Nothing But Words

Farewell, My Monkey

Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Blogging, Web Design

As you can see, I’ve moved my blog to the top of the site. The blog is the only part of my site that isn’t gathering dust, so I thought it made sense to move it up. I’m still fond of the old toppa.com home page, but it’s about 10 years old now, and it’s time to move on. It shall be forever memorialized here, with these screenshots:

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It’ll Come To You When You Stop Thinking About It

Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Blogging

A while back I tried to come up with a new title for my blog, but couldn’t think of anything I liked, and eventually gave up on it. Then last night I was listening to C-Tec while washing the dishes and heard the lyric “My wisdom is nothing but words,” and it clicked. For me it’s the perfect blog title, suggesting ambiguously facetious self-deprecation, which is a space where much of my sense of humor comes from - to the extent I’m funny, anyway ;-). I Googled it, and was surprised to find no one has laid claim to it yet (at least as far as I could tell, it’s hard to know for sure since it’s a common phrase).

And I think the subtitle should effectively pre-empt any smart alec remarks about my pictures .

Spam = The Essence of Evil

Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Blogging

I’ve put my feedback form back on the site, and I’m fairly confident that it’s spam proof now. It checks the HTTP referrer (amusingly, this environment variable has been canonized in misspelled form as HTTP_REFERER) and, more importantly, it disallows certain special characters in the email headers. I think that’s how the spammers got me before. A word to the wise if you have any kind of web form that sends email: don’t allow \ or % in any of the form fields - these can be used as footholds to hack into the email headers.

And now I’ve got spammers using the “comment” feature of my blog to spam me with get rich quick schemes and breast enlargement offers. I’m happy with the size of my breasts, thanks. Fortunately, Movable Type includes some nice banning features that will hopefully be sufficient to stem the tide.

What a pain.