Category: Web Bob

Testing an upgrade of MT that I’m making to try to solve my comment spam problems. I’m going from 3.15 to 3.35, and I’m somewhat astounded by how easy the upgrade has been thus far. I’m going to turn comments back on, too.

When I turned comments off under the previous version, I watched my CPU usage drop from as much as 45 minutes a day to 20 seconds a day, so comment spam attempts hitting my database clearly were the culprit. I’m hoping this install of MT will minimize the problem. I’ve also changed a few default setting to try to further dodge the comment spammers. We’ll see …

The CPU usage for my hosting account has been soaring, and I suspect it’s database calls from spammers who are trying unsuccessfully to post to the site. I’ve disabled comments for a while to try to figure out if this is the source of the CPU spike. If so, I’ll need to figure out a workaround to restore comments but keep the spam attacks at bay. In the interim, you can always e-mail me at bbenz@scrippsweb.com.

I’m in Athens today at Ohio University, so it seems appropriate to give props to Soul of Athens, a new site spawned (I think) for the OU VisCom Department. But what I like most about it is the mix of folks involved. It’s good to see academia slipping out of its silos and spreading its wings. And the content is very cool.

The site is Flash-driven and sucks some bandwidth. The wireless connections I’ve been viewing it on are barely enough to render it, but it does work. And it errs a tad on the side of being too image driven. But given the abundance of text centric sites out there, I think I’d sooner err on the side of photos and video, most of which are beautiful on Soul of Athens.

I particularly liked the Die Donkey Skull piece. Dawn2Dusk also is a nice look at Athens from sunrise to sunset.

For interactivity, they’ve made it very easy to share each piece, and they have a blog and a Flickr group featuring user-submitted images of Athens.

All in all, great stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here …