Refererblock Version 0.2

I came up with two improvements to the first release of my refererblock plugin:

  • If the referer string matches the site's URL it passed immediately and isn't checked against the blacklist.
  • The blacklist.txt file was being read even if the referer string was empty. Now it is only read …

Those Darn Spammers Blosxom - Hit Counter and Writeback Changes

Over the past year I'd noticed that comment and trackback spammers had been hitting the same dozen or so pages of my blog multiple times daily. (It is probably the same person/group who took a snapshot of the articles on my front page at that time and just reuses …

How Safe is Your Personal Information in the Hands of Website Developers?

I was going through the webserver statistics for this site to see if any new sites had linked to any of my articles (it is always nice to see that what I have to say is useful to someone). Anyway, I ran across someone who had come to my site …

Blosxom Plugin to Block Referer Spam

Like so many other bloggers who allow comments on their websites and blog articles, I was facing increasing comment spam as my blog got noticed by more spammers. The size of this problem is illustrated by this Google query for "comment spam" that returned 1.5 million hits. For the …

Online Button Creation Tool

I was reading the Blosxom email list tonight and came across an interesting photoblog by Rob Park. After enjoying some of his photos, I noticed his post about an online form for creating the XML, RSS, etc. buttons popular on so many websites. Adam Kalsey has created a simple (dare …

AgilityNerd Site Enhancements

I've spent some time over the past couple nights trying to improve the access to information on my site. As a software developer it is often more fun to play around with the technology than it is to do "real" work.

I've made the following enhancements:

  • Added Quick Links to …

Modifications to Blosxom moreenties PluginLinks to a Configurable Number of Index Pages

Jason Clark created the moreentries plugin for Blosxom to allow adding links to the previous and next group of articles/entries in the head or foot of a Blosxom weblog. He solved a problem that most weblogs have; it can be difficult for visitors to browse older articles. Although he …

See More... Added to Article Display on Index Pages

I know my Agility readers will give me a hard time about this non-Agility post, but hey I'm "thinking about technology" too. I was limiting to five the number of articles/posts on my main and index pages to minimize the download time for non cable/DSL visitors. But I've …

Backup Your Data Lately?

A few weeks ago I bought a Ximeta NetDisk 120 GB external hard drive to back up the data on my home computers. There are a number of vendors making hard drives that support USB connections; this model is unique in that it also supports direct ethernet connections. Unlike more …

sysadmin

Centering DIVs in CSS

I took a look at this site on an 800x600 resolution monitor and didn't like how the original layout looked. Having the menu box on the left hand side with a 20px margin to the left used up too much screen space. So I decided to move the menu box …