Some little while ago, I changed the name of a file used in the comment process, and submission of comments by spambots ceased. Comments are now open, until another wave breaches the battlements. I’m betting that the number of good comments that I won’t have to moderate before then will exceed the number of spamments that will get through before I see it and flip the switch again.

I’m experimenting with format here, taking baby steps in CSS and PHP. Please don’t hesitate to comment on legibility.

My friend Mike Linksvayer links to some good info about voting methods. See in particular why the problem of “tactical” voting does not go away with Automatic Runoff (Australian ballot).

Some of you are familiar with referral spam. The spammer issues HTTP requests for pages of yours, giving the advertiser’s address as the source of the link; you look at your HTTP log and say to yourself “whoopee, there’s a link to my site from someone I didn’t know about; what do they say about me?”; you look up their site and find that it sells, let’s say, referral-spam services.

Now I see a change. Previous referral spam has usually been from domains with cryptic names, hitting many different pages; they were easy to spot and ignore. The latest batch has a hundred different domains with clear names like application-card-credit-4u.info, each hitting three or fewer of my pages. I have not bothered to see how many different hands are behind these various finger-puppets.

It’s a much worse nuisance than before; finding seeds among chaff is harder than ignoring chaff among seeds.

If you’ve written something that intercepts HTTP requests for missing pages and makes an educated guess where they should go, do you mind sharing it?

Coming to you almost live on WordPress, because one host ought to be enough for anyone. Even cooler, it’s all written in PHP; no Javascript needed.

Conversion from Blogger was surprisingly easy. Now to customize it — because I really dislike the present look [i.e. the default template of the then current version]. How do I undo whatever makes class storycontent look compressed, when I can’t find storycontent in the CSS file?

I also wonder if I can turn off “smart” punctuation, which, in my default font, messes up the line spacing.

I’ll also have to go through the archives and remove all the line breaks that I put in to make the source more legible. sigh

In his blog Literal-Minded, Neal Whitman reports on his toddler’s acquisition of syntax.