atourworst.org

After almost four months of working at home, I finally trekked back into the wonderful world of retail. I had my first day of work today–It was only orientation so I didn’t do too much. Right now I’m only working part time for the time being, but I am still looking around for another full time job. I’m actually waiting on Cingular to get back to me, and I believe I might have snagged a job with this time this time around.

I finally managed to get atourworst.org back to normality. It ended up being the resolving IP address that was causing the horrendous load time (it was close to 40+ seconds for me!). I was also having issues with spam bots hitting up my site every minute, and not being blocked by akismet. But now the IP issue has been fixed, and MySQL configurations have been tweaked to accommodate the site’s usage.

Thanks Bubs, Mari, and Jack for your suggestions on spam protection. I had actually installed Bad Behavior just after I posted that entry, which was actually starting to reduce the amount of comment spam. I also installed Comment Timeout which is set to close comments that are older then 60 days or haven’t had a legitimate comment on them in 35 days. I realize that it’ll inconvenience people that want to leave a comment on them if they find them through searching or other ways, but hopefully they’ll contact me if it’s that important.

So far it’s worked wonders as I haven’t had any spam problems (yesterday I had about 350+ “approved” spam comments make it through) since Bad Bahavior has stopped 414 access attempts since yesterday, and akismet has managed to catch 88 comments just from yesterday alone.

Things should be running along smoothly now! With all that done and done with my first day of work, I’m just waiting for Mark to stop by and then we’re heading to his friend Crystal’s apartment to play some Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360.

Edit at 4/29/07 @ 1:08am – A few hours ago I ended up getting a call for another interview on Monday. I would love to have this job because it would put me back on the path with computers and its peripherals. It’s for a Tiger Direct store in my area. The best part about the phone call? He was highly impressed with my application. Ahem, I’ll take a bow now, thanks.

I have no idea what is going on with my site, but for some reason things feel wonky. My site’s load time has been pretty shoddy today; Loading up my entries takes forever, and askimet seems to be failing miserably.

I’ve been receiving comment spam every minute, since 10am this morning and Akismet hasn’t caught a single on of those. Somehow they all got approved. I have this inkling that a plugin I activated (then later deactivated) had some cataclysmic effect. I’ve probably deleted well over 100 comments that were spam, and somehow got approved despite not having an e-mail address.

For now until I find a suitable method of “protection” (I really don’t want to go the way of captcha) I have now set up comments to be moderated if the comment author is not already in the database (and approved.) So if you’re a new visitor to my website and you leave a comment, don’t fret. When I see it, I will approve it immediately!

No doubt I’m sure a lot of you are aware of this bandwidth exceeded evil mockery of a page. It’s honestly been awhile since I’ve stumbled across a page that had a 503 page on it, due to the large amounts of bandwidth that most hosts now have with their packages. Anyway, after viewing Bubs’ page and seeing that her bandwidth limit exceeded, I realized that the e-mail I was writing to her, wouldn’t get to her until she A.) Paid for more bandwidth to last her until the a new month, B.) Waited until May started to renew the bandwidth. This was because she was using her domain+hosting to receive/send out mail (at least, I’m assuming so.)

Even though I can control my own bandwidth, I have my e-mail accounts hosted off of my server. I currently use the Google Apps service for mail. There are two editions for the Apps: Standard Edition which is free, and Premier Edition which is $50/year. If you want to check out what the difference is, you can view their comparison. I currently have the standard edition, since I don’t utilize what the Premier offers.

With Google Apps, you can create your own e-mail “service” that will utilize GMail’s interface if you chose the webmail route, or you can use POP3 accounts which utilize’s Gmails POP and SMTP ports. Setting it up is very easy to do. When you go through the steps of signing up, it will provide you with two ways to authorize that you own the domain name being used. Once you have that domain name verified, you can set up your e-mail accounts through the interface (you can reach yours by http://google.com/hosted/atourworst.org. Once you have your accounts set up to your liking, you will need to log into your domain’s control panel (cpanel, dhpanel, ensim, et al.) and change your MX Entries to reflect ones provided by Google (you don’t/won’t need to use all of these, you can pick one):

• aspmx.l.google.com.
• alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
• alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
• aspmx2.googlemail.com.
• aspmx3.googlemail.com.
• aspmx4.googlemail.com.
• aspmx5.googlemail.com.

So, even if your website has exceeded bandwidth, or hell, your server is down, you’ll still be able to send and receive e-mails. The reason why I also like this is because of GMail’s spam box that will rid of all the junk, so I won’t have to worry about receiving hundreds of crap e-mails. I don’t use the webmail feature often, since I prefer POP3, but if I’m out and about (say at Mark’s place) I’ll just log into my GH account and check mail through there.

Here are some images of Google Hosted’s admin panel:

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Just came across Wittysparks.com’s article, “60 Best CSS Directories You Would Die to Watch” which features, you guessed it, 60 CSS galleries that are a must-watch.

Perfect if you’re a stalker for the galleries to check out what people are concocting and to get ideas. Bub’s gallery, Per.fectio.net is included in this list. Congrats Bubs!