last few months, and that’s just getting ridiculous. I skim the spam filter so quickly to try to get through them all in a decent amount of time that I’ve lost some false positives (sorry to those of you whose legitimate comments were eaten). So I put in a quick javascript check (which you can see now), but that only cut out about 20% of the spam. So I’ve tried a new method I found referred in the wordpress codex, and that cut out about 30% of the spam. So I’m back to the tide of spam I was facing a few months ago — more than I’d like, but a manageable amount.

Most of it comes from the 173.2** range of IP addresses, and I’m tempted to block the entire range in my .htaccess file. But that would also deny access to any legitimate users that might be in that range, and I’d rather deal with spam than accidentally keep actual readers out. One other feature of spam is that it tends to focus on the older posts, and seems to hit only certain ones (I think) so what I’ve been doing is closing comments to posts that are more than a few months old as the spambots find them. If for whatever reason you do want to comment on an old post, you can either email me, or comment on any post that does have comments enabled, and I’ll move it.

Now, part of doing this manually is to continue to learn about how my platform works, and part is because all the modern plug ‘n play spam tools for WordPress are for the newer versions, and I figured it would take less time to hack at the guts of my current install than to try to upgrade to the current version of WP. Maybe that was a mistake, but I’m so used to the way this one works (and it does work for me) that I’m loathe to change it.

I also wanted to create a new archives page that might work better than the current method of sifting through the archives 10 posts at a time by category or date (via the links in the sidebar). I wanted to group the posts by category, then have the full list of post titles under that. I couldn’t quite get it to work, but I do have a simple list of posts under the page BbtP Archives in the sidebar now. The formatting isn’t quite there either, but it works, and I think I’m going to stop wasting time trying to improve it.

If you’re reading this, then we’re saved. The world has not ended, despite the recent predictions of some. Macho Man Randy Savage died to save us, by keeping Zombie Jesus in a headlock through the appointed hour. Thus every year henceforth, followers of this sect will celebrate Macho Mania on or about May 21 (Canadians may do double-duty with Victoria Day), to celebrate the Macho Man’s sacrifice for all. Ooooh yeah.

Of course, others believe that the prediction was nonsense to begin with, so little to no supernatural mercy can be ascribed to Saint Savage. Potatoism (the way of the Holy Potato) does not contain any explicit teachings on eschatology, no hints as to whether the world will grind to a halt in the freezing darkness, be consumed by flames, drowned by unstoppable seas, or devoured by ravenous zombie dinosaurs — and has certainly provided no sell-by date for the planet.

So yeah, either no danger to begin with, or our continued existence is owed to an unlikely hero’s struggle in the hereafter. Either way, life goes on, and the devout have their new hero, and the rest of us have an excuse to party and eat slim jims in the nice weather of early spring (any recommendations on vegetarian slim jim alternatives?).

So I forgot that after I got a real webhost I also signed up for Google Analytics, and it’s been a little sobering to look back on the stats now. I get, on average, 7 unique visitors per day. Considering one of them is probably me (since I no longer access the backend directly, as my real webserver is with some company with server farms and probably my old dog Schwartz frolicking, because he totally went to a farm like my parents suggested when I was 11 and not put down like they told me when I was 22, and if he went to a farm it was probably a server farm; and not a decrepit Windows ME system under my desk), that’s just 6 people who visit the site per day. True, many (uncountably many) people may be on the RSS feed now that it actually works, while others may only check every few weeks since it’s not like I post all that often anyway… but I also know that I wake up to 20+ spam comments caught in my filter every morning afternoon. The average length of my posts is about 800 words, so that’s roughly 133 words per visitor.

I thought I had more “real-world” friends reading than that, plus the odd internet person (or chatty AI)… apparently not. Though there have been more than 6 people that have commented in the past on particular posts, it doesn’t appear as though they stick around. So, guessing at the identity of my 6 readers, here are 133 words for each of you:

Wayfare: “She tries to get me to write, and I try to get her not to edit.” I know you must feel in some way obligated to read, if only to check in and see if I was killed in a horrible fiery wreck on the 401. Still, I know you like all the rants here. It’s tough getting this worked up about major (and admittedly, minor) issues and then writing about it for the internet, and mistakes are bound to creep in. I’m glad you use the comments section for corrections. Please send me adorable cat pictures, as I know I don’t have nearly enough for your tastes, and our cat is way cuter than all of Scalzi’s put together (which, as a 3-headed 12-legged monster cat, probably wouldn’t be all that cute).

Netbug: You got me into this whole WordPress thing, then abandoned your own for Twitter. I just can’t do Twitter, man… I can barely get this 133 word gimmick to fit in this one-off post, so a 140 character limit all the time is a serious straitjacket for me. Can you start doing movie reviews on Twitter? I’ve seen some awful movies recently that someone really should have saved me from: The Box, Amelia (actually, both of those I saved myself from after the first fifteen minutes or so). I’m reminded that I should start writing about the upcoming StarCraft2 launch to help get you psyched for it, because if you let me down on SC2, man, Ima gonna be pissed. I’m even carefully timing my graduation so I will have more play time!

