Schonhose

Finally the (long awaited) update for the Defensio addon for Pixelpost is here. As mentioned in this blogpost earlier it contains the fix that slowed down a lot of photoblogs earlier this month.

Thanks to Carl Mercier of the Defensio team I was able to add one more bugfix. Carl was looking at the logs over at Defensio and noticed that sometimes the article-date is not passed to the service. The date is a required parameter and from the very first version I made sure the addon passed it along with the other variables.

This was kind of odd since it was clearly a Pixelpost blog and the date was not passed. I have to say I was stumped on this one, but Carl managed to figure it out. The Defensio addon allows comments to be posted on images that don’t exists yet. Once we (Carl) identified the problem a fix was a matter of a few lines. If the article-date is not in the database, the Defensio addon will throw a nice 404 error.

So there you have it, the best just got better!

I have been using the services provided by Project Honeypot for sometime now, hoping to stop comment spam and email harvesting. I even wrote an addon so it can be used on Pixelpost Photoblogs. Today I received an email from Project Honeypot, it seems that one of my honeypots has caught its first unique harvester nobody has ever seen before.

Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here’s something to be happy
about — today a honey pot you installed successfully identified a
previously unknown email harvester (IP: 41.251.10.177).

For those of you who are unaware of what an harvester is, a nice explanation is given by Project Honeypot in their FAQ:

A harvester is a computer program that surfs the internet looking for email addresses. Harvesting email addresses from the Internet is the primary way spammers build their lists. Harvesters must connect to the Internet through an IP address. Project Honey Pot publishes the list of the top IP addresses used by harvesters.

If you want to join this project there are several addons for WordPress and, as mentioned earlier, there is even one for Pixelpost!

WordPress came out with a very important 2.3.3 release so I updated the blog to that version. I also took the time to update some plugins and that is about all I will do for today. It was a long day at the office so I might just turn in early.

Well, some of you might remember October 16th and the backup scheme I installed following that dreadful day. I set up cronjobs and mailed the zipfiles to a Gmail account. Pretty slick and I was quite happy with it.

That was right up until the day Gmail started bouncing my mails. After an investigation it seems Gmail flagged my zipfiles as a virus. The reason: a high compression rate and somehow that is considered to be related to a virus.

So last night it got me thinking. I had a fairly decent zip-class, perhaps I could throw in a mailer-class and a database backup class (written for my old CMS). That way I could build my own backup software and drop the other script that was sending unaccepted zip-files.

Well, today was the day of the initial tries and after some startup errors (paths are really different when started as a cronjob) all seems to be working well. The size is only 120KB while the other script was a mere 2000KB. So that is a drop of a whopping 94% in size.

Now I can clean some things up and install it on all my subdomains. Now for a question to the readers of this blog: What would you consider to be a good backup scheme? Every 56 hours? (That would make it three times a week: 7 days times 24 hours equals 168 hours in a week. 168 hours divided by three would make it every 56 hours). Let me know alright?

I have been so busy with the new Googlemap addon for Pixelpost so I completely forgot to mention some things. Therefore I decided to put them all in this post in random order:

• Yesterday we released the final 1.7 version of Pixelpost. Grab it from the Pixelpost homepage.
• You can now subscribe to comments on this blog (by popular demand).
• I found this cool site called ajaxrain.com with loads of AJAX examples for Prototype and Mootools.
• Some minor templates changes were done, none really noticeable really. But somehow they were bugging me.

Well, that is it for now. Enjoy the rest of your day.