Checksum Arcanius

The website of the Titan Robotics Club uses the ColdFusion Meta Language (CFML) to generate and display its dynamic content. I posted earlier about how ColdFusion was an easy language to learn, and that it seemed semantically powerful, able to accomplish a lot in not too many lines of code. While that is still true, there seems to be a dark side to the ColdFusion story or at least that of our current host, readyhosting.com. It seems that of the server’s stability leaves something to be desired, especially on start-up. For example, if you are te first person to visit the site after some period of time and (at least this is what I speculate happens) the ColdFusion interpreter has shut down, you are greeted by a hideous page with SQL statements and unprocessed cfoutput statements, which is hopelessly ugly. Occasionally when just reloading the home page, you will witness the same phenomenon. Needless to say, we can only hope this doesn’t happen when a judge is around. So, to hopefully minimize the chance of this happening, I created a shell script that, every 30 seconds, reloads the home page, and logs whether it recieved a “big” (correct) or a “small” (incorrect) version of the page. This way, the command interpreter should remain active (hopefully) and I’ll get statistics on how often the page loads incorrectly, even after a “hot” start. Nothing like hard data with which to confront your host (or should it be Macromedia?) .
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While looking at my site today, I realized that it is way too blue. I’m gonna have to do something about that. But, as the procrastinator’s creed goes, why do something today that you can do just as easily tomorrow?

I almost upgraded to WordPress 1.5 today, at the sugestion of Erik. Unfortunately, too much has changed to make transition a simple process, so I quikly backtracked almost all the way – I ended up with 1.2.1, 0.0.1 larger than I had before.

A little while back, I noticed that I was beginning to get some trackback spam. At the time, I thought it odd that the trackbacks didn’t actually show up as comments – yet I recieved the email as if they had been posted. It truns out that, beause the initial trackbacks I was getting were from poker places, they had in fact gone into the moderation queue (although WordPress did not inform me on this). Secondly, the spammers seem to have refined their techniques, as a couple of trackback comment spams actually made their way into comments on the blog. They have of course been utterly eradicated, long before google or even msn bots could have picked them up, but now I have to make a decision between learning how trackbacks work so I can implement some sort of more intellegent anti-trackback-spam scheme, or simply disabling trackbacks altgether. I don’t want to have to resort to the later techniques, but real trackbacks are not all that common for me, so its not out of the question.

Apparently, trackbacks don’t go through the same checks as other comments, and spam can sneak through, even containing such words as “party”, “poker” and “online.” I don’t get many real trackbacks, so I think my solution will be to simply turn them off. I don’t feel like figuring out how they are suppsoed to work and how I can get WordPress to filter them, so it seems the best solution.

Update: I just noticed that, while I get emails about these trackbacks, they don’t actually show up as comments. Hm. Anyone know anything about this?

An earlier question and Bernie’s response led me to snoop around the WordPress source code, where I found a section that set the non-caching rules and had the page always instantly expire. A comment in the code said that it would be presumptuous to assume that WordPress is the only thing that can change the site… however, I update often enough (at least I used to…) that I don’t feel it is all that presumptive, and at any rate, I am willing to presume to get rid of bad side effects like missing comments, jumping to the top of the page after clicking back, etc. I hope the user experience is greatly improved. Let me know if anything isn’t working.

Some of you have undoubtedly noticed the rotating/random title image. Along with that, I have introduced a few other tweaks on the blog. First, I split the title banner up into three images, each with its own alt text. This allowed for the random graphic at the top, which I actaully had planned for a while, but just hadn’t gotten around to implementing. Next, I moved the “I am human” check box down so it is near the “Say it” button for comment posting. This is to, hopefully, prevent more real people from accidently seeing the “Die inhuman scum” message that awaits would-be comment spammers, and accidental non-humans. This move was inspired by Bernie, who has elegantly implemented the checkbox idea in his custom blog software. Whereas my implementation just calls the PHP die() function, which is pretty terrible (although, in my defense, WordPress does it elsewhere – for shame… something I have to fix, some day), Bernie’s takes you back to the page you attempted to comment on, and displays a nice looking message explaining why your post hasn’t appeared.

Add that to the list of things to do: To do. And no, that check box doesn’t do anything. Thanks for asking though.