It was time for another Nucleus update. No major security issues this time, so it could wait a few days, but today I finally got around to installing the latest version. As usual, if you happen to notice something no longer working, feel free to contact me.

Since I was looking at updating anyway, I also checked out some possible hosting alternatives, since I managed to go over my bandwidth limit last year. Although I found some interesting providers, it seems I will need more time to decide on one for sure. Meanwhile I will stay with the current hosting provider, since it has served me well for years. I just have to make sure I don't post anything popular enough to make it to digg. No worries there, eh?

It took forever, but I finally managed to create a Sitemap for this blog. This is supposed to be helpful for search engines indexing the content. A Sitemap is basically just a file (xml or txt) with a list of all URLs of the site. So instead of crawling the site from page to page, Google and Yahoo can now just read the Sitemap and figure out which URLs to index.

I have no idea if this will actually help my site. All I know is Google claims submitting a Sitemap will never hurt a site(s results), so I guess it is one of those “can't hurt to try” situations. Creating a Sitemap by hand seems to be extremely unpleasant, so I used a Nucleus plugin (NP_SitemapExporter) that creates a list of all blog posts. If all goes well, you should not notice anything at all.

In related news, I removed the little thingy that would let people select a different style for this blog. To be honest, I doubt anyone ever used it, since most visitors are unique visitors, not recurring ones. Meanwhile that option would load all kinds of data whenever a page was accessed. When some annoying bot caused me to go over my bandwidth limit last month, I figured I should limit the amount of data that is loaded unnecessarily, to avoid a similar problem in the near future.

I wonder if everything still works.

Edit: at least posting works.

For the past few weeks, I have been trying out Digg, the social bookmarking site. I'm not sure yet what I think of it. It's certainly a fun way to discover some weird or interesting articles, but it's also very time-consuming. My girlfriend told me she was unable to digg me my articles.

At first, I figured digg simply didn't appreciate the URL's of my blog posts, since those contain a question mark. But no, the problem is different. The error message “This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.” is caused by digg being unable to process the URL. Why not? Well, because the anti-spam plugin BadBehavior was blocking the crawler from accessing my site. Oops. Thankfully, someone figured out how to fix this, by whitelisting the digg.com crawler, as explained on the WordPress support forum: add the IP of the crawler (64.191.203.34) to the part of the whitelist following "$bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(".

So that's it. Now you should be able to digg my most interesting stories (ahem) using the Digg this link below. Yes, it is text, so it blends in with the rest of the blog's layout. No, I'm not begging for diggs, I am actually slightly worried any digg traffic would ruin my bandwidth. So if things get out of hand, I'll have to remove this option again.

Once again I updated my blog software, in this case to fix a security issue. If you notice anything weird, let me know in comments. Of course I'd prefer to hear about security problems through mail, RB @ this domain. Same address if the comments don't work for you.

If all went well, neither you nor I should notice anything strange

If you visited today and saw an error message that said “Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.”, please rest assured. There is nothing wrong with your television, please do not adjust the set.

One of my anti-spam plugins was hit by a problem related to one of the blacklists it uses. More information can be found here. Basically, whenever someone visited my blog, the IP was checked against a blacklist, but for some reason the application doing the checking returned a “this is a spammer” message to all queries, regardless of the actual IP used. In other words, you were a false positive, and incorrectly accused of being naughty. My apologies for any stress this may have caused.

It seems fairly unlikely that anyone was affected by this, considering that I read about the problem on the Nucleus forums a short time after checking out my own blog. The error message wasn't there when I first checked my site, but it was there when I checked it again after reading about the problem. This is just one of the risks of centralized anti-spam measures, but in this case it was resolved quickly. Thanks guys.

Nucleus version 3.31 is out. Although upgrading was not necessary, I still figured today would be a good time to upgrade. Since I have made some modifications to a number of files, upgrading is always a bit scary, so I actually plan at least an hour for this. Preferably on a Saturday, so I have Saturday night and Sunday to fix any unexpected disasters.

