SteveCastellano.com

I was subjected to a pretty intense and sustained comment spam attack over the weekend. I thought I would turn off comments temporarily, wait the attack out and, after it had subsided, restore the site from backup with new and improved spam protection measures.

Well that’s not exactly how it’s going to work, obviously.

I’ve shut down my Blosxom script, and it won’t likely be coming back. While I think it’s possible that the script could be reconfigured to withstand such attacks in the future, my initial searches have not turned up any solutions that provide the features I need.

I’ve got a lot more that I could say about the situation. Obviously it’s a drag. I’d like to keep what I have, not let any of the links stay broken, make it better faster stronger blah blah blah. But I don’t have the expertise to patch the code myself, and Blosxom doesn’t appear to have been supported in any significant way for quite some time (and no offense to the devoted guys who are still developing plugins), as its original author hasn’t mentioned upgrades for over a year and a half.

Perhaps the nail in the coffin for me was the fact that Rael’s blog seems to have been overrun by comment spammers some time ago.

So, while it’s pretty uncouth to put up an “under construction” notice on a website, I think you folks will forgive me for saying that this place is a bit of a mess, and I’m going to clean it up before too long, and then once I’ve settled on a new content management system I’ll move it all back to the root folder where it belongs.

Thanks for visiting.

I thought long and hard about what to give my loyal readers for Christmas this year and came up with what I think is the perfect gift: XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation.

This has meant taking down the Referrer code. Sadly, URLs with ampersands will not validate. That means that many search engine referrers will make my XHTML Validation claim worthless when they are appended to the list.

While the search engine queries were among the most interesting things under the Referrers headline, I can sum them up for you thusly: the SY77 is still very popular in Europe, resulting in a lot of searches for service info and sounds. People like their VSTs free if possible, and many of them were wondering what that VCS3 rumour was all about. There are periodic bursts of interest in things like service manuals for electric pianos and the Sound Lab Mini-Synth DIY project. And occasionally there are baffling referrers indicating that someone got here by clicking the 271st ranked entry for “Yamaha trumpet mouthpiece”.

And some people get here by Googling my name, which is equal parts flattering and unsettling.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to watch over someone’s shoulder while they’re visiting your website. If you find yourself pointing at their screen and saying things like, “the link! click the link!” and “what are you, grayscale-blind?” – as I did yesterday – you might want to consider a redesign.

My aversion to the underscore can be traced back to my days working alongside an old-school hot-metal-era typesetter, who would look over my shoulder and offer such helpful tips as, “yeah, we would never do that in my day.” One of the many nuggets of typesetting wisdom that he imparted to me was the fact that there is no good reason to underscore. And as a tribute to his tutelage, I’ve tried to carry that aesthetic over to my web design – with somewhat predictable results.

So witness please, my first design-driven (rather than purely utilitarian) Blosxom flavour. I suspect there is a tidier way to do it with CSS rather than tables, but the urgency inspired in me as a result of the realisation that the difference between #444444 and #000000 was not nearly drastic enough for most casual observers to distinguish between the muffin that is the text and the blueberries that are the links demanded that I work quickly with simple, familiar code, and leave the business of teaching myself new tricks for another day.

One month into the new dynamic configuration, I have deleted my first comment spam.

I know that this one in particular was submitted by a real live person (as they submitted twice to an entry that was not accepting writebacks, took the time to see if the spam was posted, and then moved on to another entry that was), so I’m going to indulge myself in an explanation as to how moronic this behaviour is. I don’t know if these people read. I feel strongly that if they do, they should read more. Starting with the following:

more …

In panicked response to the declaration by a kind Blosxom Group contributor that he planned to add my RSS feed to his aggregator, I have educated myself somewhat on the protocol, adjusted my RSS headline tags so that they actually bring you to the correct story, and become a bit of an evangelist to my luddite friends on the subject (no offense guys, I know you have more important things on your minds).

The dynamic music links page has been activated. It still needs an index. But now that I’ve got the config plugin working for me, I don’t think that’ll be too far behind.

I know these technical updates probably aren’t very interesting to you, but I’m finding the whole process quite rewarding. And the conversion of the links page has not only been a significant undertaking, but the content has been a pretty big draw in the past, statistically speaking.

more …

The audio directory is now live. New music and relevant discussions will be found there, and eventually the contents of the old MP3 page will be transferred there as well.

The link to “Programming Tutorials” has been redirected to the Articles directory. I only wrote one programming tutorial anyway. That tutorial however led to a couple of articles for a users group magazine that was published by a software distributor, and I will upload those eventually.

“Programming” means synth programming, by the way, and the software distributor is a music software distributor. It will be a long time before I have anything to say about actual code that will be of value or interest to anyone.

As you can see, I�ve decided to make some changes.

I was reading up on Unix for OS X recently, and I discovered that one of the authors of a book I was reading had also designed what looked to me like a pretty interesting and robust piece of code called Blosxom.

The software is ostensibly blogging software � though its extended capabilities have been demonstrated elsewhere � and while that�s not really what I do around here, it occurred to me that the structure of several pages on this site (notably �recent additions� and �MP3s�) lends itself to the blog format � headline, date, blurb, repeat. And now that I�ve switched to a new host and am in the process of fine-tuning some of the back end here, the front page has become home to the occasional service bulletin. If its tidy directory structure is anything to go by, the new software should allow me to organize these three areas in some kind of sensible fashion.

The benefit to me is threefold: a) it�s a lot easier for me to update the site when necessary, meaning that I may b) update the site a little more often; and c) you readers can contribute relevant information if you wish to do so, at least until I get overrun by bots the way everyone on Movabletype seems to sooner or later.