RasterWeb!

Wow, I’m so proud… my first comment spam!

We just moved over to WordPress recently, and slowly but surely we got a few (legit) comments on a few posts. That is, until today.

We noticed 5 new comments. Hey! We’re really building a community here! Conversing and discussing! Oh, wait, it’s comment spam. Ugh!

WordPress put them into moderation, as it should, so luckily you didn’t have to see them, and it was quick and easy for me to delete them.

Hopefully I’ll soon implement the “nofollow” for new comments coming in just in case a spammy comment slips by. (I have plenty of thoughts on the “nofollow” thingy that I will write up later.)

It’ll be interesting to take part in the War of the Comment Spam, that’s for sure…

Over on 43 Things people write up the things they want to do, things like be happy or relax. I wanted to add some things that I don’t really want to do, but thought doing an experiment in social software was worth trying, so I added get shot in the leg, fall down a flight of steps, and total my car. It’ll be interesting if people say “I’ve reached this goal” for any of those, or better yet people who reply with “I’ve done this” and then mark it as “Worth doing!”

Any takers?

I learned a bit more about email today, from some folks who deal with email all the time. Not the spam kind, just the marketing/newsletter kind. Here’s are some tips… See, when people who deal with email want to clean their lists, and remove what they think are bad and/or fake emails, they look for certain things. So, I’m just saying, if you have your own domain, and want to have some fun, use something like delete.me@example.com or no.email@example.com, or if those don’t work, try to use profanity. I’m sure you can come up with your own examples.

Now, as you might know, when email is sent, they will include an image, and the URI will have a query string that uniquely identifies you. So take your mail app, and modify it to strip off the query strings of all URI’s and you might still get to see the images while they won’t know if you read the message. When I brought this up they seemed a bit perplexed, so that was interesting.

Ok, that’s all I got for now, more email fun later.

By request, here is the code I used to get my Gmail. (I hope you like Perl!) Download gmailpop.pl

(See Also: The Gmail API)

Here we present to you the first official post written in WordPress.

WordPress is a fine open-source weblogging application written in PHP, which is not Perl, but we’re using it anyway. ;)

In fact, while we’ve hacked on PHP a bit in the past, we’re quite excited at the prospect of doing more. So this should all work out fine. (Unlike other things going on elsewhere…)

Oh, expect parts of this site to be broken until the transition is complete. I do not have a date set upon which the transition will be complete, but if things are broken for too long, feel free to bug me about it.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank all the WordPress developers, contributors, and supporters. Feel free to leave a comment, which is something that hasn’t been possible here since 2000 or so…