pi:
This week I've done updating around a few of my websites. It began with a few reports from friends that my pi page was down. I'd known as much but because I made it a long time ago and lost the original code. For geeks: I used Reflector to disassemble the original assembly and then cobbled it back together. It works now for all of you who are just dying to know what the 69,000th digit of pi is.
phoDak (oPhoto):
I also got around to some long overdue updates to phoDak (software which I'd originally called oPhoto). It started with some comment spam that was advertising porn. I'd seen comment spam before but never on a new photo. I'd periodically clean things up, but didn't feel a dire need to write any code (laziness!). But I couldn't take a chance with that kind of spam since it's the site related to me that people visit most often and also because someone may confuse the link with something I put up there.
After disabling comments for a few days I used the following strategy:
1. I leveraged an Akismet library.
2. I added a picture/word because it seems to work well for Jeff Atwood.
If things are still getting through I may do a few more things like enabling some sort of "mark spam" link for people to get rid of bad comments. The worst case scenario for me would be to disable comment visibility until it was approved.
In the process of doing that update I thought I'd roll in a feature people have asked me for quite a bit: the camera settings I use on the photos. I'd been a little apprehensive about it because the first thing it will do is show how much of an amateur I am since my settings are more often than not quite bad. But I've been needing to get more purposeful about really learning my camera rather than trying to compensate with photoshop. I'm doing my Canon 20D no justice by maintaining willful ignorance.
I updated my photo upload page which, get this, has never had a password. Of course the URL is unknown except to me but it still was an irksome little thing that I finally got around to doing. It's still got a secret location but I can rest easy that my heroes wouldn't think less of me.
Hobbitwerk:
My final software update (is anyone awake at this point?) is that Hobbitwerk now aggregates from this blog rather than the error message it's been displaying since I pulled the plug on my old blog on Userland. I'll also be updating the blog link from it to seruyange.com/david along with the picture preview.
That's it for updates, stay in touch.