You’ve helped me get started many a morning with your wonderfully creative gifts to music lovers everywhere, and now there’s a void left in my daily routine…
Anyone know where I can find good mashup podcasts? 
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
This better be the last post in the series, but it appears everything has been resolved.
When the system administrator finally responded, he included two sample traceroutes showing the problem had been resolved and explaining that there had been several abusive hosts flooding the network segment my server is on, which he had removed.
I guess this is the kind of risk you take when you go with a hosting company, but it’s so much cheaper than hosting things yourself, it’s really the only option.
Oh well, let me know if you have any further speed issues, I’m going to finally hit the sack now that I don’t have something to wait on… G’nite!
Just thought I’d let everyone know what I’m up to with the plugin. If you’d like to see my current wish-list of features, skim through the couple of comments on my last post. Here’s the latest, in relative order of importance:
SPAM Received / Purge Dates
DONE! These are now displayed in my admin panel. Oddly enough, most of the data for this was already present in the plugin code, just not actually printed out… go figure. You can expect this to appear in the next release!
Email Notifications
I just migrated the function used to send email notifications about new comments over to the Akismet plugin today. I haven’t actually tested it yet, because I’m waiting on several other things so I can test it all as a whole.
I’ve also added an “Additional Configuration” section to the Akismet configuration panel (Plugins -> Akismet Configuration, where you put your API key in). Right now it’s got a “Notify on New SPAM” checkbox you can tick if you want our new notifications. You can expect this to grow somewhat significantly as I add more and more options.
Whitelists & Blacklists
The next priority is a whitelist and blacklist feature. Wordpress already includes blacklisting, but I really want a more specific tool. I want to be able to specify that this email address or this IP address is blocked, or that this word is a no-no. Wordpress lumps all these together, which could leave room for a lot of false-positives.
Blacklisting will have to come right along with the email notifications, otherwise there’s no way for me to test in a timely manner (ie: I’ll have to add myself to the blacklist so I can SPAM as much as needed). Since whitelisting is exactly the opposite, it’s just natural that the two should come as a package.
Admin Panel Coolness
Just because it’s all the rage these days, I thought I’d add a little Ajax to the admin panel. Why type all this whitelist / blacklist stuff in one big text box when you can use Ajax to add / remove multiple ones? Gee, aren’t I the greatest?
So that’s where we’re at. The next release should be fairly soon. By the end of the weekend, if nothing else. I’ve gotta make it to Starbucks for some quality coding time before Thanksgiving hits and exams quickly follow, or it may be Christmas before I get much more done.
As always, if you’ve got any problems or feature requests, drop me an email, use the form on the Contact Info page, or let it fly in a comment!
UPDATE: Oh yeah, and no offense to the actual Abdul that reads my blog! 
Abdul is just my standard stereotypical hard-to-understand I’m-stealing-your-job-for-a-quarter-a-day Indian outsourcing worker name… I know, I’m really not that creative, am I?
I posted about it earlier, but here’s a follow-up.
First off, I’d like to let everyone know that up until now, I’ve received nothing but flawless support from Superb Servers. In the entirety of my 2-year long relationship with them, I have submitted 3 support tickets. The first was when I hung my server during a reboot, and it simply needed to be hard-cycled. The other two were during problems with their data center, which were momentarily there-after reported on their status page. Both times the incidents were updated within 5 minutes and completely handled within 10.
At 2:32pm (EST), I submitted the following support ticket, via my un-affected external control panel:
Noticed some unusual latency connecting to web server. Upon further investigation, it appears I’m getting some very high response times at the last hop (your network to my server) - 91ms jumps to 1400ms.
See attached file for assorted traces.
[attachment snipped]
I feverishly refreshed the ticket status page for quite some time, as I continued about my work (since I was, after all, at work). I received absolutely no acknowledgement from support staff.
At 5:26pm (EST), I added another note to the ticket:
An update would be greatly appreciated now that we’re coming up on 3 hours post-ticket.
At 8:49pm (EST), I called their toll-free number and had the following conversation with “Abdul” the ever-helpful technical support specialist:
Me: Yes, I submitted a support ticket about 6 hours ago and have yet to hear back from anyone there about it. I was wondering if you could help me.
Abdul: What ticket ID?
Me: Uhh, I have a “Reference Number”.
Abdul: Yes, that.
Me: 119 - 047.
Abdul: One moment.
Me: OK.
[40 second pause]
Abdul: Yes, we receive ticket.
Me: Uhh, ok. And…?
Abdul: Oh yes, we forward to system administrator… in front of server, yes.
Me: Uhh, ok, it’s been 6 hours now, and I haven’t heard anything back.
Abdul: Yes, we forward to system administrator in front of server, you know, at console. He will update.
Me: Yes, but this was six hours ago, and I haven’t heard anything back yet.
Abdul: Yes, I guess you just need wait. You get email automatically.
Me: Uhh, ok… [click]
Not only was Abdul’s broken heavily-accented English almost impossible to understand, but he was totally and utterly useless. The time would have been better spent if I had found some goat porn and “entertained” myself.
So now we march firmly into our seventh hour of thoroughly unacceptable service, with not so much as a word from anyone about what’s going on, and I’m starting to shop around for new hosting companies. I’m thinking 1&1’s Root Server I would be quite nice, not to mention it would save me $20 a month (yes, I bent over and took it for this server, what of it?).
I await any news of my server’s livelihood, along with all my loyal readers. At 10:30 (the 8-hour mark), I plan on calling back and demanding to speak with a supervisor about my lost revenues due to this unresolved problem and unresponsive support… We’ll see how it goes.
I Hate Google Now…
I was reading through FeedLounge, and found the post from the Weblog Tools Collection entitled Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map. After reading all the disgustingly blind pro-Google comments, not only was I sick to my stomach, but I just had to rant:
This sucks… I hate Flash, and after Talk, Reader and Analytics (all of which I consider firm failures), I’m starting to hate Google too… Not only are stats not updated quickly enough (I’m sorry, but I like to know what’s going on whenever the whim hits me), but the service is unremarkable, slow, was down for the first 48 hours after launch, and seems to be wrong. Out of the 3 stats packages I’ve got running on my blog right now, Analytics reports a significantly lower number of users than the other two. I don’t know if it’s just dropping out for hours at a time (since I can’t find any hourly stats like every other package I’ve ever seen or used) or what…
If you want the attractive interface, Mint is far superior in many ways. If you want a raw stats package, AWStats is the clear choice…
Quit wetting yourselves over it because it’s got the colorful logo people, there’s greener grass in the pastures out there that don’t have big ‘Do No Evil’ signs over them…