Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
If you’ve been using the site over the past week you’re lucky if you’ve missed all the spam comments flooding the annotations. If the past four days are anything to go by we can expect around 500 of these to appear every night, even with the current safeguards in place. (For what it’s worth, I’m getting a similar number of spams appearing on my personal website.)
Obviously, I need to take stronger measures. The most likely solution will be to install the latest version of Movable Type. This has an optional feature that would require people to create an account and log in on the TypeKey website before posting annotations. TypeKey is a free site that allows you to post comments to any weblogs implementing its technology, with a single username and password.
Hopefully I’ll have a chance to try the software out this week and see how it works. If anyone has alternative suggestions I’m more than happy to hear them! Until then, please bear with me…
3 comments | Permalink | Wednesday 2 June 2004 | Housekeeping
On Monday I will be upgrading the software used to run the site, which will hopefully make it possible to stop the spam links to porn sites appearing in annotations (another few hundred appeared last night). Hopefully all will go smoothly, but this is an advanced warning that if you notice something broken on Monday, I’m probably already trying to fix it!
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Saturday 5 June 2004 | Housekeeping
I mentioned that I would be upgrading this site’s software so that a simple log-in would be required before posting annotations. This would hopefully help cut down on the large amount of spam appearing in annotations. Unfortunately, the software I was upgrading (Movable Type 3) seems to need a bit more work… rather than try and work round a few problems I’m going to hold off and wait for official fixes. I’ll post another message here whenever I next plan to do this. (If you’re really interested in the problems, there’s more here.)
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Monday 7 June 2004 | Housekeeping
It’s been well over a year since I last looked at the traffic statistics for this site - to be honest I’m not overly concerned with getting huge numbers of visitors. Things seem to be going smoothly, with plenty of interesting annotations, and that’s what matters most.
But someone was asking me recently about the stats, so I’ve just analysed the logs, and here are the highlights for May 2004. According to webalizer, the site averaged 11,801 page views a day, with an average of 3,309 “visits”. This is slightly less that February last year, but that was close to the frenzied launch of the site - I’m surprised the figures are still so high to be honest! The most page views on a day was 22,863 on 8th May, and most visits was nearly 4,000 on a number of days. The totals for the month were 365,848 page views and 102,596 visits.
Up to today we’ve had 10,708 annotations to the diary and 2,490 in Background Info, for a total of 13,198.
20 comments | Permalink | Thursday 24 June 2004 | Statistics