…grayblog…

Category: grayblog.co.uk

  • Another year

    Good news or bad news, depending on your point of view – I’ve just renewed the hosting or this site for another year, so you have at least another twelve months of this.

  • Holy crap

    Apologies to everyone who has noticed that this site has been crawling to a standstill lately. I’ve been suffering from runaway trackback spam (if you don’t know what that means, nod, smile and move on to the next post). I’ve tried a couple of fixes but have just installed Bad Behavior, which seems to have fixed the problem even without a "u". I was getting a POST trackback.php request once or twice every second which, needless to say, was grinding my server to a halt. This should also fix the problem with the feeds, which should now be more reliable.

    Keep me informed by the usual means of any problems that you find.

  • Quarter of a million

    Sometime in the next day or two, visitor number 250,000 will come by this site. My advice: hit refresh repeatedly until it happens.

  • More on comment spam

    Sometime during the night, Akismet caught the 150,000th spam comment to be sent to this site.

    The last 50,000 have taken 104 days to arrive, compared with 95 days for the previous 50,000 and 139 days for the first 50,000. In the last 104 days, an average of 480 spam comments have been submitted each day, which equates to one every three minutes. If it wasn’t for Akismet, I think I would have given up on blogging by now.

  • grayblog = 6

    Six years ago today, I started this site with a post that included the question "what am I doing with a blog?"

    I’m still waiting for an answer.

  • Expect quiet

    Don’t panic. Travel, workload and other stuff will preclude writing new content for this site for a little while, plus delay the long-awaited redesign.

    But things are good.

  • Tinkering

    Some of you may have noticed some oddness here. I’m working on it. Expect great change.

  • Spam milestone

    Today, Akismet caught the 100,000th spam comment sent to this site. The first 50,000 took 139 days to arrive, whereas the next 50,000 were posted over just 95 days – so the rate of spamming is increasing, in spite of the fact that not a single one of these comments has been published.

    Over the last three months, 527 spam comments have been posted on grayblog each day, on average. This equates to one new spam comment every 2 minutes and 44 seconds.

  • Soundtrack

    There is a lot that I should be writing about here at the moment, but time pressures prohibit me from doing so. I’m travelling to the Netherlands this week, so if you’re lucky you might get some airport blogging.

    In the meantime, here is a current playlist (aside from several CDs that are getting a lot of rotation time):

    • Lupe Fiasco – Kick Push
    • Amerie – One Thing
    • Hird – Love Again
    • People Under The Stairs – The Dig
    • The White Stripes – Blue Orchid
    • Ladytron – Soft Power
    • Go! Team – Ladyflash
    • OMD – Sealand
    • Curve – Coast is Clear
    • Bass-O-Matic – Fascinating Rhythm (12" version)
    • Editors – Munich
    • Jazzanova – Bohemian Sunset
    • Ladytron – Fighting in Built-Up Areas
    • Neotropic – Under Violent Objects
    • Siouxsie and the Banshees – Dear Prudence
    • Zombies – Time of the Season
    • Amon Tobin – The Lighthouse

    Willfully eclectic?

  • Still very busy

    I’ll try and update at the weekend, possibly including exciting pictures of The Front Garden Project, which is now well and truly underway.

    Hmmm. The banned cartoon post was the 6000th post here, and I only just noticed.