I learned very quickly that I could not allow comments to be passed through to the site unchecked. The obvious solution was to moderate comments. While this is 100% effective at keeping spam off the site, it very quickly becomes unworkable when the volume of spam comments exceeds a handful every day. While it is not particularly burdensome to reject a couple dozen comments a week, when that number suddenly rockets into the high hundreds every week, moderation alone is not sufficient.

There is also another issue with moderation. It means that legitimate posts on the site do not appear immediately. Rather, they must wait until they are approved. While this is not a particularly large issue given the volume of legitimate comments my blog attracts, I do want the comments to appear as quickly as possible.

Enter Akismet. I discovered it when I noticed that WordPress wanted to update its Akismet plugin. Noticing that, I did some quick research and realized that Akismet might be exactly what I needed to solve my spam  problem. After jumping through the minor hoop of getting an API key and enabling the plugin, I was on my way.

Within seconds of enabling Akismet, it blocked two spam comments. Since enabling it, no false positives or false negatives have occurred. Given my experience over the handful of days since I enabled it, I have to say that it is a wonderful product. Indeed, if I was making any money with my blog, I would not hesitate to pony up the astoundingly reasonable fee they charge for non-hobby blogs.

So if anyone reading this is having a spam problem with their WordPress blog, give Akismet a try.

In general, I enjoy writing these entries. Sometimes I write them because something has a bug up my butt but mostly I’m writing about things that are interesting to me. Anyone who has read through my posts will know that the things that interest me are somewhat eclectic. I mean, 地球少女アルジュナ, Battlestar Galactica, English grammar, and TRS-80 Color Computers? (No, I don’t read or speak Japanese; I just copied that text from a much cooler source.)

One thing I’ve never really thought about, though, is why do I really do it? I mean, my comments in that first post mentioned above are great but that doesn’t really provide any insight into why I keep doing it. After all, my blog is fairly obscure. I’m pretty certain almost nobody reads it. My web host doesn’t even notice the traffic I get. So I’m clearly not making any money from this thing and I certainly am not getting famous. Still, I must be deriving some benefit from doing this or I would hardly still be at it all these years later, would I?

I put some thought into just that question. Like everything else in life, the answer is not exactly simple. It turns out I have multiple reasons for having continued this long.

The first, and probably least important, reason is that I enjoy writing. I dabble with writing novels (none finished or published), short stories (some on my site), poetry (available in dead tree form from the publisher) and even non-fiction rambles about current events. But pleasure is not sufficient to continue something long term for it eventually gets boring if that is the whole purpose.

There is also a certain ego trip that results from seeing ones work published in any form. With the advent of the WWW, it is trivial for anyone to publish anything they want. And I have done just that. In fact, I had a personal web site with actual content on it long before the blogging craze took over the web. Indeed, I registered my first domain name on October 7, 1998 and that domain still directs traffic to the one I use today (which I couldn’t get until late 2000 when the .ca domain was deregulated). Since my site has been online as long as it has, when it actually has content relevant to a particular search, it seems to rank fairly well. Being able to say I’ve had a web site since 1998 is also an ego boost. But the ego boost is even bigger if I can say the site has been active since then. And it has.

But ego trips aside, I think real reason continue is for the occasional comment out of the blue from people I do not know and who wouldn’t know me if we passed on the street. Every once in a while, I’ll write a piece that gets somebody’s attention and they will care enough to leave a comment. It happened occasionally before I started this blog and, thus, posting more regularly. It has continued to happen since then. Some of these comments are available for all to see when viewing the blog archives. I think it is for these small moments of awesome that I do this. I think it is wonderful that I can write about some random topic and find that another person actually reads it and feels strongly enough to comment on what I wrote. I think this modern world with its Internet and WWW counts as one of humankind’s crowning moments of awesome and I am simply honoured to be able to participate.

So what it comes down to is I like hearing myself talk (figuratively), I like seeing my name and my work appear where others can see it, and I like being part of something cool. In other words, I’m human. And it’s fun. So I keep doing it. So sue me.

I made this decision not because I have any great difficulties managing the site using old school static html files but because this way is much easier to add content to. It is also much easier to redo the site look without having to monkey with a large number of files and I no longer have to maintain stylesheets and so on if I don’t feel like it.

So far, I have brought the entire blog history across as well as the main web site pages. I have taken the opportunity to eliminate a few pages that were horribly out of date and not terribly useful. I have not finished bringing over the deep content pages, however. That may take some time as there is much fiddly work involved in doing so. I have, however, ensured that the internal linking structure of those pages will bring viewers back to the new WordPress installation instead of leaving them in limbo.

After tinkering with various WordPress themes, I think I have found one that I am happy with. It follows largely in the same vein as my older site layout, being largely text based with relatively little fancy layout gimmickry. That makes me even happier because it means I don’t have to monkey with creating a theme for WordPress which, while it is something I could do if I chose to, I really don’t feel the need to get that deep into WordPress.