It seems the upgrade went well. If you notice anything out of the ordinary (something bad, that is), please let me know. In the meantime, I am enjoying a very pleasant surprise: Nucleus now automatically saves a draft of my post. Sweet!

Argh! I just wasted an hour in frustration. People would encounter errors when entering a comment and I had no clue what caused this. I even went through the error log to see what happened when I would enter a comment myself. And then after a while I figured it out: my blog was trying to mail me notifications of the new comments, but those could not be sent. The reason? Well, the address was invalid.

You see, in August, my provider decided that it would be a good idea to remove the catch-all email address option. I agreed, since it should save me a lot of spam. (technically there was nothing to agree to, they simply stated they were doing this) A catch-all simply means that any mail sent to an address ending in @golb.org would be forwarded to my mailbox. Even if it was not a “real” address. After the change, any mail sent to a non-existing address will be bounced to the sender. An existing address is one I specifically set up.

My provider told me to check and make sure all addresses I need are actually set up. I figured I knew which ones I had in use, and I knew they were set up. Uh uh. Think again. Turns out I used an address for comment notifications that did not exist. Oops.

And then there were one thousand posts.

When I started this blog, I wasn't sure how long I would keep it up. It was meant as a distraction from/replacement of other activities. When I started posting, I knew it might not be as easy as I imagined. I had read plenty of accounts of bloggers who started with frantic posting, only to tire of it all after a couple of months. I worried that might happen to me as well, and at the same time I planned on writing at least one post a day, on average.

Over 3.5 years later it is clear I did not manage the one post a day average. Over time I have taken a more relaxed approach towards blogging. In a sad sense, it helps to realize there aren't too many frequent visitors. Blogging for a small audience can be quite lonely. (actually, I blog for a very large audience, it's just that the audience doesn't know about me) It is not necessarily the interactive medium some people think. In fact, when I blog and hardly get any comments, I wonder if anyone is actually interested in what I write. In the beginning I worried about this. It seemed rather pointless to blog just for myself. But the truth is, my blog has become a marvelous (if I may say so myself) repository of forgotten knowledge. I frequently search my blog for things I once knew, but forgot about. From software to browser settings or tips. I guess my focus sort of shifted from writing for the masses, hoping to provide some useful or entertaining point of view, to writing for a very select group of people and hoping an occasional passer-by may find something useful here.

All in all, I am pretty happy that I'm still blogging, albeit slightly less frequent than before. And less elaborate and in-depth than before. Sometimes I wonder if I should focus less on current affairs, and more on tips or tricks that will still be useful months from now. Since most of my visitors come here through search engines, I should probably stop making funny posts and make sure my information is clear and to the point, for those looking for a quick and straight answer.

But hey, it's my blog, I'll do what I want. And maybe, just maybe, I'll make it to post number 2000.

I should have bought myself a cake ...

It probably won't be that interesting to you, but I like statistics and numbers. What I like best, is that it lets me compare the effectiveness of certain measures. In the case of spam, it is good to see how much spam is blocked. An increase in blocked spams tells me the spam problem (in general) is getting worse. A decrease in spam that makes it through to my blog tells me my spam measures are working.

So, the bottom of the right-hand column of this page now has a little number on it. It shows the “crap blocked” in the past 7 days. Or, for the time being, the crap blocked since June 3rd. Starting June 10th, it will show the crap blocked in the past 7 days.

Crap is a pretty vague term, but the statistics are based on a Bad Behavior plugin for Nucleus. This plugin comes into action every time a page is loaded. It checks to see if the application trying to load the page matches characteristics of known spam applications. If it does, access to the site is blocked and an error message is returned. The same goes for certain attempts to “hack” the site or to execute unwanted code. What is great about this, is that it blocks the application before it loads the page. Less page loads means less time to wait while the page loads for real visitors and less bandwidth use.

So, check the stats from time to time and imagine what it would be like having to delete every instance of those blocked crap comments or trackbacks. One wonders why anyone would still find blogging to be fun.