I’ve had to make several changes to the comments capability on this weblog
over the past few days. The reason: spam. Some group of on-line gambling
sites are spamming all of the web logs they can find. Their actions are a
sad commentary on our times when a few people take something useful and
interesting and drive it into the muck and garbage, spoiling the capbility
for everyone else. However, there may be some light at the end of this
tunnel. I ran across a blog called In The Trenches by Kevin Devin
(www.kevindevin.com) where he talked about the problems with comment-spam
in Word Press web logs (since this post is coming through e-mail, I can’t
include links in clickable form). A comment posted by Matt (photomatt.net)
directed me to what looks like a clever method of defeating this
comment-spam. Wp-hashcash is a set of code written first by Matt Mullenweg
and then enhanced by Elliott Back (elliottback.com). I’ll be installing
this code this evening! I’ll be quite happy to see this stuff go away and
not come back.

It has been lightly snowing much of the night and most of the day today. It
looks quite nice out my office window. Perhaps by tomorrow we might have a
couple of inches of new snow. I expect that the mountains are getting a
good dose of snow. The newspaper yesterday reported that Yellowstone
National Park has far below normal snowfall for this time of year and
hasn’t been able to accomodate very many snowmobiles so far this year. On
the other hand, some people in our neighborhood who spent the holiday in
Island Park, Idaho, reported lots of snow on the ground up there. Let it
snow!

I’m sending this post in through my work Lotus Notes e-mail system. The
purpose is to see how this kind of e-mail is handled by the web log —
perhaps some additional formatting work may be needed. Once I get the
comment-spam problem put to rest and get the e-mail posting working
correctly, I probably won’t have much more to do to the web log for a few
weeks. Then I can work on a better method of handling pictures!