As is often the case, I’m far too busy to create interesting content here today. If you’re lucky (?), there may be something later, possibly this evening. I was going to do a round-up of coverage of the UK EU constitution referendum from other English-language newspapers around the world, but I’ve not had time yet.
In the meantime, I’ve got a German coming to visit later today, at some indeterminate time. Just don’t mention the war.
You should now see a different random header graphic each time you load this page. There are ten different graphics, five that you’ve seen before and five that are completely new. How exciting is that?
It comes to something when, as I check my overnight emails first thing in the morning, I discover that the spam left in the comment boxes of this site outweighs the general spam email by two to one. In particular, I’ve now blocked three IPs in the series 213.91.217.xx, namely 13, 14 and 15, which were being used to send large numbers of messages promoting online drug stores. If you run MT or some other commenting system that allows you to block IPs, I suggest that you block these three pre-emptively.
The next version of MT will feature a system whereby users must register before they can leave comments. I’ll be adopting that as soon as it becomes available.
This site is now running on the most recent version of Movable Type. If I’m really lucky, the upgrade will have fixed the annoying gremlins.
UPDATE: nope. Sigh.
Over the weekend, I received around twenty comment spams at this website. Whilst I was tempted to disable comments across the entire site as a response to that, I decided not to, not least because sometimes there is some good and erudite discussion in the comments boxes, such as there has been in the last few days in response to my piece entitled Inadequate. Having said that, I object to being called a wanker just because someone is incapable of expressing their argument clearly.
So the comments remain, for the time-being at least. Thank you to those that use them well – you make maintaining this site very enjoyable.
As regular readers will know, I’m something of an admiring of Indian actress Aishwarya Rai. So I can’t tell how relieved I was to receive a comment to this post. Seems authentic and believable. Must be true.
Hmm. grayblog is ranked number two on MSN for sneaky pictures of Jordan and Peter Andre.
Popular culture. I’m your man for the latest on celebs everywhere. Oh yes.
I’m not even sure that anyone can read this. Anyway, thanks to Vicky for her suggestion – this is a test to see if it works!
UPDATE: Vicky’s suggestion does seem to have fixed the comments problem, so you should now be able to leave comments as normal. If you experience problems, please let me know by email.
Oh, and I realise that this must be very boring for most grayblog readers, but these technical difficulties are making it quite difficult for me to keep the site updated, and I’d really love to resolve them.
OK, I’m beginning to quantify the symptoms of the MT problem more accurately.
I have started a thread at the MT support forums here. Please, anyone who is an MT buff, go take a look and add anything that you feel might help me. Thanks.
I’m still experiencing MT problems. It won’t post properly (always comes up with a DNS error), rebuild properly (ditto) or allow comment posting properly (same again). I’ve tried a rebuild which has been unsuccessful, so now I may have to resort to the MT troubleshooting pages. Guh.