Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
A couple of months back I said that the references in the Encyclopedia — which link back to the diary entries on which a person, place, etc was mentioned — were no longer updating. I’ve just finished some work that means these should now be complete and up to date at last! It’ll be a couple more days before I get round to making this happen automatically for new diary entries, but by next week everything should up to date on a daily basis. As ever, let me know if you spot anything that’s broken.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Wednesday 10 May 2006 | Housekeeping
Due to a huge flood of spam, that shows no sign of stopping after an hour of me fighting it, annotations are currently disabled. I’ll post an update when they’re enabled again.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Thursday 11 May 2006 | Housekeeping
I’ve switched the ability to annotate back on. There’s no more spam appearing right now, but it’s possible it will appear again. If so I’ll have to think of some better solution to the problem.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Thursday 11 May 2006 | Housekeeping
No sooner have I cleared one lot of spam, but another appears. I’ve no idea why they’ve suddenly appeared in such numbers over the past week.
I’ve now switched annotations/comments off for all parts of the site until I can implement a solution - sometime over the next couple of days I hope.
The first step may be trying Akismet , and if that doesn’t do the job we’ll all have to log in using TypeKey to post comments. I’ll keep you informed…
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Wednesday 17 May 2006 | Housekeeping
Annotations should be back, and functioning, across the site now.
We’ve been having two problems. First, spammers automatically hit the Movable Type comment script many times over (without physically filling in the forms), which causes a load on the server, resulting in the site’s hosts, Pair.com, disabling the script. I’ve now changed the name of the comment script and will keep on moving it periodically in the hope this will stop some of the automated attacks.
The second problem is that some spam isn’t being filtered by Movable Type. This means that (a) the spam appears on the site, and (b) every page hit by spam is rebuilt. When the site has a lot of comments, and is being hit by a lot of spam at once, this results in even more server load, and even more likelihood of Pair.com disabling the script. To combat this I’m trying Akismet’s spam filtering, which is reportedly very good.
If spam still gets through we’ll have to start logging in before posting a comment, which shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. But if load on the server continues to be a problem, I fear the only solution will be for me to upgrade to a server that isn’t shared with other peoples’ websites, although I’d rather avoid that hassle and expense. Cross your fingers…!
Let me know if you find any problems.
9 comments | Permalink | Thursday 18 May 2006 | Housekeeping