Aehso's Output » blosxom

Comments disabled – blog engine and Irish hosting service advice anyone?

aehso — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 06:40:00 +0000

The reason why? My blog seems to make it onto a comment spam hit list yesterday and this morning I got a nice email from my hosting service indicating that my disk usage had noticably increased. Needless to say my poor blog had been overrun with spam last night – nice to see I’m moving up in the world.

The writeback plugin for Blosxom (the engine I’m using) is pretty dumb out-of-the-box so I just plugged it out for the moment – I’m going on holidays for two weeks and I don’t want to come back to another mess. All of this is a terrible shame as one of the most valuable things about blogging after all is public reader feedback.

Once I get back, I’ll switch the blog over to another engine, maybe Wordpress but then I’ll probably need a MySQL database. Pair Networks are great (uptime, support, advice is all fantastic) but their Advanced hosting package (the cheapest that offers MySQL database support) is a bit expensive for my needs.

If anyone has any advice to offer (esp with Irish hosting services) email me at “aehso at xlml dot com”. Thanks.

More Plugins Added

aehso — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 12:24:00 +0000

I’ve managed to add two more plugins to this blog

antispam – masks email addresses as ASCII codes to stop spambots from harvesting them from these pages. The email addresses are redenered as normall by browsers so it’s invisible to you, the reader
poll – eye candy, for whatever daft quick questions I want to pose yo ye lot!

Bloxsom’s calendar plugin

aehso — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 19:23:00 +0000

Finally, I got the calendar down to a respectible size – I had to go back and change the CSS Selector’s I was specifying for the calendar table elements. Now I’ve ended up with the following in my head.html Flavour file:

table.calendar    { color: #336633 ; font-size:8pt }
th.calendar_month_head { font-size: 8pt }
th.calendar_day_head { font-size: 8pt }
td.calendar_day_noday { font-size: 8pt }
td.calendar_day_nolink { font-size: 8pt }
td.calendar_day_link { font-size: 8pt }

Easy, when you remember how Now to have a go at adding some more – antispam is high on my list…