Between Linux and Anime

Yare yare… so my site went under for a day plus, and then resurfaced with some new PHP settings that were unfriendly to WordPress. I got sick of waiting for my host to fix the problem (yes I bugged them) so I rolled up my sleeves today and did some hacking, making minor modifications to the WordPress code and whacking my .htaccess with some workarounds. And we seem to be more or less back online!

Seem to be. I have no way of knowing for sure. If anything acts in a distastefully screwy way, please do let me know.

Back to my rant, I then discovered to my horror that Akismet has ceased to work (chi.. they must have cut off outgoing connections). Knowing full well that I’d be nose-deep in spam before I could say “God Dammit”, I irritably went to quick-shop for a stand-in spam filter. NoSpamNX is now in the house and working its craft, and has apparently already stopped “7 birdbrained Spambots” so far. Hopefully none of you are among the seven – if you are, email me rite nao so that I may unleash wrath and hell! (see comment form below for my email add)

Anyway, if I were a little less pissed I might have been somewhat pleased with this exercise – some of the counter-spam solutions I saw employ techniques which I found very clever and intriguing.

But since I have just spent the last 2 hours on this while procrastinating on that mountain of work I must now return to, I’m in no mood to be indulgent.

Come to think of it, if Akismet doesn’t work, pingbacks probably won’t either. And I’m a big fan of pingbacks -.- Ugh.

The recent disturbances had better be caused by some massive doomsday DDoS attack and not just some badly planned server upgrade. Think I’ll give this host one more week (oh magnanimous I~!) to get their act back together, failing which I’m gonna hostswap. AGAIN!