I've not been blogging much lately and for the last two weeks it's just been a weekly wrap-up. Most of my time has been spent 1. actually running and 2. designing my new website.

My new website (http://prime357.org) went live on Wednesday 2 April 2008. Prime357 caters for technical computer stuff, stuff that was creeping into this blog.

Since the go-live date I've been fiddling with all sorts of settings in order to re-direct all hits pertaining to Drupal and C++ to Prime357, and it works (the re-direct).

In time I'll remove the menu buttons above pertaining to Drupal & C++. That's not an overly urgent job, click on them and a re-direction occurs to Prime357 anyway.

I'll keep this blog purely for my running and other personal stuff but not geekie stuff.

I've ditched the Image Thingy (Captcha) as it wasn't working and thanks to those that pointed it out to me via email and facebook. In the interim I've reverted back to the Maths Question if wanting to post comments.

Goodbye Bloglines, hello Google Reader. Well it's not goodbye completely, but I'll wait and see how Google Reader behaves. Might give it a month or two.

New blogging's in town and probably here to stay. I've come across two relatively new, well new to me, blogging or more correctly, mini blogging systems. These mini blogs are geared towards including, not only the web interface (browser) but instant messengers and mobile phones as the source of adding posts.

The idea behind these types of blogs are that they're meant for short sharp and to the point messages. To enforce that theme posts are restricted to not more than 140 characters. If using a mobile phone that is probably ideal anyway, who wants to type anything longer that 140 characters, not me.

I suppose it doesn't take an Eienstein to work out that I've changed the look a little bit.

I thought the blog needed freshening up just a tad. I've gone with the 'Zen' theme and in my opinion is easier on the eye. The old theme was 'Pushbutton'. In the process I did some house keeping, cleaning up some links etc.

Well, that was a short blog post.

Update - 2 Apr 2008

A copy of this manual is located at Prime 357. I'm reverting this site back to just my personal running stuff.

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I'm hoping that this guide should contain enough information in order to use my conversion program, currently version 5-05, without a hitch.

First things first, BACKUP

We have heard this term many times and we all know what it means. To those that have lost data, either through mishandling, theft, fire etc. and didn't have a backup, I'm sure stress levels went through the roof. If, on the other hand you haven't had such a catastrophe imagine you did last night, how would you feel right now. It happens.

Do not use the conversion program on your one and only Drupal 5.x (target) or Wordpress/b2evolution (source) databases. How much more explicit can I be.

At the end of this entire process you should still have your old source and target databases intact. You should also have a new Drupal 5.x database which contains all the imported information.

Sorry people, I didn't realize it was 'comment nightmare' out there when trying to post comments to this site.

Okay, I've sort of figured out what the problem was. I'm using Captcha (maths question) in order to verify that humans are in fact posting. This module has one quirky feature which I won't go into at the moment. For what it's worth this quirky feature is not the cause of the 'must enter comments numerous times' to post issue.

Behind the Captcha I am still using the Akismet service. A feature that was activated, I believe, was the cause of the problem. This feature is a time delay aspect before a comment actually appears on the site. I've changed this back to zero or effectively turned it off.

As I write this, I'm thinking whether it's really necessary to use the Akismet service. Is it overkill? Since installing the Captcha module all spam has ceased.

I've tried a couple of test comments as an anonymous user and all appears to be working normally.

Sorry for the issues you guys were having and thanks for reporting this problem. Please come back.

Over the last few days my site, which for all intents and purposes is just a simple blogging site, was hit by spammers or more precisely 'comment spammers'.

I didn't have any anti-spam measures in place, that was on my 'to do' list after changing to Drupal.

I was hit by spammers selling or trying to sell all types of drugs and pills.

In order to combat this I first turned on the 'I must authorise comments first' option in order to have them published on the site. This really didn't address the spam problem. I still had to wade through a whole heap of spam making sure not to delete legitimate comments. At least the spam didn't go public.

I've now implemented anti-spam measures courtesy of Akismet. So far, so good. I've fiddled with the settings for the Akismet module within Drupal and so far it's trapping all spam.

As for the title of the post do I need to elaborate any further. What would you do if you met a spammer?

Subscribe to Steve's Stuff - Running

I've been having heaps of trouble recently with my feed into Bloglines. I also use Newsgator news reader but not as my primary reader.

Decided a change of skin was in order for my running blog.

Went from 'Custom' to 'Niffy_Corners' skin. Only modification to make was to insert the necessary code for StatCounter (number of visitors).

Then decided that all the blogs, even the test one's can have the same skin, minus the StatCounter code.