tech.agilitynerd blosxom

In preparation for an overhaul of my website I wrote two new Blosxom plugins. The lastread plugin allows me to create a list of links to the last n articles that were viewed by readers. The lastcommented plugin allows me to create a list of links to the last n …

After my recent Referer Spam attacks I've been checking my logs and AWStats reports daily. I noticed that occasionally I'd get people requesting pages with incorrect suffixes. i.e. foo.ht or bar.|id| (some of these are probably spammers too). A "feature" of Blosxom is that it will still …

I've noticed that folks who come to my site by querying through a search engine often end up on my main page and the article they are searching for has already rolled off the front page. This is because the search engine robots tend to choose the index pages as …

Fletcher Penney created the original entriescache Blosxom plugin. It is designed to cache all the articles and their creation dates in a Blosxom blog to avoid the overhead of scanning the file system for new/modified files. He merged the meta plugin functionality into the plugin to allow authors to …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Updated 20-Jun-08 for addition of storytitle

I'm really impressed with the Blosxom plugin mechanism. Rael Dornfest, author of Blosxom, put hooks at strategic points in the page generation process. At each hook point the main script iterates all the plugins present in the plugin directory. Plugins that implement the hook …