Migrating To WordPress

After six years of blogging using b2evolution, I bit the bullet and moved over to WordPress.  The conversion wasn’t all that bad, there is a script out there to move the database content over, but it’s buggy.  I had to tweak the SQL to get the links to insert correctly and change which date it used to set the post dates.  After that it dropped right in.  Then I got started on getting the plugins installed and working.  Finally I had to make some modifications to the theme to display my post URLs similar to the way b2evolution did.  It looks like I’ve got all of the functionality and features working, though there are some articles that are showing some strange formatting, but they’re old so I’m not too worried.  The final tweak was a small perl script to update the category counts so that the category cloud displayed the correct values.  If anyone wants copies, just ping me…

b2evolution Upgrade

I upgraded the blog software today and while you may not notice anything different, I sure did. I’ve been reluctant to update the software because it’s been a pain to do. I’ve had to customize some stuff, like the Adsense code, Google search, Google Analytics, and some HTML validation steps.

Well, it turns out that none of that is needed any more. The 2.1.x series has a generic HTML widget that you can drop just about anywhere. I just copied the HTML into widgets, put them where they needed to be, and was done. Now code updates don’t require me to crank up vi and get dirty with PHP.

A Captcha For b2evolution

I’ve been getting slammed by more and more comment spam over the last few days and have finally had enough. I’m implementing the captcha solution from village-idiot.org. I know it’s not perfect and that there is software out there to defeat them but it’ll stop me from having to delete literally hundreds of porn spam comments from my posts while still leaving them open for people to post .

The directions are pretty good but I did make a couple changes to authimage.php and comment_post.php to clean up a few warnings generated when the spammers try to hit the page directly.

Basically, you need to change two blocks of code in authimage.php, both up near the top of the file. First, wrap the if/elseif block that checks to see if you’re requesting a text or image with a test to see if $_GET[‘type’] is set. Then in checkAICode you’ll need to change the if/then block at the beginning to make sure that $_SESSION[‘AI-code’] is set. Here’s what the two blocks look like after being changed:

if (isset($_GET['type'])) {
  if ($_GET['type'] == "text") {
    createAICode("text");
    exit;
  }elseif ($_GET['type'] == "image") {
    createAICode("image");
    exit;
  }
}

and

if(!isset($_SESSION['AI-code'])) {
  $return = 0;
} else {
  if ($code == $_SESSION['AI-code']) {
    $return = 1;
  } else {
    $return = 0;
  }
}

And then in comment_post.php you’ll need to wrap the captcha checking routine with this code:

if (isset($_POST['code'])){
...
} else {
  errors_add( T_('Error: Please don\'t try to bypass the access code.') );
}

Posting Via E-mail

I’ve reconfigured the b2evolution installation to accept posts via e-mail. This will make it a lot easier to post while I’m on the road since I’m not bringing a laptop. This is all going to be done via my Palm and phone.

Referrer Spam Run

Sorry about the poor performance, my poor server’s getting the stuffing beaten out of it by one massive referrer spam run. I’ve got mod_rewrite passing out 301’s to (hopefully) redirect the clients back to the site they’re spamming for, but the router’s still working hard enough that connection times are terrible. This has been going on since about 5:30 Central time on 3 May with no end in sight. I’ll post updates as things develop.

BlogShares

I just found a pretty cool blog related game called BlogShares. It’s a virtual stockmarket based on blogs. I’m now listed and there are shares of this blog for sale.

One of the interesting blogs that I happened across while there is Farzad’s Blog, so go take a look at it!

Stupid referrer spam

Grrr… I’ve wasted a good chunk of my time cleaning up a bunch of referrer spammers. They’ve now been banninated inside apache and won’t be getting anything but a 403. In case anyone’s interested, here’s what I’ve used to ban them (I’m obvously changing the domain names so that they don’t get any credit whatsoever).

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.foo.com/.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.bar.com/.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Edit it to suit your needs and then put it in your .htaccess or httpd.conf file.

External linking problems

So for the last few days I’ve been fighting a few sites that decided to put links to the bikerscum domains on their pages, one of which describes it as a porn site. It’s obviously not, and so after a little mod_rewrite work visitors coming in from there are going elsewhere.

If you’re going to link to me, fine. But let me know in advance if it’s got the potential to generate lots of traffic. Which, by the way was how I noticed this. It’s kind of funny to watch your traffic go up by a factor of 100.