Category: Meta

Or, rather, the lack thereof.
I don’t know how you other bloggers do it, but between a full-time job (which often turns into more-than-full-time due to the quirks of IT work) and applying for graduate schools, I have essentially no free time.
Sorry for the light content. More when I get it.

I’m testing out a new anti-spam plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA.
I am loath to use CAPTCHAs under normal circumstances, as they are tedious for regular users. Fortunately, this plugin uses an interesting method that should reduce false positives: if comments are marked as “not spam” by Akismet, they are handled normally without any CAPTCHAs. However, if Akismet flags a message, the user is then prompted to solve a reCAPTCHA, and the message is then dropped into the moderation queue for manual intervention.
With the 150+ spams per day making it into the spam queue, it was a challenge to go through everything and make sure there were no legitimate messages mistakenly flagged. This plugin should resolve that issue without inconveniencing legitimate users.
If you find any quirks, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

At present, it’s not practical to implement SSL due to the large amount of externally-hosted embedded content here. Perhaps in the future, when I have more spare time.

Over the next few days, I’m going to be performing some changes.
Specifically, I’m going to see if hosting this blog completely over SSL will cause any problems (( Why, you might ask? Why the heck not. That, and it’s more secure. Even though there’s not really any content that needs to be secure, there’s no real reason why it shouldn’t be secure.)).
It’s quite possible that I will screw things up in an epic fashion. If so, fear not — the existing site will remain untouched.
All existing insecure connections, such as feed readers, should be redirected automatically to the secure version without any user input.
In short, readers shouldn’t need to change anything at all. In fact, please do not change anything at all. After I make the changes to enable the secure settings, I will make another post to that effect. If that post doesn’t show up in your reader, I’d appreciate it you contact me at [email protected] and I’ll see what can be done.
Thanks for your patience and dealing with my crazed, experimental nature.
Update: With all the external content I deal with (e.g. using an external image host), this might not go as smoothly as possible. I may abandon this attempt. We’ll see.

I changed the theme from the rather outdated previous style to something a bit more modern, albeit generic.
If anything has broken, please let me know.

After using a generic blog theme for some time, I’m looking at using a custom theme (nearly all canned themes don’t seem to work).
Unfortunately, my graphical skills are slim-to-none.
Anyone out there have any graphical skills? I’m a bit tight on money and so can’t pay with cash, but eternal glory could be yours (( For varying levels of “eternal” and “glory”.))!

This blog is on track to hit 10,000 spam comments stopped since it’s inception in July 2008.
The total number of spams that have passed the battery of filters? Zero. When will they learn to stop trying?
Total number of CAPTCHA’s and other things that annoy legitimate commenters? About three, over a year ago, but were quickly retracted due to being poorly received.
I’d also like to apologize for some technical difficulties that resulted in the website being unreadable (though the feeds evidently kept working) for at least a few days. It’s been corrected.

Many thanks to Carl for his donation to the New Shooter Ammo Fund. With his generous donation, 1,500 rounds of CCI Blazer .22LR ammo was purchased.
And yes, I still need to do the write-up from the New Zealander new shooter event, but things have been hectic. Hold your horses…

Still here. Still alive. Really busy with the end of the semester and grad school apps.