Day 25 of my caffeine detox.

I surprise myself sometimes, didn’t think I’d make it this far. There’s been a few major changes in my life lately, those happening online and offline under the radars. jermexpress.com is sitting on a spanking new server, and it’s now hosted by our very own digitalSURGERY.net. We will be launching a small WordPress hosting service in the following weeks. On the personal level, I’ve been sleeping better lately. I dream less and I only wake up once or twice in the middle of the night, instead of the usual 5-10x as cause of nightmarish dreams. I’m OK financially for once. No I’m not rich yet but I can relax and not think about tomorrow (but not the next day after) if I wanted to.

I just watched Supergirl. It’s amazing how people made movies in the past without the technology we have now. Helen Slater was a babe, too bad she’s old and wrinkled now, or probably dead; who knows. I know Mr. Reeves is gone, I guess it’s time for a new breed of superheros now.

Superbloggers.

I know people with 20+ blogs, when the hell do they sleep? I’m suffering the consequences of my youthful wisdom, or lack thereof. Sleeping 10 hours can finally feel good, like paying off old debts. Waking up is like being chased around by collectors. It’s a scary life out there.

That’s why people stay online, that’s why people blog.

I failed to mention the public release of WordPress 1.5.2 from last week.

This set of improvements and security fixes is in line with our commitment to maintaining an extremely stable 1.5 series. In addition to fixing a number of bugs and adding requested enhancements for plugin authors, this release also addresses all of the security issues that have been circulating the past few days.

If you use WordPress you should consider upgrading as soon as possible.

Backing up your blog database is a smart thing to do. In fact it’s recommended by every administrator on the planet. Regardless, I haven’t done the chore in weeks. Today I realized my lack of emergency precaution and freaked myself out. So I logged on to phpMyAdmin as hurried as I can to export my database for download. Guess what it was 4mb at least, and I thought I haven’t been blogging much around here. I suspected bogus and there it was buried under. It turned out all these time marking SPAM as SPAM in WordPress ended up storing them in my database instead of banishing them to datahell. So there I was with 7000+ comment SPAM entries spinning the brains off my head. Thank heavens for phpMyAdmin and it’s intelligent search and destroy feature (yeah I made that up!) my database is now back to 1mb and that makes me a happy blogger.

Good night! (South East Asian time)

Yay I finally got around to upgrading to the latest nightly. I feel refreshed!!

I also put back the about page and I even mocked up a page dedicated to WordPress!

I’m off to bed now…

Despite the questionable drawbacks of CAPTCHA, I find it very useful in killing comment SPAM.

For the last few months my blog has been bombarded by SPAM bots trying to leave marks of their clients’ sites so they can improve their Google PR. It frustrated me for some time as they continue to find new ways around the countermeasures that come packaged with WordPress. A few of the recommended plugins found on the WordPress Support Forums seemed promising, but one encounter with SPAM Karma pissed me off as it mistakenly passed me as a bot at Chris J Davis’ site and trashed my comment. It’s smart but if it outsmarts itself, it’s NO good! Comment moderation on the other hand was a bitch, for if you get hundreds of SPAM comments it would equate to massive inbox SPAMMING. It wasn’t until I learned about CAPTCHA when I finally found a near-perfect solution to my SPAM problem. Sure the bots can have built-in OCR mechanism one day, but until that day comes and AI finally manages to infiltrate the human ways I can lay back and relax knowing that no bot could SPAM my blog with their stupid ad comments for a while.

Now the breakdown…

A CAPTCHA test is a program that can generate and grade tests that:

• Most humans can pass
• Current computer programs can’t pass

For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below but current computer programs can’t:

The Wordpress plugin I’m using now is Trencaspammers by Coffelius and it generates a CAPTCHA test that looks like this:

You can see it at work in my comments page, and so far it has eliminated every single SPAM bot that comes accross my blog.

If you’re Spanish language challenged Esther has a translation of the install instructions on her site.

Credit: The CAPTCHA Project is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. It is funded by the NSF Aladdin Center.