i-sako.com

After putting it off for entirely too long, I’ve now gotten around to setting up ScribeFire and Google Gears, which will enable me to read Google Reader and do a bit of light blogging even when offline. All of these things together should make it possible to return to a normal blogging lifestyle sometime soon.

Has it really been almost six months since my last weblog entry? I’d better do something about that.

I’ve decided that one of the first steps in my rehabilitation as a blogger will be to get a MacBook so I can write even when I’m away from home. I’ve been wanting to get a Mac ever since the advent of OS X, but for various reasons just never got around to getting one. Now is the time to change that. I’ve already picked out the model and the specs, so the only thing left at this point is to shop around for the best price. By this time Wednesday I should be playing around with my very own Mac.

Recent discussions with my adorable wife have led to the conclusion that we would prefer to limit access to news about (and pictures of) our family life to our friends and family from now on, so I will be setting up a separate, password-protected weblog for that purpose. This will most likely be the last entry in the Family category of this blog. Subsequent posts about family-related matters will be posted in the new blog (the details of which are forthcoming), but you will need to be a registered—and recognized!—friend or family member to be able to read them. If you are one of these, but have not yet registered, please feel free to do so now. 

It’s too early to say for sure at this stage, but there has been some discussion about having said adorable wife contribute to the friends-and-family blog….

Incidentally, this also means that our Family galleries at smugmug are now password-protected as well. If you would like to know the password, please contact me.

Update 1: Okay, the new blog is more or less ready. There are still some bugs to work out, but it’s in good enough shape to share with family and friends (who will be forgiving, I hope!). The new blog can be found at http://ff.i-sako.com/. Offhand, I cannot think of a more auspicious topic to kick off a new blog than our daughter’s fifth birthday today.

It requires a separate login from this blog, even though the login information for both blogs is the same (I’ll work on fixing that soon).

I’ve received comment from a number of people about this change, but haven’t been able to respond to most of them yet. I will soon. I promise!

Ouch! When I came home from work this evening and checked my e-mail, I got a rather nasty surprise: More than 40 “spambacks” from online poker games and porn sites.

ExpressionEngine, the blogging software I use to run this site, has always been very good about keeping comment spam under control. In fact, I’ve had only a small handful of such comments in the year since I started using EE—and no trackback spam at all, until just now. (Thank heavens for Tabbed Browsing! Deleting all of those junk trackbacks would have been a real chore in Internet Explorer, but thanks to Firefox it was just a minor inconvenience.)

As the blogosphere grows, however, the incentive for the profoundly disreputable to promote their enterprises on someone else’s dime grows right along with it.

Not on my dime, thanks.
If there is something good to come of this, I suppose it is that I looked at the preference settings for my weblog for the first time in a while. I’m glad I did, because I found out that countermeasures for precisely this kind of problem were already available.

As of now, this site will only accept one trackback per hour and the trackback URLs will be randomized to minimize this sort of automated attack. I doubt these changes will inconvenience any legitimate trackbacks, but it should keep the bad guys out.

Oh, by the way, if you happen to run an online casino or smut factory, and you’ve discovered a great way to advertise your site using trackbacks, my advice about things to do other than committing suicide does not apply to you.

Advertise on your own damn dime!

Right about now my regular readers are probably beginning to think that I change the design of my site more often than I change my socks. Sorry about that! I promise this will be the last redesign for at least a year. Maybe.

I took advantage of the redesign to implement some new features as well—some more thoroughly than others. More changes are in the works, but rest assured, dear readers, that none will be as drastic as this most recent one.

It is my hope that this new design will make it easier to post more regularly (because I will no longer need to worry about screwing up the page layout with short posts, which are usually all I have time for), but we’ll see how it works out. If you see anything you like (or don’t), feel free to let me know.