G3

For those of you who may have noticed a brief outage…

We blame Adelphia, and/or the nation of France.

- M

So, the original idea was the thought that I could toss up a simple multi-author blog that allows some friends to share and comment on interesting stuff. Seems doable, and it was. But being the lazy guy I am, I expected to “make it better and cooler” whenever I got around to it. I didn’t expect to have to put any work into it.

Well, turns out I was wrong. There seems to be some smacktard that insists on comment spamming me. I am reminded of one of Brad’s entries that I read early on when I was originally setting up this blog. I kind of brushed it off at first, thinking it must only happen to the supa-cool, popular sites. Guess I was wrong. And I have to say I’m getting pretty tired of having to regularly check for (and then delete) these annoying pr0n posts.

So, until I can find the time and motivation to apply one of the current “fixes”, I’m most likely going to turn off comments very soon.

Somebody in the, erm, “male genital enhancement” industry decided to use our comment section as free advertising. 4 comments across the archives. Baleeted.

Another online gaming spammer tried to sneak one in again. Baleeted.

Advertising will NOT be tolerated here.

Addendum:

So as it turns out, the “spam in comments” thing is a common problem now. Here’s an article discussing how spammers are clogging blogs.

Stealth advertising smacktards will have their comments baleeted.

If you have thoughtful comments to contribute, that’s peachy. But we’re not interested in being used as a Google rank-booster for commercial sites, so please refrain from non-content, off-topic, or advertising-motivated comments.

Al Gore didn’t take the initiative to create the Internet so you could abuse us in such ways.

Here’s a prototype for a blogazine format I’ve been envisioning for the site:

Blogazine Layout Concept

Note that the prototype is IE-friendly only. Mozilla-compliance will come later.

I’d like your feedback on the main section approach. (Ignore the right-hand column stuff, since it isn’t in place for this layout. Assume it’ll be there in the real thing.)

Well, I got tired of seeing the niftier version of the site only on some semi-hidden page. So, I’ve gone and overwritten the default pages with the stuff I have so far. I decided to do this today since I was at a “stop here before you go and really bork it up” milestone.

I’ve modified the main, category-archive, date-based-archive, indvidual-entry-archive, and comments pages to use the new schtuff.

Some things I’ve done (most of which aren’t really very visible) are:
(more…)

Well, I reached the first milestone in the quest for a more interoperable website this weekend. I got a test version of the main page validating as HTML 4.01 Strict compliant, as well as getting the CSS to validate as well. You can check for yourself down near the bottom of the links area.

One issue I’m running into is the content of blog entries sometimes not validating. So, in order to get around that I may be installing a Movable Type plugin called MTValidate that should allow the entry author to see any validation issues before his post is saved. We’ll see how that goes. I also may install the MTMacro plugin because I’m tired of typing in <acronym title=”whatever“>W</acronym> all over the place.

Anyhoo, I’m getting there! :-p

I added an Authoring section on the side bar for your convenience. Enjoy.