Over the last month or 2, I’ve seen this in quite a few blogs. I’ve succumbed:

HowManyOfMe.com

There is: 1 person with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

That’s interesting, because this site says there are at least 2. The elderly gentleman resembles my grandfather.

I realized on Monday night that it had been 2 weeks since I posted. There are a few techy things that I wanted to mention.

1. I’ve made a few more changes to the Spam Karma auto purge plugin. This weekend I should be able to test it. If it performs as expected, I will release it into the wild next week. I’m going to make a second version for WordPress MU which will have a feature not required in a stand-alone WP install.
2. I’ve been running gentoo linux on this computer for the last 7 months or so. I’ve decided to switch to Fedora Core 6. Hopefully, this weekend I’ll be able download the 6 cd images needed. If that goes as planned, you won’t see alot of me next week.
3. Last week I went to an official Vista launch day. For all the neat things they have done, I was quite underwhelmed. I know eventually I will be working with it. But, you can count on it never getting installed on any computer I own. More than once in the course of the day, I silently wondered how many people in the audience were familiar with the innovation of the Open Source and GNU communities. For example, Windows Vista has a sidebar on the desktop. For the sidebar you write gadgets using javascript. Extensions for Firefox which have been around for quite a while are written in javascript. I saw little innovation in which one could say the idea was original.
4. For the last couple months, signups have been disabled at Homeschool Journal. We did that because we had reached our account’s capacity. The work that I’ve done with Spam Karma has extended the window in which we had to plan what to do next. Sometime in 1-2 months we will be moving Homeschool Journal to another provider where our account will give us a bigger slice of the server. Bigger accounts cost more and we will eventually have to look at ways of funding the site.
5. After we have the account but before we move Homeschool Journal, I will be working on optimizing the code and implementing a few other features. So, for a while I may be throwing a few techy accomplishment posts at you.

to you all

Today I discovered I had comments from the previous entry. Earlier tonight I responded in the comments.

One of the things I hadn’t mentioned was that I would not be going back to work this past week. I’ve been home since the 22nd. I had planned on getting lots done on the house. TBH, I’ve spent quite a bit of the time spending time with Andrea and the kids. I don’t regret that of course. It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to chat away with them more than once (in person) or twice in the same week. It has been a good break for me as well. And, I did get some things done here.

Unrelated to house renovations, this week I counted the caught spam on Homeschool Journal (HSJ). Even though I’ve been spending a few hours a week purging it for the last couple months, the total suprised me a bit. Spam Karma (SK2) tracks all comments that it suspects may be spam in tables in the database. Among the tables for 200+ blogs were approximately 40,000 records. I had purged it down to under 5000, 5 days before. There were 14 blogs (ones that have to be purged every week) that had accumulated over 12,500 of those.

Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about how I might reduce the time involved in managing SK2. SK2 is an amazing tool in that in our experience it captures well in excess of 99% of the spam comments directed at a WordPress site. The first problem we encountered with SK2 was that when many new users signed up for blogs they were not familiar with the way SK2 works. Before we started altering SK2, each user needed to activate it and visit its administration page before it would filter comments. Andrea installed a version of SK2 modified for WordPress MU which is automatically enabled and filters for all blogs.

What we discovered a couple months ago was that SK2 only purges the spam data when it’s administration panel is loaded. Even though there are check boxes there that suggest the purging will be automatic, it isn’t automatic. At the time, I found an abandoned blog that had collected almost 15,000 spam. What I’ve done in the last couple days is write a WP plugin which is an add-on for the SK2 plugin. I’ve tested it in both this blog and Andrea’s. On an active WordPress install my plugin will make the purging automatic. On a WordPress MU install it will purge the spam data on a blog on any day the user logs in. Tomorrow we plan on testing it on HSJ. While it will not entirely eliminate purging on my part, it will substantially reduce the time involved.

An interesting tidbit I discovered over the last several weeks is that the spammers primarily target active blogs. A good percentage of the blogs that have not had recent updates have not collected up any spam at all in the last few weeks.

If you are using SK2 and are interested in the plugin I’ve written leave me a comment. I’m not quite ready to release it into the wild yet, but if you want to test it, I can arrange it.