dasman’s World

After being motivated by a workmate (who when confronted by comment spam, hacked together a quick maths-based Captcha in an evening), I decided to install a Captcha plugin and re-enable comments.

(For the uninitiated, a Captcha is a “thing” that attempts to distinguish humans from computers – particularly handy for preventing comment spam)

I’ve gone with SecureImage as my Captcha. It requires the user to type in some random letters that are displayed in slightly distorted form for a comment to be posted. The plugin was nice and self-contained, some Captchas require the wordpress files to be hacked in various places, but all that was required was to drop the file into the “plugins” directory, then enable it through the WordPress interface.

One gotcha was the choice of font – by default, SecureImage expects to use a font called FreeSansBold. I don’t have this, and as a result got a blank image. Makes it unreasonably hard for the user to guess the random letters, in my opinion . Changing the default font fixed all that though.

So, welcome back comments!

Notice anything different?

I hope not! But theres always the chance…. I’ve just spent a merry hour or so transferring this blog over to a new web server. The process was straightforward – just a bit lengthy what with installing the whole LAMP family, backing up and restoring databases, copying configs and the like.

But it all appears to be up and running, blog history intact.

The new web server for the blogs is one of these Book PCs – a completely fanless system using the Eden low power CPUs. Big difference over the standard tower that I was using for this – obviously a lot quieter, and being the size of a medium-sized dictionary, a lot smaller too!

And on the hippy front, I’m expecting quite a power saving – modern Intel CPUs can consume around 150 watts – so, around 3.6Kwh per day. And thats not counting all the other power sources in the case. From memory, these Eden things draw around 7 watts (so 0.17Kwh per day). Of course, there’s a cost – this model runs at 533 Mhz. I’ll be interested to see how it handles the load….

So I’ve had my first encounters with the spammers of the blog world. I’d heard about them, but hadn’t really encountered them. For those who don’t know, this particular variety of parasite puts fake comments against your postings, along with a URL to their own site (in my case, some sort of online gambling site – classy!).

I gather the idea is for either other readers to follow the link, or for Google to improve their ranking as it indexes the blog. Either way, its &^%^&%^&% irritating!

Luckily WordPress has some neat features to detect this kind of stuff and put such comments in a moderation queue – they stay in this queue (and invisible to the rest of the world) until I approve it, or delete it.

Needless to say, I’ve now enabled these features and all is good with the world again