This whole adventure has left me somewhat awed by the progress that web site publishing has made over the past ten years. When I made my first foray into blogging back in 2003, the state of the art was quite basic. Content management systems were just becoming a mainstream concept and blogging wasn’t really on most people’s radar. Back then, I rolled my own blog software which I used in one form or another until I switched to WordPress. Now, I have finally jumped on the content management system bandwagon though, in all honesty, the state of the art for that arrived a couple of years ago. It was really just inertia that kept me using the same old system since then. No doubt the next seven years will result in similar advancements which will be interesting to witness.

First, I like my site design so I wanted my blog to use a similar look and feel. Since the world at large goes for all sorts of whizbang gewgaws, my site design is fairly unusual, what with its total lack of images or fancy layouts. It took me the better part of today to work out how to get the basic look right and still maintain the functionality of WordPress that I was interested in.

The second, and possibly more pressing, issue was how to get all the old comments from my original home-grown blog software into WordPress. Knowing this would not be easy, I cranked up my PHP and MySQL skillz and started poking around. Without too much trouble I managed to incant the right stuff at MySQL to copy the data from the old tables to WordPress’s tables. Thus I was able to import all my blog posts since the dawn of time and all the comments associated with them! Yah!

For those of you wondering just why I went to an off-the-shelf software package, it comes down to time. I wanted a bunch of new features which one gets with such software without having to do all the tedious research and write all the tedious code to make it happen. That is just not efficient. I have better things to do, like ripping DVDs or reading books or watching TV or what have you. It’s not that my home grown software was terrible; it was quite good for the design specifications I built it to, but it was just getting old.

So here’s my shiny new blog with all its shiny old content. If you find anything that didn’t come over correctly, feel free to let me know. Also, I am likely going to be tinkering with the site layout for some time to come so don’t be surprised if something is broken for no apparent reason. Feel free to let me know if you find something like that, too.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled sparse stream of ramblings.

The first major problem is what to do when reorganizing the site. Since I like to keep the old links functional with redirects, I end up creating a bunch of rewrite rules in Apache or placeholder PHP pages or what have you. That’s a real pain to do and easy to mess up. It would be much easier to maintain if there were to be a lookup table somewhere that is consulted for links that don’t exist and an appropriate redirect generated in that case. That can be accomplished using mod_rewrite or with some sort of PHP script in a 404 handler.

When rearranging a site, one also wants to update all the internal links to avoid having them go through the redirection process or worse, hit a 404 error. This problem is not so easy to solve as it requires a periodic validation of the site or preprocessing every page to check for outdated links and rewrite them. This is not really practical.

A content management system can solve the above two problems without too much difficulty. However, most content management systems rely on a database server in the backend. That’s overkill for content that almost never changes, especially for someone proficient with a text editor and file transfer methods. That said, it is conceivable to create a content management system using static files on the file system which then preprocesses the files for links and so on. In fact, that is exactly what I have done, along with a caching scheme so that pages don’t get reparsed every time they are loaded.

Another problem content management systems often have is that the pages they serve appear to be modified every time they are loaded. This is not ideal for web site traffic volumes as search engines and web browsers will have no way of knowing the page really hasn’t been modified. My system uses the modification time of the source file to set the last modified time in the response and it also handles the if modified since request option and returns the proper not modified status if appropriate. This means browser caching can behave normally.

Many of my pages also have a last modified time in the footer. This has historically been updated manually by me when the page is updated. This is not ideal, however, since it requires me to remember to update it. Instead, the new system provides a substitution that adds standard footer along with modification time based on the file’s modification time. After all, the computer is very good at identifying such bits of information.

So I have a content management system that handles static pages implemented. I even arranged for apache to call it for every request within a particular folder. That means that unless the content system recognizes a request, it is not returned. The content system has full control. This prevents anyone from seeing the underlying file structure that implements the site. That is not sufficient, however.

My site also has a number of sections which have well defined behaviour or require more dynamic operation. These are such things as my blog or the photo album section. To make it possible to add such sections on at any time without having to modify the global site code, I have created a module system. The main content system examines the requested item, figures out a module name for the contents, and attempts to pass the request off to that module. If the module exists, it handles the request. In fact, the static pages are implemented as a module in the content system.

And, to top things off, if no module handles the request, it is passed on to a final step that looks up the requested item in a list and determines if a redirection is needed. If a match is found, a redirection is sent back to the browser, If that last ditch effort fails, a 404 error is returned.

It’s a very ambitious project. So far, I have implemented the framework for static pages and have started converting existing static pages to it. Still, I have the blog, photo album, etc., to implement yet before I can bring the new version of the site live. Even with the amount of work involved, I think it is well worth the effort even if there is no real visible change as far as the site users are concerned. Who knows, maybe I’ll share the site code once I have it all working.