piikkilanka.com

"Why would I need any spam protection? I'm not running any popular blogging engine, so spammers won't be able to abuse my blog."

Wrong. Absolutely wrong.

This blog has been up and running for quite some time (though update rate has been slow) and this is what my comments table looked like just moments ago:

mysql> select count(commentId) from blog_comments; +------------------+ | count(commentId) | +------------------+ | 6627 | +------------------+ 1 row in set (0.02 sec)

Guess how many of those were by actual people? Less than five. And now even those are gone - being as lazy as I am I just truncated the table (my apologies if you were one of those who had posted comments.)

Anyway, it seems I'm going to need some spam protection after all. I'm considering these:

• Captcha (it's not elegant or perfect and it's really quite awful considering usability, but my company has been implementing it with great results)
• Something similar but slightly more refined ("what's 1+1?", "are you a human?" and so on)
• A self-made "spamwords checklist"
• A free spam blocker (something like Spam Karma, though that particular software is - in my opinion - made unusable by an awkward license)

I'll be posting updates to this post as soon as I decide where to go from here. All roads are still open.

Related posts: Piikkilanka.com redesign '07, Site updates

Not a huge surprise considering popularity of Netscape browser in recent years, but it's still almost tragic: Netscape browser is discontinued and support will cease after February 1, 2008.

"Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox." - Tom Drapeau in The Netscape Blog

The title says it all.

I actually managed not to touch the computer during Christmas Eve - probably the first time in something like ten (or more) years - so it's a bit late for the Christmas part now, but what the heck - better late than never, right?

Interesting stuff is going on around the Web:

• Firefox 3 Beta 2 was released (all the usual warnings about beta versions apply here, it is not a finished product, don't treat is as one.)


• Internet Explorer 8 renders Acid2 correctly. Doesn't mean much for the common folk, but those in the Web design business might find this interesting. (This is achieved in "IE8 Standards Mode", the exact meaning of which I'm still not really sure.)


• David Airey continues his struggle against domain hijackers, and it seems that the whole hijack scene was made possible by a security failure of GMail. The security issue has been fixed, but the problem remains - this is important for most GMail users.


• Andy Clarke has raised some serious debate with his post CSS Unworking Group and a follow-up titled CSS Working Group proposals.

Today I carried out the yearly cleaning here at Piikkilanka.com (basically meaning that dozens of files of dozens of types were buried even deeper in the darkness of my very unorganized home directory, hopefully never to be found again) and switched from home-made CMS back to WordPress.

I guess it was just one of those "did it because I wanted to" kind of things, but I kinda thought it might also be interesting, since the web has been so full of all these "customize your Wordpress to meet all your needs" articles and all. That and the fact that WordPress is awesome and cool and sexy.

But anyway, something even more interesting happened today: Mozilla announced the first beta version of Firefox 3.0! It's brand new, bigger, better.. and a beta. It's also supposed to be full of security-, usability- and performance updates, not to forget some handy new gadgets like "native web page form controls", "colour profile management" and "full page zoom".

I'm aware that there's an endless list of awesome extensions for Mozilla Firefox available at the Mozilla Add-ons site (in case that you happen to be web desiner/developer be sure to check out the Web and Developer Tools category) and in many other places, but these are my personal favorites :-)

1. Web Developer

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Useful tools for developing web pages. I've found resize-tool (resizing browser window to any specified size), validation tools (W3C validator, speed report and many more) and cookie tools particularly useful.

2. Firebug

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

HTML, CSS and JavaScript inspecting and editing live. Really useful when making small changes on a layout or checking which CSS rules apply for certain element.

3. Save As Image

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3408

Save a website (or a part of it) as an image (png or jpg). Saves quite a lot of time when compared to letting Photoshop (or similar software) do the same task.

I hope someone finds these extensions useful. I certainly have.

Is there an important plugin missing? Feel free to mention it!