x

Monthly Archive for November, 2006

Now my comments are spam

At least Akimet thinks so.

Lately I noticed that my own comments reply are not appearing. I was pretty sure the comments were posted. After some test, it turned out that Akimet marked them as spam! It some became a pain to have to go into the admin after every reply to unspam my own comment.

One problem of living and accessing the Internet from China is that many spam filter consider my IP as a spam source. I had similar problem before commenting on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

Akismet do not reveal how spam are determined so it is not clear if Akismet use IP as one of the factor. I would hate to think that it was my email or URL and certainly the content of my comments does not read like spam.

After digging around it seem like there is an option in Options > Discussion, right at the bottom, there is a checkbox,

Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies.

Backlist! Don’t get me started on why blacklist is a bad idea.

No luck after unchecking the option. My hope now is the false-positive feedback to Akismet really work.

[tag]spam, akismet[/tag]

Donation for October

This month’s donation comes a little late. I was thinking which other software that I use regularly that I should send in a donation. In the end I decided to send to an online service instead.

EveryDNS is a project that provide free DNS service to the internet community. The founder David Ulevitch, has since moved on to start OpenDNS, another free DNS service that I had been using as well.

Managing DNS is not as easy as it looks, especially when it comes to the smaller details. And often it is the smaller details that gets you.

For example, providing 2 or more DNS server, making sure the 2 DNS are at two different routing (and/or physical) location, syncing the DNS records between them, etc.

EveryDNS solves these, provide an easy interface and take away the server maintenance. I’m happy to make a little contribution to keep it going.

[Tag]dns, donation[/Tag]

links for Nov 20-26

This week.

  • Hosting billing
  • PHP Open source project management tools. Anything close to BaseCamp?
  • Blogging Success Study

Continue reading ‘links for Nov 20-26′

K2 3 column scheme updated

The AdAdvantage K2 scheme has been updated.

This update took me quite a while to release as I wanted to get 2 ideas out.

  1. Sidebar module support. Yes, finally sidebar module is working with the columns. A number of user had asked and I hope this makes it really easy to play around with the sidebar.
    I’m thinking of moving some of my blocks into the module in future.
  2. A block that spans across the 2 column on the sidebar at the top.
    Here the 336×280 large rectangle unit sits nicely.

Beside the 2 major update, the CSS and the layout are also adjusted. The header is narrower and the background color of 3 columns are now using a y-repeated image.

If you use it, leave me your feedback.

Domain hijacked for Spamming

Today I noticed an unusual amount of bounced emails. Initially I thought they were just spam mails so I just marked as spam and deleted them.

But more and more emails started to appear in my inbox. Some were bounced, some quota full, some vacation reply, some verification. Very strange.

So I took a look at them and found that all the mails were for one of my domains - freebizware.com.

It struck me that spammers are hijacking my domain to fake the From: address! Here are some examples,

fake spam emails

They were even generating random usernames and names.

I considering implementing SPF in my mail server. But I want to see if there are other ways to stop this from happening.

Do you have a similar experience? How do you deal with this?

links for Nov 13-Nov 19

This week,

  • followed some interesting links from Rojo’s newsletter.
  • research into open source in China
  • found an interesting project: Xinha

Continue reading ‘links for Nov 13-Nov 19′

links for Nov 06-Nov 12

A busy week of surfing:

  • Looked open source based companies for an idea that I have in mind.
  • DNS stuffs. Looking at moving my hosting dns to EveryDNS.net
  • revisit online storage/ backup.

Continue reading ‘links for Nov 06-Nov 12′

Work starts on Host Thyself

Since I am doing more and more system admin work behind the scene to support my websites, I had compiled a collection of useful notes.

Some of the notes are result of countless trial-and-error as well as searches, so I hope it will prove useful to other users.

Rather than have the notes sitting on my harddisk, I decided to turn the notes into a wiki and have it available online.

The site is setup using MediaWiki (which is the reason I upgraded to PHP5) and is now online at Host Thyself. The organisation is still under work as I gradually move more information online.