Laurabelle's Blog

Delilah (my Dell 8100) has served me faithfully for nearly 3 years now, but I'm almost ready to move to a desktop. This time I want to go the DIY route, because I don't think they make computers the way I want them. In preparation for this project, Jeff and I sat down a few [...]

I think Phil Ringnalda is right about nofollow: It only actually stops you from getting spammed when the ocean starts boiling, after we've forced every single person with weblog comments to implement it, and driven the unbelievers off the web. Until then, the spammers and the search engines are going to keep working you from [...]

Like Gloria Craney, I find myself obsessed by referrer spam. For the past few days I've often kept half an eye on my access logs, trying to make sure all requests get 301'd. I tweaked my .htaccess rules. I renamed mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi. I waged a defensive war. Along with renaming mt-comments.cgi, I also added [...]

I can be a twit sometimes: I would like to add that I find it very hypocritical when right-wing, conservative Christians pray for peace and mercy. Look at me complain about hypocrisy as I sling the same kind of wild, baseless stereotypes that I so despise when imposed upon my own side of the political [...]

If you tried to submit a comment a couple of hours ago, you probably noticed that the script formerly known as mt-comments.cgi was producing nice fat 500 server errors. Yup, that was me, tweaking (as ever) without having any clue what I was doing. Great learning experience, bad customer service. Bad Laurabelle. (Note to self: [...]

I'm considering creating a feed for comments but am not sure whether it is needed or desired, so I'm conducting an informal and thoroughly unscientific poll. Drop me an email or a comment if you have an opinion. Would you use a comments feed? Entries+comments together, or comments separately? How about feeds for comments on [...]

I did a lot of PHP and Perl hacking last night, modifying the PHP code I use to change stylesheets dynamically (so that I can use an external file to store the config data) and then writing some Perl code to duplicate the same functionality in my CGI scripts (mt-search.cgi and what used to be [...]

Ian Hixie has a humorous take on research about the effects of pornography on psychological health, but actually the article is fairly serious and its subject potentially disturbing. I'm not talking about pornography (though I'm not a fan); I'm referring to Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) trying to impose his conservative Christian agenda on the Internet. [...]

A dude named Scott Wiersdorf has written a script to harrass formmail trollers when they hit his site. It's a fun idea, but I think it actually would cause me more harm than good. That's my bandwidth they're using! Still, it makes me wonder if there's something I could do to get back at referrer [...]

I'm listening to To the Point right now on KUOW, and Adam Clymer (Political Director of the National Annenberg Election Survey of the University of Pennsylvania and former chief Washington correspondent and political reporter for the New York Times) just said that only 23% of people who voted for Bush think that his reelection equates [...]