Category: The Site

Donncha has posted up 10 dodgy keywords that people have used to find his site. Quite funny actually. He asked other bloggers to examine theirs so here’s my top five:

1. roaccutane: the drug I was on for my acne. Fair and away the biggest traffic generator.
2. v for vendetta speech: it seems like a lot of people want the text of it.
3. studio 60 on the sunset strip cancelled: after the show was put “on hiatus”, this became quite popular. The rest of the series is due to be aired starting 24th May in the States.
4. meebo: the popular web-based IM thingamajig.
5. spiderman 3 plot: I saw it tonight, will post a review tomorrow

This is the 401st post to the blog. Can’t believe that to be honest. Back in the day I was using b2, the predecessor to what’s now known as WordPress. 631 comments have been left and a further 27,313 spam comments were nuked by Akismet.

I got an auto-generated email this morning from Blacknight Solutions explaining that my hosting package was due for renewal. I’ve been with them for a year now having previously been hosted in the States. The invoice was for the Blog Package, which was ideal for me since I use WordPress, and also extra bandwidth which I had required when going through a particularly busy time.

However, I noticed on their site that the Soho linux hosting plan offered more disk space and bandwidth than I was getting, plus it was cheaper, so I submitted a helpdesk ticket to see if I could switch. Within an hour I had a reply from Leona in Accounts who said it’d be no problem and that the previous invoice had been cancelled and another issued. A few minutes later I had updated my credit card details and had an email confirming the payment. The process was simple, easy and personable. Thanks guys. 🙂

Went to check the blog comments just now and Akismet has picked out 500-odd that look like spam. The beauty with Akismet is the fact that you don’t have to do the donkey work and you’re also contributing to keeping spam off others blogs. However, it does lack one feature in that there’s no way to bulk delete comments from the same domain. I know the vast majority of those 500 spam comments are genuine spam hits but on one occasion I did find a genuine comment so I’m slightly reluctant in just deleting them all with a click of the button.

You see when a spammer hits this site for example, they’ll normally submit up to 20 or so comments all with the same domain. So instead of using Akismet’s ‘Delete all’, Rich’s Akismet Worst Offenders steps in. It allows you to do delete comments based on a common domain so it might say ’26 from blogspot.com’ and I can just delete those. It cuts down the overall list and reduces the odds of me getting rid of a genuine comment. 🙂