It’s been a while since I posted anything up here, so I’m going to try and cover a few topics now. I started a new job developing payments routing software with ACI Worldwide in February, so I’ve been busy enough over the last few weeks.

To start with, I’ll mention http://photos.jmadden.eu, which I’ve just set up. This is a Plogger install that I can fill up with our photos. At the moment, all that’s up there are photos of Lou’s hen night in Killarney this year.

That leads me nicely on to my stag weekend, which was this past weekend (4th, 5th & 6th of April). I had a brilliant weekend, really enjoyed it & it was brilliant to have such a great bunch of friends around for the few days celebration! Thanks to everyone who made it. When I get a few photos in from it, I’ll put them up too.

While on the topic of photos, I also grabbed PloggerPress to integrate Plogger with WordPress, so I could have pages & posts of just photos. It works perfectly, but I’ve made a few changes to make it work a bit better for what I want. Firstly, I found a minor bug in it that I notified the developer about this evening. On line 150 of plogger-press.php, change

$url=substr($path, $number);

to

$url=preg_replace(“/[ |(|)]/”, “_”, substr($path, $number));

Plogger replaces certain characters (the one’s I noticed for the above change were ‘ ‘, ‘(‘ and ‘)’) with underscores. This ended up with some of the thumbnails for photos not being shown because the link for the ‘img src’ was incorrect.

As well as this, I added an ‘add_filter(“wp_head”, “my_head_func”);’ so I could alter some styling. I put a ‘class=”image”‘ into the ‘<img>’ tags so I could style them (borders, padding etc.) just to look a bit better.

Lastly, I’ve had very little time to work on SvnFs lately. I’ve done a small bit of work on getting write support done, but if you want it any time soon, I’d advise grabbing it from http://www.jmadden.eu/svnrepos/svnfs/trunk. It’s available anonymously, so

svn co http://www.jmadden.eu/svnrepos/svnfs/trunk

That’s it for now. We’re only three and a half weeks away from the wedding, so I doubt there’ll be many more updates before that. I’ll put up the stag photos when I get them, but that’ll probably be it!!

In my Comments posting earlier this year, I said I had disabled comments on articles on this website to avoid having to deal with spam on another front.

As it turns out, just disabling comments within WordPress wasn’t enough. I was getting hit with more and more spam, all being held for moderation. This was getting to be an annoyance, so I looked into it.

Using grep on the Apache logs, and searching for the IP address that the spammers hit my site from, I found everything was being POSTed to wp-trackback.php. Simply changing the permissions on this file to 0600 (it was installed from a Debian package, so is root owned) has stopped the onslaught of spam, and doesn’t seem to have affected anything else.

I’ve disabled comments on all my pages and posts because all that’s been showing up is spam to buy drugs. If you’ve got anything interesting to say about any of the posts, email me and I’ll sum up the comments on the original post.

I’ve got a decent spam blocking setup for my email, and it’s easier to tackle the spam on one front rather than many!