Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

The ASP/ XML software that this blog runs on. is starting to show it’s age I’ve rambled on countless (well actually about 3 or 4) times about how I want to migrate it to something else. The thing that has given me the extra push recently is comment spam on the skate site - i’ve been having to hack in validation and blacklists which is only half working. The ones that do get through get deleted as soon as I spot them - a job made more difficult because blogworksxml doesn’t have a way of viewing all comments in one place, so I have to rely on a crude system i’ve hacked together to track new comments.

It would only take me a little while to put together something like they have in wordpress where first time users have to validate their email address by clicking a link in an autogenerated email, but reluctant to do this as I could be spending that time on migration to something else, plus I don’t want to deter genuine er.. commentators from adding comments.

Next stumbling block - neither quills or coreblog (now supporting plone!) appear to have a mechanism like wordpress for protection against comment/trackback spam. hmm.. looks like i’m going to have to do some development whichever way I go…

UPDATE 2007: this blog is now running wordpress in case you are confused

I stopped updating this page some time ago, but do occasionally post photos to my flickr gallery (3 most recent shown below or see the full gallery)

after a forced shutdown I lost all my mail and mail preferences - possibly because of filevault not getting time to rewrite files or something?

fortunately I had backed up my home folder to an external drive earlier in the day (a good idea!). After much trial and error I got it working again by deleting the file com.apple.mail.plist in (my home folder)Library/Preferences/ amd deleting the Mail folder in (my home folder)Library/ and replacing with the versions from my backup.

if like me you have a large quantity of stairs to ascend on your way to work, I can thoroughly recommend doing it in time to the acoustic guitar banging and strumming of KT Tunstall’s Black horse and the Cherry Tree.