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June 23, 2006
Blog changes...
I've been looking for a good web hit-counter for a while, and fiddled around with several of the free ones that I found via Google. But, none of them were satisfying, and I got distracted by other more pressing things (more on that in another post). But, today I finally found something worth using. In the gutter now, you'll see a little picture of the world, maintained by ClustrMaps, which uses a rough geospatial reverse-DNS to determine the general point on the world map that the originating IP address came from. It's a cute way to visualize the distribution of visitors to the site, which I like.
In other blog changes, come January 2007, this blog will be moved to a Santa Fe Institute location, where I'll be starting a post-doctoral fellowship.
Finally, I'm considering closing all (past and future) entries in the blog to comments - the blog-spam is getting annoying to deal with, I don't get that many comments to begin with, and I haven't figured out a simple way to make it difficult for the bots to post. Does anyone have any experience with making MT v3.14 bot-spam-proof?
posted June 23, 2006 02:54 PM in Blog Maintenance | permalink
Comments
I use a generally available script called mt-close2.cgi to close comments and pings. I use it about every week to close any that are older than 5 or 10 days. It's specifiable at a prompt page.
This doesn't stop all spam but they seem to target older posts that have scrolled off the main page, perhaps thinking that you won't notice them. I also have all comments and pings emailed to me so that I have full information easily available (including IP address and such) in a "push" form so that I don't have to visit my own site and read the drivel I post there.
Posted by: back40 at June 23, 2006 03:30 PM
Congratulations!
Santa Fe Institute is a wonderful place!
Posted by: suxnc at June 23, 2006 07:15 PM
Congrats on going to SFI!
Posted by: Dave Bacon at June 25, 2006 11:39 AM
Thanks! I'm very excited about the move :)
Posted by: Aaron at June 30, 2006 01:44 AM