RailsConf Europe - In Berlin

September 18th, 2007

I arrived in Berlin yesterday and the sun was shining, that makes a change from London but today its raining, so exactly like London.

There is a large assembly of Railers, official figures have 39% Germans, 19% Brits, 11% Americans and the rest. Dave Thomas did his keynote last night (more to come) and DHH is just finishing his this morning.

I have some starter pictures for you:

Using Attached Files in Mephisto

June 14th, 2007

The Mephisto blog engine has added the facility to attach files to an article rather than just embedding in the article content itself.

I’ve now added some code which will show an attached image at the start on an article. You can do this by editing the home.liquid template to something like this:


{% if article.assets.size != 0 %}
  {% for asset in article.assets %}
    {% if asset.is_image %}
      <p class="image"><img src="{{ asset.path }}"/></p>
    {% endif %}
  {% endfor %}
{% endif %}

Liverail to RailsMachine

June 13th, 2007

I’ve just completed a switch over of hosting on liverail.net from TextDrive to RailsMachine and I must say I could not be happier with the experience.

The TextDrive hosting I was using was a shared installation and mephisto is not happy on shared hosting. Instead the virtualised Linux hosting provided by Railsmachine is truly excellent. All my previous problems with Mephisto such as out of memory errors, asset problems, comment problems and submitting large posts has gone. It is also considerably faster.

The capistrano deployment recipes on RailsMachine made it supremely easy to deploy a Rails application.

Right result all round. I can now get round to actually blogging rather than fighting to keep it running.

I havn’t as yet migrated the svn repository so you may be unable to download the RailsDAV or mephisto webdav plugins.

UPDATE: Anonymous SVN access is back. For anyone interested to setup read access for anonymous SVN at railsmachine I followed the instructions at How do I install mod_dav_svn? but changed the line in the domain config /etc/httpd/conf/apps/.conf from

Require valid-user
to 
  <LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
    Require valid-user
  </LimitExcept>

Migrated to mephisto and learning about spam protection

February 9th, 2007

Liverail is back!

And now running on mephisto with a bit of a redesign based on the theme Pinder. I’m going to update the design in a few days but it is looking lots better so far.

Mephisto is helping with with my Spam problem, its Akismet is picking out nearly all the spam but letting good comments through and it is much easier to deal with deleting the akismet picked spam.

I’ve learned a bit about blog Spam problems.

Things that work.

Turn on Akismet.

Any good blogging system should have Akismet integration now and getting an API key is free for personal use.

Disable Comments in a month.

One of the surest ways of dealing with any spam is to disallow comments a month after the article was published. This is a common setting in most blog software and helps because by the time the spam spiders find it, it’s all too late. It causes problems with long running articles of interest such as my Flex and RoR tutorials but it’s a worthy price to pay.

Don’t let the spamming start.

You should think about spamming from day one, even though I didn’t get a spam problem until over a year after my blog started, most spam spiders will test your blog for suitability with a test comment. If it can then read it on your blog it will hit you with its full spam might. Don’t let them start.

Captcha.

If your blogging engine supports it, turn it on. It will stop nearly all spam and anyone who can’t be bothered to fill it in, isn’t really too bothered about commenting anyways

And some things that don’t work.

Maintaining your own blacklists.

You’ll never keep up and the spammers are too clever. Use Akismet instead.

Relying on AJAX comments to protect you.

It’s a myth that most spam spiders don’t know about AJAX comments and this will protect you against spam. They wised up to this pretty quick.

Comments Broken

January 20th, 2007 Well Typo has decided to solve my comment spam problem, but now it won't allow comments at all. So sorry to any non-spammers trying to comment. I'm moving to Mephisto ASAP. UPDATE: Comments are back with mephisto

You've got Spam!

January 16th, 2007

I’ve been hit with some serious blog spamming for a while now. Both comments and trackback.

After a period of time away from my blog I came back to realise that the bots had taken over my content. I first noticed when I was checking my Google Analytics and found people were coming to my blog to read about some acts i’d never even knew about let alone wrote about!!.

So I cleared up all the Trackbacks (too spammy), turned on Akismet in Typo and cleared down the rest of the comment spam.

Interesting dynamics to the spam content. Some was plain spam, some was just short news articles. Some was psesdo-spam saying “great article, really useful” which could have been a real comment but obviously wasn’t. Some just reposted other peoples comments.

Well Akismet has got rid of some of it but a lot is still coming through. Annoyingly Typo still seems to store the comment if Akismet says it is spam but sets Published to ‘No’. This means I still have to trawl through the Unpublished spam to find the ones to get rid of.

Anyway all this is forcing me to start working on a move to Mephisto. Has anyone else done this move? Any tips. Will Mephisto do better with my spam.

Live in hope ;-)

I've been a bad blogger

September 25th, 2006

Yes that’s right i’ve been very very bad. No posts since the end of July is a sign of my life right now between moving home and working a very tough two months, but at least i’m getting paid for this one.

So i’ll try not to let this become an abadoned blog, left on the heap of forgotten posts of the internet and get back on the horse real soon.

There’s still a lot to talk about!

Stuart

Liverail down

July 30th, 2006

I know liverail has been down for a while, it’s a real problem.

I had been attempting an upgrade to Typo 4.0 but problems with the themes seem to be a real issue, hence the switch-back to default.

It was down for so long because I just have no time for anything at the moment with my workload and trying to find a new place to live. So those who are looking for more on Flex2/Flash/RailsDAV or anything else I normally do are going to have to wait a little. Sorry folks.