I’ve Arrived
When I started this blog last August, I knew I’d be just another small voice in a crowded room roughly the size of Utah. I’ve had alot of fun writing my obscure little blog, and I have really enjoyed meeting a few people via emails and comments on the blog.
However, on Friday I arrived. I’m part of the in-crowd now. First, I got an invitation to Orkut, the Hipper-than-thou, invitation-only Friendster / LinkedIn clone that’s loosely associated with Google, from one of my readers (Thanks Chris!… and I haven’t forgotten about the broken comment system). I haven’t decided if I’m going to join yet- I didn’t do Friendster or LinkedIn, and I’ve read some things about the Orkut terms of use- but I sure was surprised to see the invite in my Inbox. Of course, I’m a week behind the real in-crowd, but I’m not proud. :)
The real clincher was a couple of hours later. Talk about feeling special… I got my first comment spam! Incidentally, if anyone happened to view said comment before I deleted it, appologies. It was pretty tasteless. Oh yeah, and not very smart.
You see, the commenter pasted in a very long list of links to “adult” websites. He even used valid HTML. Then he had to scroll down the page to hit the submit button, scrolling right past the notice that my comment system doesn’t accept HTML yet. So even if Google indexed that page in the hour the comment was up, there were no links. Ah, gee, shucks.
Fortunately, I recently upgraded my writebacks plugin by borrowing some code from Fletcher, adding IP tracking and email notification of new comments. So, as soon as I picked up my Powerbook, I got an email pointing me to the new comment. Two minutes later, it was deleted and the IP address was banned. Incidentally, if you’re running a Blosxom blog, check out Fletcher’s updated writebacks plugin. It combines a number of updates to the original, along with features from some other plugins. I haven’t upgraded mine yet, but I’m planning to. I think I have some other custom code in my existing writebacks, and I need to look over my old code first.