Blocking Spam Comments Using a Honey Pot
Everyone who uses the internet is familiar with spam and the problems it causes. Most people's familiarity is through its intrusion on email, and I've already outlined how I use gmail to block email spam. Since running this site I've had to deal with a lot of comment spam. It goes in phases but I receive about 2–3 spam comments per week and sometimes as much as 20. And this is a low traffic site. My initial strategy was to delete spam comments as they appear. I receive a notification... more »
Order, Inheritance and Specificity in CSS
Some quick notes on an easily misunderstood area of CSS. One thing to remember with CSS is the order statements appear in the stylesheet is important along with inheritance and specificity. So if you have the following: div { background-color: red; } ... snip ... div { background-color: green; } The green background will be applied. This is also true across multiple stylesheets. Rules from stylesheets linked later in the HTML will take precedence over stylesheets appearing earlier... more »
Thoughts on dConstruct
Last week was dConstruct here in Brighton, which I found to be a mix of interesting, inspiring and frustrating; but, above all, entertaining. The topic for the day was "Designing for the Future" and varied from a very high level dreamer's view of what could be, a look at how sci-fi has influenced interface design and vice-versa, to a very practical look at what can be done now in different media. The speaking highlights for me were Russell Davies's talk on bringing the digital world to the... more »
Installing VMWare Server and Running Windows XP on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid
Recently I was asked to do some .Net development and, unfortunately, my cranky old Win XP laptop is definitely not up to the challenge. Not wanting to buy a new machine or mess with my Ubuntu install I decided to try a virtual install using VMWare Server 2.0. The following isn't exactly a how to, it's more notes and links on what I had to do, so I have any easy reference for next time. A very good walk through of installing VMWare Server on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex can be found here: How to... more »
32 bit DSN on 64 bit Windows
Earlier in the week I came across something which had me stumped for a while. After a lot of training on the Endeca platform I finally had an opportunity to set up an instance for a new site. Unfortunately it was a duplication of an existing site so there wasn't that much to do. Still, I got the tweaked version running on my dev box with no trouble. When I moved it to the staging server it wouldn't work. It consistently failed to connect to the database via a DSN, though the JDBC connection... more »
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