Meandering Diatribes: May 2004 Archives

Remember before, when I said I would nullify the threat of any future blog spam for good by upgrading to Moveable Type 3.0 when it was finally released? Well, it's final. It's released. And it's gone pay. I don't begrudge the programmers monetary reward for their hours of work, I never would. But I need more than the single author provided with the free personal version, and I can't afford even the cheapest pay package. So it's time for plan B.

The comment section now has a CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHA's a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, and most computer programs can't. You've probably seen CAPTCHAs before. Mine was programmed and released as an MT plug-in by James Seng, and it should kill any spambots that MT-Blacklist might not catch.

Feel free to stress-test the thing for an opportunity to see my shrewish, irritable error message. And don't worry, the CAPTCHA itself's not difficult. Uh, unless you're, uhm, blind. Or using a text-only browser. Sorry.

It's a little absurd I have to install so many lines of defense to keep jarheads from defacing my blog, but eh. You deal with what you deal with.

EDIT: CAPTCHA misbehaves. CAPTCHA gets removed. I'll noodle it out and fix the reported problems later tonight. Thanks for the heads-up, Rich...

DOUBLE EDIT: Well isn't this just the cock and balls of it.

Seng's CAPTCHA and Allen's MT-Blacklist are apparently well-known for refusing to play nice together. That's my problem. Blacklist's intrusive with the exact files that the CAPTCHA needs, and as a result, Seng's program ends up either letting all comments through, or allowing none at all. I'll keep banging away at this, but if the PERL gods haven't figured it out yet, things look pretty grim.

There's some talk of editing Comment.pm, but no one's been good enough to go into detail.

TRIPLE EDIT: HOTCHA! FINALLY WORKING. Not that I had much to do with it, since it was Matt who discovered the broken link in the foundation file. I R dumbtarded. Always remember to double-check your code, kids.

I've added Reinder Dijkhuis and Eric Millikin to my list of buddies over there on the left, because they're both cooler than I am and I suspect I might snatch a little reflected glory merely by being associated with them. Blargh.

Eric does Fetus X for Serializer, and publishes a blog John Ashcroft does not approve of at FetusX.com. He was also the editor of the Modern Tales yearbook, which Sparkneedle was featured in, and I've gotta say he did a beautiful job. Reinder does Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan for Modern Tales, and he had me giggling like a defective at a goofy Sparkneedle reference in a semi-recent strip. Plus, he's a nice guy, and his comic's a joy to follow. So on the list he goes. Read his blog, already.

And I'm sure you're all just positively clamoring for the photographs I took while mummifying my recently deceased rat, Beavis. I won't be putting them in a blog entry, unfortunately; A lot of people click through to me from their Livejournals, and they go directly to the full entry, not the front page. As a result, putting anything behind a cut as an extended entry in an attempt to spare delicate dispositions would be pretty useless. I don't want anyone smacked full in the face with glorious, full-color shots of disembodied rat organs an' crap unless they specifically ask for it, so I'm putting together a seperate page. Whoopie.

I will say this, though: Weird as it was, I'm glad I did it. I think I understand now how ritual and closure go together in a situation like this. I've said goodbye to Beavis in a way a thousand times more thorough than most anyone says goodbye to anything when it dies. I'm not denying that most of you will probably regard mummifying a pet rat as pretty damn warped, but by the time I was done, it felt a lot more affectionate than grotesque.

Or maybe I've been watching too much Six Feet Under. Who knows.