Blogging

I've finally done it: ReelCritic has launched! The DNS changes are currently propagating through the Internet, so the link may not work for you straight away; you might want to give it another go in a few hours/tomorrow.

Here's an excerpt from my introductory post:

Welcome to ReelCritic, a new film blog!

I find the whole meta-blogging thing a bit tiresome, really, but I thought I should probably do a quick update as CodeBork is moving home! There are two main things you will notice:

That busy period at work that I mentioned hasn't really ended, and by the sounds of things it won't be any time soon. As such, it's likely that my Code Complete series is going to be put on hold for a while longer as we ride this current and move on.

Apologies to anyone who tried to comment on one of my previous entries and found they couldn't. The issue with reCAPTCHA that was preventing this has now been resolved and you should be able to post comments again without any problems.

I thought it was high time that my blog, being called CodeBork an' all, be located at a codebork domain, so I just bought codebork.com and codebork.co.uk. codebork.co.uk has been configured as a ServerAlias for codebork.com. The site as a whole will continue to be accessible indefinitely at the current domain, alastairsmith.me.uk, but requests to this domain will be redirected (via a 301 Moved Permanently response) to codebork.com.

I've suffered a bit of downtime of late — about the last month, actually — which is why my blog has been unavailable and my web frameworks' evaluation has crawled to a halt. Apologies to anyone that might have been following that series.

The good news is, however, that I'm back for 2009 thanks to a particularly felicitous finding on my laptop that resolved the underlying problem. I'm hoping to move at least my blog (if not some of my other bits and pieces) to a more reliable hosting package sometime this year. 363 days and counting to accomplish this!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been suffering quite badly from trackback spam. I dread to think what it's done to my Google ranking (and related search terms), and what impact it's had on my bandwidth consumption.

That aside, as Tim suggested, I have re-enabled Akismet. We'll see whether this sorts out the problem, although I'm quite hopeful.

As you may have noticed, I've not blogged in a while. The good news is, I'm back! :-)

Unfortunately, over roughly the same period, I've not really been keeping on top of clearing out my trackback spam, to the point where I deleted in the region of 1000 spam trackbacks this evening. Short of disabling the trackback function (which I don't really want to do), I'm after a bit of advice on combating trackback spam.

Oddly, I don't have any problems with comment spam at all.

Comments welcome, as always! :-)

So it seems there's currently a problem with the comments' system. First of all, DON'T PANIC! Your awesome comments are being posted correctly, and are making it through to the moderation queue fine (or being posted if you've got an account).

The bad news is the Akismet anti-spam module I've installed is in beta for Drupal 6 at the moment, and an error in the module is causing the screen to go blank when you hit "Save" to publish your awesome comment.

I learned my second lesson from this blog today. What was the first, you might ask? The importance of peer code reviews, and I learnt this pretty much as soon as I'd started.

The second lesson was to improve my writing style! After a comment or two on my last post (in conversation rather than via the blog itself), it appears that I didn't explain the situation particularly clearly. I will try not not be so arrogant as to assume that my readers know what I'm talking about all the time!