My ongoing war on spam
We’ve been getting a lot of spam lately. This is partly because Google needs to lock down their Gmail service from being used to generate email addresses automatically. It may also be because we are starting to show up in more search results. Whatever the reason, spam is no fun …
Fighting Spam
Spam – I knew that it would happen sooner or later; I would just have rather spam happened later (or never). There are two significant areas of spam that we have to fight. User Registration Spam (and spam groups) Comment Spam The user registration spam is pretty much just a …
Importing content from other platforms
Today I set myself the task of finalising the import process for a number of large blogs waiting to move into the Author Buzz family. If only life was so simple. It turns out that the last time anyone tried to import from the platforms in question was several major …
Oh no! Not now!
Right in the middle of NaNoWriMo, the server got the hiccups. First, the blogs stopped responding. Then the main site went down. I did what any stressed dev might do and restarted the server. Bad mistake! The MySQL server refused to come back up. Just totally refused. After some time …
What is Grumpy Dev Syndrome?
Grumpy Dev Syndrome is the term I came up with a while back to describe that funk that devs (developers) can get into when everything just seems to suck and the only answer is to unload your irritation on someone else. The dark side of Grumpy Dev Syndrome is when users …
Games as platforms for storytelling
As both a dev and a storyteller, I know that games can make an excellent platform for telling stories and it is something I dream about quite frequently. This dreaming leads to an unhealthy dose of Grumpy Dev Syndrome because, well, I can’t use games to tell stories and I …
The world’s grumpiest dev
There are days when despite my best efforts I sort of just feel all Marvin the android with a side order of Eeyore. Today is one of those days. I am a grumpy dev and you should probably just stop reading. Today I feel like the best and worst dev in …
WordPress Child Themes: It’s a bit like that.
Creating a child theme has nothing whatsoever to do with actual children. It is a WordPress term that basically means the same as extends does in PHP. For those of you reading this that are not PHP geeks, a child theme is like creating modifications without modifying the theme itself. You …