Skip to content →

Category: web

WikiLeaksโ€™ collateral damage : web-anarchy?

Published December 13, 2010 by lieven

NeB’s web-stats are orders of magnitude out of normal behavior, something must be going on…

  • Spam filter : normally between 10 and 20 spam-comments are trapped. They are removed automatically every 14 days so I only look at them when someone complains a valid comment didn’t get through. This moment, there are 1007 spam-comments held (already 1020 by the time I post this).
  • Akismet-plugin : for those who don’t run a blog, Akismet is an extremely useful WordPress-plugin getting rid of most spam-comments (before entering the spam-filter). I must admit I don’t check Akismet-stats regularly but today the message reads : ‘Akismet has protected your site from 104,145 spam comments already’ (which is about 10% of all visits…).
  • Mail-notifications : this week my email-account is bombarded with spam-comments to approve. Usually there are 1 to 2 such comments a week, now about 20 a day. Part of the problem was that the Akismet-servers were obstructed earlier this week, but the problem persists.
  • Today’s stats show more than 4000 hits, 500 uniques. About 3 times average.

Do we all really need to get caught in the cross-fire between WikiLeaks- and government-hackers?

I have no intention to post my take on WikiLeaks, simply because it won’t be original. As to Assange’s problems with justice : until further evidence comes to light I’m with Naomi Wolf on this (thanks Kea for the link).

If NeB goes off-line for a while, you know why…

Comments closed

Link problems : Markdown versus latex2wp.py

Published December 7, 2010 by lieven

As John Baez (and hopefully others) noticed most links here on NeB are now screwed up.

For years I’ve used the Markdown syntax to include links in posts (that is something like [this is what you see](and here is the URL)). NeB used an older version ( Version 1.0.1k) of php Markdown to convert these to proper links (as I did have problems with the newer version).

Ever since the Return to LaTeX post, I’m trying to re-educate myself to write posts in LaTeX and convert them into wp-format using the Latex2WP python script.

Unfortunately this script doesn’t go together nicely with the Markdown-syntax, forcing me to go over the converted latex-file almost line by line fixing errors in order to be able to post. Not the time-saver I had in mind…

I hope to post a lot of new material once the semester finishes and therefore disabled the Markdown-plugin. This causes all links to remain in Markdown-format, which is a nuisance but, if you really want to follow the link it is still there for you to copy-paste. Depending on how exciting the christmas-break will be I’ll try to hard-code the links in some of the more popular posts.

If someone knows of an elegant solution, such as a micro-markdown wp-plugin only parsing links, please drop a comment.

UPDATE : I have downloaded the Markdown quicktags plugin. It replaces the standard HTML-editor of WordPress with a Markdown-editor. There is an option “Render” which transforms Markdown to HTML and then updating the post will save the HTML-version. This looks like a relative quick way to get my old post-links back. So far, I’ve rescued the posts of the last year, more later. Hopefully, this causes no overload in your RSS-aggregator…

Comments closed

itโ€™s about time to restart blogging when โ€ฆ

Published September 28, 2010 by lieven

you get emails like this one :


From: Alyssa jasmine
Subject: Interested in writing article for your blog
Date: 28 Sep 2010 13:41:40 GMT+02:00
To: lieven lebruyn

Hi

This is Alyssa

I went through your site while surfing in google, am very much impressed with your site unique informations, and We are pleased to inform you that we do write articles for such unique sites without cost.

Article are sure for its unusual quality to invite traffic to your website. We provide relevant articles based on the topics suggested for your site

We do provide a unique article for your service. No duplication or copying of the article is done. we write contents exclusively for your site on demand. We also give Copy rights for articles to your site on security base.

In return we expect a small link connecting to our website from your webpage(2 links per post/article).

Awaiting for your positive reply to serve your site..

Thanks,
Alyssa

Comments closed