Manila: new callbacks and 5 years old

I was blogging, about 6 months before Manila came out. Didn't call it blogging then, called it a news page. We used Frontier's news page technology, with the shared menus on my Mac Classic, I could copy text from a web page in Netscape, hit a menu (still in Netscape) and a Frontier dialogue box would open (made with MacBird) with the URL and title of the page and the text in the clipboard already pasted. The system also went and added this news item to an email which was posted out to subscribers. Ah! It was a revelation. And so, so easy. We soon noticed our traffic growing. Alas, I never kept a copy of the site.

Happy birthday Manila. Can't believe it's five years.

And now, referer callbacks and comment callbacks to combat spam. I've been using a rough method that's been quite effective at fighting the porn referers: I'd see if the word 'sex' or 'adult' or other common porn words were in the domain name of the referer, and ban the IP. Mostly the same IP would try several times with different domain names. Obviously, it's a machine. So far, in nearly two months, I've collected just over 1,000 IPs.

Recently, though some had been getting through. Those referrals with unknown (to me) porn words, or even clean (non-porn) sites. So, I installed Thomas Creedon's referrerRemover. Which cleans up after the event. (I'll dig into this and add something so that anything banned with it goes into my ban list too.)

Luckily, I, nor any of the machines I monitor, have been targeted (yet) by the more insidious comment spam.

I do love Manila. Much easier for meatheads to use than the more complex and powerful Radio. I've just added some RPC-XML calls to my Thumbnailer plugin which now allows me to shoot a script at a folder of images and have them placed in a page, as thumbnails. Wicked. Though I wish I could write this script as a stand alone app, for my meatheads.