Strangely Perfect

Weird Comment Spam I don’t know if it’s linked, or not, but since the WP upgrade a few days ago I’ve had an extra type of comment spam fall into my spam filters. Thankfully the spam filters worked, but still filled up the “spam comment” area for further perusal. Maybe it’s a plugin?  Whatever. Dodgy [...]

For no reason …other than a try-out and also the current anti-spam plugins miss the odd bit of comment spam, I’ve now switched off TanTanNoodles’ Spam filter and am giving WP-SpamFree another try plus another plugin, AVH.  I’ve left Akismet running regardless. WP-SpamFree This now promises a lot, so it’s worth another shot.  Two years [...]

As MP’s expenses come to the fore again, Peter Mandelson spoke on Radio 4 this morning and did his usual self by not explaining anything and being perfectly unclear about everything!  Listen hear here! Thank god the interviewer cut him off. The question was “Have you got much sympathy with MPs who’ve claimed under one [...]

Well I Never! ..should be the title of this post.  Having lived in the South-West for nearly quarter of a century, it’s come as a complete shock to me to discover that my favourite vacuum cleaner (if there is such a thing, I’m now defining it here!) is little old Henry, and it’s made about [...]

Introduction An unfortunate consequence of posting stuff online is that you enable your ‘work’, ‘your words of wisdom’, your ‘copyright’ or your petty scrawlings (choose which you think is the most appropriate), to the world as as such, it’s freely copyable. My website is proudly running on WordPress sat on a standard shared hosting LAMP [...]

The Intense Debate Install Story Along with some theme and plugins changes I’ve recently done, I’ve also had a play with Intense Debate (ID), a system complete with WordPress plugin for managing comments. Phase One Last week using my old theme I couldn’t get anywhere with the comment import. It kept crashing out at 9% [...]

Humphrey Hawksley in an article on today’s BBC News website has reported the (blindingly obvious, some might say) results of a 25-year American study into the effects of air pollution (specifically vehicle and industrial) on life expectancy. City air pollution ‘shortens life’ Basically, it’s bad! I live next to an A-class road, busy with holiday [...]

Introduction While fishing around for some chords I came across azchords.com – as you do.  They’ve a shedload of Google ads and I accidentally hit the banner ad while trying to get rid of pesky popups (why do sites still do this now?)  I was taken to the website of someone called Kevin Hoeffer and [...]

Highlighting the Differences in Public Health provision, the Attitudes to Death and Responsibilities of the State and the Individual to Public Welfare. The title is the biggest bit – trust me. Introduction This takes us from today’s news from America and the Duffy’s Cut project to a tiny hamlet in Northumberland, England, called Throckrington. Duffy’s [...]

Below is the plain text of an email spam I got today.  I always view as plain text and all my messages are spam checked, in various ways.  Some POP3 stuff comes in via Mailwasher Pro, which I’ve mentioned before; other stuff I forward through gmail and use the spam filters in there, which are [...]

I’ve twiddled the settings on my Wassup Widget to show huge lists of all the OSs & Web Browsers hitting my poor little website.  They show in the first sidebar to the right. Granted that the list has selective filtering applied because of the content and how the various search engines direct people here, but [...]

Just for a while I’ve closed down the open comments access a bit (but not completely) until the splurge of spam has passed that started last night.  For some reason, Akismet etc missed a lot.  Hopefully, it’ll be back to it’s normal trappy self soon. My sites went slow with all the hits, but as [...]

Following on from my post a few days ago about EuroSoftware, I had an interesting spam today. I used “The Complainerator” to automate some abuse mails to see what happened.    Well… fortunately I used my old email spam sucker-inner trap as the “from” address, because that’s where today’s spam came to. Addressed from myself – to [...]

Well it’s hard to say, actually.  I run this site on WordPress which dynamically uses a backend database and various plugins.  The thing is that I chop and change the various blocking systems for testing, failures, experiments and even because I like the name!  There a host of reasons. But my website has had millions [...]