6 Jun 2006

The slow move to Gradient Dropshadow Curve 3.0…

Under Blogging, General, Technical

The long hard road to an overhaul has begun.

I have had a few stop-starts on a redesign for Gradient Dropshadow Curve. The latest stop sees me leaving the design aside for a while and looking into technology, specifically, upgrading Wordpress. Actually the real reason is the unrelenting barrage of comment-spam I get on this site on a daily basis. The spam demon has even figured out how to get around moderation. So to get around this, I’m going to try out Akismet, a Wordpress plugin that a good mate put me onto that simply makes them go away. But it requires Wordpress 2.0 to work, so that’s that. 2.0 it is.

For this process, I’ve decided to upgrade the nice way, on my own local dev server, rather than try a major upgrade on the live site and screw everything up. So I’ve installed Apache/MySQL/PHP on my XP box. XAMPP is the easy all-in-one distribution for this, not being the sys admin type myself. So I have a nice easy dev server running Wordpress 2 at home now.

Now I just need to get on with the redesign… I think I will skip the whole Gradient Dropshadow Curve 2.0 thing and jump straight to 3.0.

More news as it comes to hand…

Archives

8 comments

  1. ross
    July 20, 2006
    3:27 pm

    spam spam spam… I get about 30 word press spammers a day… I figured if I change the name of the text fields in the comments section this would screw them… does that not work???

  2. hank
    July 20, 2006
    4:12 pm

    I don’t have high hopes for that. Does it work for you?

  3. Ross
    August 20, 2006
    1:20 pm

    okay, I think I may have a solution … I have implemented this but time will tell if the spam truelly stops…..

    on the comments.php page I have added this piece of code to the form…..

    < ? //// added by Ross //////// ?>

    ipt language=”JavaScript”>

    function checkCheckBox(f){
    if (f.spam_protected.checked == false ){
    alert(‘Please check the NOT SPAM box’);
    return false;
    } else {
    return true;
    }

    }

    < ? /// ended /// ?>

    and add this attribute to the

    tag

    onsubmit=”return checkCheckBox(this);”

    then on the page called “wp-comments-post.php” add this somewhere towards the top …(line19?)

    //// added by Ross ////////

    if($_POST['spam_protected']!=”666″ || empty($_POST['spam_protected'])){
    echo “spam!!!!!! you spammed me!!!! ahhhhhhhh!!!!!”;
    exit;
    }

    /// end of Ross add…..

    well that’s my attempt, I’ll let you know if that works and the spam stops

  4. Ross
    August 20, 2006
    1:26 pm

    Hank
    That last post is displaying my code incorrectly look at this link for full code

    http://radiationzero.com/spam_php.htm

  5. hank
    August 20, 2006
    11:05 pm

    hehe that looks good. I’ll take a closer look when I get the chance…

  6. Ross
    August 21, 2006
    9:33 am

    all good so far, it’s been over 24 hours and not one word press spam yet… previously I was getting between 30 to 50 spams everyday, so I think I may have been succesful!

    If anybody needs help or has questions about doing this email me ross@weirdgalaxy.com

  7. hank
    August 21, 2006
    9:52 am

    Nice one – but you’ll have gone from comment spam to email spam with that comment… :)

  8. Ross
    August 21, 2006
    10:02 am

    yes, i guess so….
    I forgot to mention this part

    “and add this attribute to the tag

    onsubmit=”return checkCheckBox(this);”

    should say “and add this attribute to the Form tag”

    like this
    [form action='bla-bla-bla.com' method=post onsubmit="return checkCheckBox(this);”]