Thursday, October 05, 2006

computers = love/hate

I love computers when they work. Something just makes me happy on a core level when I can write a few hundred lines of code, and have everything work. Even if it's not working correctly, all I need is that glimmer of hope while debugging to keep me going.

Recently I've had a tremendous influx of comment spam from my comment system. I'm not talking about the 20-30 per week I've been deleting manually for months; the last 5 days alone I've gotten well over 2000 spam messages on various posts throughout the archive which goes back several years. I deleted most of them with crafty sql queries targeting key words (like viagra) and IP addresses (which I do log thankfully), but it got really old, really fast. I've been keeping an eye out for a good solution for keeping it at bay, but nothing has really caught my eye until I found Akismet, created by the lovely people at wordpress.

Now, I use blogger to manage my posts, but I wrote all the scripting for the comments myself (well before blogger offered this as a service; d'oh!), including the AJAX and backend and stuff, so it's pretty klunky at times. Most importantly, however, is I can't simply drag and drop plugins for filters and templates. If I want something, I code it. Which is how this post started.

I implemented Akismet using the provided PHP4 class (which saved another couple hours of coding), but still had to finess it all into my existing system which took about 2 hours. I've been meaning to re-write the whole system in PHP5 using new OO features as an excersice to keep me fresh, but my host hasn't updated versions yet, so I'm a bit lazy with that.

What this all really comes down to is that I really like coding. It's fun.

And remember, e-mail me all the bugs you find :)

***UPDATE***
For sh*ts and giggles, I added a counter to the About This Site section to track how many spam messages the filter catches. It's been less than 24 hours, and it's already way past a hundred. I don't like spammers :(