Php

Canning Comment Spam

Workbench has been under attack lately by a comment spammer linking to dozens of cheesy .info domains. The sites sell drugs like Cialis and Phentermine, offer Texas Holdem poker, and pimp a bunch of other get-rich-click schemes. I'm writing my own software here in PHP and MySQL, so I'm trying to deal with this abuse as painlessly as possible. For several hours at a time, a new comment spam is being posted every 1-2 minutes on the 2,300 weblog entries on this site. In a comment management tool, ... (read more)

2004/11/08

Handling 18.5 Janets of Web Traffic

The Drudge Retort was hammered yesterday, serving 10 gigabytes of traffic as thousands of people looked for exit polls and early election returns. The unit of measurement for traffic here is Janet Jackson's right breast, the exposure of which maxed out the shared SDSL connection on my old server. For seventeen straight hours, it served 144 kilobytes per second of traffic (1 Janet) to people on a fruitless search for celebrity mammary. Since that time, I have moved to dedicated server hosting ... (read more)

2004/11/03

Using Your Header in UltraEdit

Since I began using UltraEdit as a programming text editor recently, I lost the ability to call the header() function in PHP. Every time I tried it in a script, the following error happened: "Cannot modify header information - headers already sent."This error happens whenever a script produces output before header() is called. When obvious causes for this problem have been ruled out, you must look for anything that might output a blank line or other characters.In my case, UltraEdit put three ... (read more)

2004/10/12

Turning Off the Radio

Because I wrote the book on Radio UserLand, my decision to stop using the software on Workbench has raised a few eyebrows.By tradition, the first thing a weblogger must do with new software is publish a vicious excoriation of the old software, warning others to keep away, like a courageous relief worker marking a land mine.Textbook example: When Mark Pilgrim concluded that a Movable Type licensing change would have cost him $535, he declared the software a dead end, switched to WordPress, and ... (read more)

2004/10/07

The Bench is Back

This entry represents the culmonation of several weeks of work moving Workbench from Radio UserLand to software that I am writing for myself on a LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).This has been an eventful month. I was the first person to evacuate Florida for Hurricane Frances, taking my family all the way to Northern Virginia almost two full days before it made landfall. My excessive caution was rewarded by a drive home through South Carolina as the storm hit that state, spawning ... (read more)

2004/09/30