Well, I’ve gone ahead and turned of trackback pings (I think). Apparently, the new tactic of the scum of the internet is to try to insert their pr0n spam into trackbacks. WordPress shows trackbacks as comments, so it is a convenient way for the SOB’s to insert links into their filthy sites. So far nothing has actually been posted to the site. The crack get donkey! security team sees to that. It’s just that it’s an annoyance to have to log into to WordPress to swat away the little piles of poop the internet gnats leave behind.
It’s headaches like this spam nonsense that sometimes make me think about just pulling the plug on this little dog and pony blog. It’s getting close to domain re-registration time, so just trashing the blog and using the domain for a private website for family info is an idea I sometimes toy with.
Of course, I really don’t want to shut the thing down because that would mean the bastards have won, so I’ll probably keep the blog out of spite. Besides, I still get a bit of a thrill from the occasional non-spam oriented commenter that stops by and says they enjoyed something I wrote. Getting my ego stroked is so cool, and, being married, it is about the only thing I can get stroked without being served with divorce papers (are stupid double entendre jokes grounds for divorce because if they are, I am in trouble).
I really do have to figure out what I want to do with the blog, however. To be honest, I don’t have much desire to forge ahead with any type of serious political blog. I’ve said this same thing before, of course, but I always manage to find something political that pisses me off enough to post about. That will probably not change, as I am sure the next four years will be chock full of outrageous and criminal antics by the Administration. Luckily, I think I have let this site whither enough that most of the audience that came here for politics left long ago, so no one will probably even notice if the blog changes focus (or, more appropriately, further loses focus). Besides, there are so many other erudite lefty political bloggers out there that a dolt like me really cannot add much to the discussion.
My feeling right now is that this blog will become (remain?) a sporadically updated personal journal/life observation/books I have read/recipes I have cooked type of thing. I definitely have the desire to keep writing, but I am tired of all the rigmarole of finding links to justify my opinions and stuff. That right there is the one thing that always stood in the way of my political blogging enjoyment. After all, defending your positions is intellectual hard work, and it is un-American to be intellectual. Stupid is the new smart!
Additionally, I am sick of debating people in the comments, or at least facing the prospect that someone will dare attempt to question my opinions. To be honest, I have grown grumpy lately and am completely unwilling to be open to even entertaining the opinions of the other side of the political spectrum. It makes no sense to debate someone who is so obviously completely wrong (joking… well not really). Anyway, I have a suspicion that no one sane is going to debate me on whether I actually ate an egg, half a grapefruit, and some toast for breakfast this morning, so I should be safe from now on.
There are some potentially big changes lurking on the horizon here at casa del burro, so I am sure I will have plenty of life-observation-related material to post. At the very least, I will need a place to talk/vent about everything that is bound to happen if these events actually occur. That place will be here, and if you decide to stick around or even just stop by on occasion, I will gladly assault you with my virtual whining, and then you can stroke my ego and make me feel all warm and fuzzy again. Just don’t tell Mrs. get donkey!
[Update]: The entire time I was wrtitng this post I was getting absolutely hammered by the mf’er that was trying to load my site up with trackback comment spam. At first I couldn’t figure out why. After all, I shut the trackback feature off from the WordPress control panel, so everything should have been blocked. It turns out that even though I shut off all trackbacks from the WordPress control panel, each individual post has a setting that overrides that global setting. In other words, turning off the trackback feature globally had no effect on entries posted prior to changing the global setting. I figured out, however, that if I CHMOD’ed the wp-trackback.php permissions to 700 (jargon is cool), the f-nut’s very attempts to run up on my porch and poop on my welcome mat would be blocked at the front gate. Suck it, spam-hole! (does Ickey Shuffle).
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3:25 pm on January 5th, 2005
Please do keep blogging, about whatever makes you happy. I’ll still be reading.
Doesn’t WP have an MT-Blacklist plugin? That works on trackback spams as well as comment spams.
3:37 pm on January 5th, 2005
Thanks, Charles.
Yeah WP does have a plug-in that filters comment spam and it works pretty well. What it does is quarantine the spam commenst to a place where you can moderate/delete them. As far as I can tell, none of the trackback spam actually got posted to the site. It’s just the principle of the matter. I don’t even want the bastage spammers to have the ability to ping me. Unfortunately, that means I have to shut the legitimate trackbackers of the world out for now.