Classical Convert

Comment Spam

Good god. Every few weeks a spammer will latch onto this blog and start piping hot buttered spam into comments on random posts, despite the supposed protection of CAPTCHA (which, incidentally, is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This results in me receiving in the neighborhood of on hundred emails over the course of a mere couple of hours. THIS results in me getting annoyed and setting Wordpress (THANK GOD for this feature) to automatically block comments which contain parts of the recurring spammy URLS.

So, if you are not a spam-king and are rejected trying to make a valid comment, you might be mentioning something which is taboo. This might be obvious (e.g., viagra, day-trading, etc…) or not so obvious (e.g. groups.yahoo.com) so drop me a line via the contact form if it’s problematic.

On the other hand, if you are a spam-king, go die in a fire.

Tags: spam

Redesignated

Well looky here… I’ve caved to the all of the peer pressure and fallen in with the cool kids in the website redesign crowd. Hopefully everything is basically working as it should be and it isn’t all about to fall apart, unlike my very classy 1995 Civic. It’s fuel efficient though.

The car. Not the website. Wait, actually that is too.

It’s nice that these modern times it’s about infinity times easier to do a website overhaul than it was in the early pioneer days, when all a man had to get by were his wits and a battered copy of MS Notepad.

Wordpress, we salute you.

Tags: blog, redesign, wordpress

Wordpress Upgrade Issues

Eagle eyed ones might’ve noticed that for a bit back there, errors were all over the place up in this blog spouting out such tidbits as:

Warning: array_key_exists() [function.array-key-exists]:

The first argument should be either a string or an integer in /home/classif5/public_html/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 176

Which happened after upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.2. To fix this problem I changed:

<?php if ( in_category($AsideId) && !is_single() ) : ?>

To:

<?php if ( $AsideID != '' && in_category($AsideId) && !is_single() ) : ?>

In the main index template, and tada! All working again. Hopefully this will help anyone else having the same problem. If anybody sees anything else gone awry, let please me know!

This was going to be detailed…

Yeah, this was gonna be a great, insightful, touching post about why I find Beethoven difficult to really, really love. Unfortuntely my brain has been slowed down by the huge hunk of sirloin and six Sam Adams white ales I gobbled down at our first BBQ of the year earlier. So, instead of all that I am simply gonna point out that by the wonders of Wordpress I now have a generic all-purpose commenting form thingy, so everyone can tell me how awesome or not so awesome I am. Yay.

Wordpress 2.1 Upgrade

Yay I have the shiny new version 2.1 of Wordpress staring out at me instead of scummy old version 2.05 or whatever. Things went a bit crazy for a short time because it now has built in support for static front pages, which sort of messed things up. The is_home command stopped claiming that the front page really was the front page because it was static, it only returns true on the front page of the blog, so I had to rewrite my is_home() statements into is_page(’Home’) after setting that page as the front one.

This new version seems really nice after my initial frustrations. It means that I don’t have to hack it around so much to use it as a CMS (content management system), and my blog can actually be at classicalconvert.com/blog instead of classicalconvert.com/category/blog which looked kind of retarded. The new editor is cool as well, it’s got ever so trendy Web 2.0 style tabs on it.

Sorry for this post being so unmusical, but I need to geek out every now and then.