Ben: I find it a sign of the times that we seem to be more up-to-date on each others’ lives by reading each others’ blogs than we ever were when we lived in the same city. Speaking of up-to-date on each other’s lives, what’s going on with the housing search?? You put that big blog post up, I put a big messy comment in reply, and then nothing except pictures of meat! (There are a lot of meat pictures on your blog!) Inquiring minds want to know! Also, I have no idea what the deal is with wine, so many of the “descriptive” words used make no sense to me, yet somehow you describing a Pillitteri Chardonnay (a liquid) as “Like a mouthful of oaky buttered toast” makes the world a stranger, better place.

Michael James: I feel bad, actually, that you read this blog. You’ve got an interest in personal finance, and I do occasionally have a post on finance which, IMNSHO, I totally rock. I even have graphs sometimes, and I know you must have a great love of graphs because you so often have such awesome ones on your own blog, and nobody graphs like that just because they think it’s a useful way to convey information. I’ll try to make more graphs (and good ones too, not just graphing alleged cookie ninja attacks vs university exam schedule). Still, I can’t help but think that I somehow tricked you, that every time another post arrives in your RSS feed, and you see it’s not finance related — let alone full of awesome crazy — you shake your head… Sorry.

Spambot: They say flattery will get you everywhere, and I’d say that it’s partly true. When you come in here and post a message about how awesome my blog is and asking for “more information on that topic”, it makes me feel good, in a really vague way. I start to convince myself that you might actually be a real person that likes my writing… until you post ten of the same message daily. That ruins the effect, Spambot. Plus, sometimes, you go and start what I can only assume is swearing in Chinese, and it’s not appreciated, even from a nascent distributed-computing sentience that hasn’t yet properly learned nettiquette. Also, it’s not cool to post more per day than I do, or to make money from my blog when I’m not. Fuck you.

Unknown reader: I don’t know who you are, you’ve never commented. This whole Web2.0 thing is supposed to make it possible for people to provide feedback and make the web all interactive, but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to. I respect your decision to remain silent and anonymous, and thank you for your readership anyway, and hope I’ve helped entertain or educate you. Besides, I hardly ever comment on other peoples’ posts, even though I read a lot out there. You wouldn’t think it from a guy who goes around blogging and trying to get readers for his blog, but I’m actually kind of shy myself, even on the great anonymous supertube network highway, and sometimes compose comments on other posts, just to delete them without posting. So I totally get where you’re coming from.

In conclusion, I suppose I should be glad I don’t have more readers, because otherwise I’d be up all night looking at what crazy google terms you used to land here, and have to write minor monologues to each of you…

I put a movie on in the background and just spent an hour and a half going through the last year’s worth of posts correcting the relative links. I figure anything older than that and it won’t really matter that much anyway. It was a little dull, but nowhere near as taxing as the initial adjustment of trying to figure out how to get the MySQL database working.

Things are pretty smooth now, so I think I’m going to point holypotato.com to the DreamHost version now. The plan is to run both in parallel for a while, then start shutting down the self-hosted version for most of the time to save power (though if I keep copying my posts to the self-hosted version, it’s there as a backup in case anything happens to DreamHost, or I decide to leave them, so it won’t go away completely). I know I’ve only been doing this in the middle of the night, but a shared space on DreamHost’s server is about 10X faster than my ancient yet dedicated server!

There’s still work to be done: I’ve lost my ability to upload pictures via the WordPress interface due to a permissions problem (there’s still FTP, but it’s a little more awkward when in the middle of composing, especially when on the road). The search function has never worked right (the first page of results come up ok, but after that the string passed to the URL is wrong and I don’t know where in the php to fix that). I’m sure there are more things on my to do list, and more moving hiccups that will crop up along the way, but none of them seem to be impinging on the core capabilities of me writing and you reading.

So the big news is that I have gone out and purchased actual webhosting from DreamHost (hatip: CC). The idea is that it would let me stop having to deal with server issues (which thankfully have been astoundingly rare considering the dinosaur I have under my desk powering the site), and also make the site more easily indexed by The Google, plus fix some of the issues I was unable to resolve with the RSS feed.

This has been the plan for some time — ever since I first started putting ads up. I know I’ll never make money with BbtP (certainly not enough to hire staff writers!) due in no small part to the fact that I don’t really write for a commercialized audience (I don’t stay on topic, I’m verbose, I have a sick proclivity for parentheses, and I don’t stick to a schedule), but I was hoping to pull in enough to cover the hosting costs at least. Sadly, I just don’t have the readership for that — right now my full year ad revenues are adding up to be enough to cover approximately 3 days of hosting.

Fortunately, my dad gave me some money for no reason at all, and just told me to spend it, so I got the hosting plan.

As of right now I have bumped the blog directory from /blog to the root of holypotato.net (an additional domain to holypotato.com), which I think is a good long-term organizational move. However, that means that I have broken every single link within my posts (i.e., those links referring to other posts). External links should be ok if they were using the permalinks I was putting at the bottom of posts, but I know that at least a few people linking back here were cut & pasting from their browser’s URL (which would have been the IP, which was doomed to change sooner or later anyway).

So right now I have the two domains acting separately: .com is still hosted on my PIII under my desk, and .net is at DreamHost (with all the broken links). Hopefully by January I’ll have fixed things up and merged the two domains so that no matter which one you choose to use to visit me they get you to the same place. Hopefully, I won’t break anyone’s RSS feed in the process.