Category Archives: Blog Stuff

A Cautionary Tale For All Plugins Users

Well, it’s been a bit of a rough week for AZIndex and some of its users.  I knew that adding better support for indexes in other languages would be tricky, but I didn’t realize that it would be quite so difficult and bug-ridden.  After five quick updates in succession, I believe the serious bugs have been squashed and things seemed to have settled down (or it could be just that everyone’s taken the weekend off!).

Unfortunately, one of the bugs I introduced caused the upgrading of the AZIndex database table to fail on some systems, causing the loss of all their index settings.  I will be making changes to the plugin to prevent such a catastrophic loss from happening in future, but there is one lesson we can all learn from this incident…

Don’t go blindly upgrading every plugin the moment you see that a new version is available, especially if it an essential part of your blog, and certainly if your blog is a critical part of your business (or hobby).  That holds doubly true for plugins that are still under development and tagged as BETA software (as AZIndex still is).

Continue reading

A Little Tweaking Here and There

Now that I’m getting up to speed again on the blog, I decided to update the blog’s theme to allow for paged and threaded comments, as supported under WordPress 2.7. After an afternoon of misery and frustration (and has anything in the history of humankind been more frustating than CSS to use?) everything seems to be working okay.

Hey, I’ve even managed to get Gavatars working!

What fun! (Just don’t tell Brandon, or he’ll be wanting them on his blog too!).

Do I Have a Problem?

Apparently so, according to the spammers of this blog. Here’s a complete list of the spam the spam filter has snared since I last emptied it a few days ago:

  • Phentermine zoloft.
  • Generic cialis.
  • Generic prozac.
  • Online phentermine.
  • Generic meridia.
  • Ultram tramadol.
  • Phentermine.
  • Alprazolam.
  • Phentermine.
  • Xanax.
  • Meridia chat.
  • Zoloft.
  • Zoloft.

Thirteen ads, all for prescription drugs–six anti-depressants/anxiety, five appetite suppressants, a pain relief narcotic, and, one for, er, stiffening one’s resolve. I never knew I needed so much help!

I wonder if other blogs get such a preponderance of pharmaceutical spam, or is there something about my posts (or lack of them) that’s tipping them off regarding the needs of me or my readership?