The main motivator for my upgrade to WP1.5 was the amount of comment spam I’ve been getting lately. Hundreds a day; thankfully, they’ve almost all been held for moderation, but it was still a pain in the proverbial to have to manually delete hundreds of comment spams every day. Wordpress 1.5 handles it much better, [...]

I’m trying to decide whether Disquisitions deserves to live, or not.

On the one hand:

There are some things I’d rather say in a ‘soapbox’ environment like a blog, rather than the more personal environs of my Livejournal. I like having a blog; I like using WordPress; I like tinkering and tweaking and all the nifty [...]

I just wrote up a Ta-Da List (more about these later) covering ‘Topics I Must Remember to Blog About’.

And now I’m blogging about that. This has to be the height of recursion, or onanism, or something.

Technorati Tags: basecamp, 37signals, blogging

Like (almost) every blog, Disquisitions has a sidebar section featuring readworthy blogs – what came to be known, in blogging parlance (right around the time I dropped out of blogging last time) as a ‘blogroll’.

But since (almost) everyone reads blogs as syndicated feeds these days, I figured I should introduce these people – first, so [...]

I’ve been somewhat AWOL lately, thanks to stress, illness (and more illness), and also having a life so boring it’s not even worth blogging about. Still, as you’ve no doubt noticed – I’m back. I went for an idle jog through my access reports, for comedy value, only to find I’m just shy of 6000 [...]

I’ve installed some heftier spam filtering on blog comments. This means that if your comment has a lot of URLs, or sounds like spam, it will either get suspended for moderation or – if it seems really spammy – deleted without me ever seeing it.

Just a warning in case your comment doesn’t appear immediately when [...]

So, I’m currently tinkering with a bunch of WP plugins to add a bit of functionality to the site. I’m not entirely sure how well they’re going to work, but I’m never going to learn if I don’t experiment.

Unfortunately, the one plugin I really want – a “related posts” plugin that doesn’t just spew out [...]

Awww. My first piece of comment spam. Now I know my blog has come of age!

(Which is not stopping me deleting it, I will point out.)

Technorati Tags: spam, wordpress, blogs

This is just to test out my new blog client – MarsEdit is from Ranchero Software, makers of NetNewsWire, and it seems quite snazzy. Works as a client for WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, and various site-based services like Typepad and Livejournal. And it supports multiple blogs, which is very useful.

Unfortunately it’s OSX software; I’m still [...]

One thousand site visits exactly! Huzzah :)

Technorati Tags: blogs, statistics, wordpress, stattraq

Got the SSI issue sorted; it was either a case of renaming everything as .shtml files, or adding one line to .htaccess. Guess which I picked? :)

So, take a look around. The full Disquisitions site is now up and running (although a few pages still need to be formatted and uploaded). Suggestions and commentary welcome.

Technorati [...]

Hey folks, I’ve just noticed that a few of you who read this blog via LiveJournal have been leaving replies to the post on LiveJournal. Please don’t do that! :)

If you see a post by disquisitions and you reply to it on LiveJournal, that comment is basically lost in the void. disquisitions isn’t [...]

I just tried uploading the rest of the eleanorholmes.com site before hopping back on EQ2 for a couple of hours. Not a pretty result.

It’s looking unpleasantly as if my host doesn’t support SSI. I find this very hard to believe. Time to go wading in some settings, I think, with a very large axe.

Technorati Tags: [...]

Adam pointed me to StatTraq, a very nice statistics plugin for WordPress. I’ve been using it and am very happy with it so far – and, of course, I’ve rapidly grown addicted to checking my stats.

“How many new hits this hour?” click, click “Ooo, who’s referring to me?” click, click “Yay, people love me!” click, [...]

WordPress offers one of the features that I like best about LiveJournal – the ability to post by email. It wouldn’t be nearly so useful if I didn’t now have access to my own mailserver, where I can set up any email addresses at the eleanorholmes.com domain that I choose.

So, let’s see if this works… [...]

Well, I’ve just discovered that the title of each entry is in fact the permalink, so that’s sorted… and I’ve worked out how to fix the timestamping issue… I think.

Technorati Tags: websites, kubrick, wordpress

Well, I’m busy tweaking my blog layout, trying to get it a bit closer to what I want. I’m happy enough with the design of it, but there are features lacking from the Kubrick template, IMO. For instance, I want a permalink for each post, which Kubrick doesn’t seem to do; I’d like to re-add [...]

Welcome. I’m Eleanor; this is my blog. (Well, duh.)

For the last couple of years I’ve been using LiveJournal for my blogging activities, and I like it very much. It’s grown since I’ve been using it, and it offers a lot of very useful features.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t cover everything I [...]