Getting off my keister, I added some new categories, fixed the downloads and forums sections, and fixed some minor stuff in WordPress. Also added Russian and Japanese language packs to the forums

Still to come are some more changes to WordPress (mainly including a footer and bringing back the random quotes) and trying to get the gallery, downloads, and forums into the same “style” as the WordPress pages. Will also be adding stats/counters, but I don’t know if I’ll make that “public”.

Here I am, minding my own business by doing some coding on the website, when I felt I needed a stretch. I got up and looked in the fridge for some food, then wandered by the window and looked outside. It’s snowing. Not bad, but there is probably about 1/2″ of accumulation. It’s 3:00 am right now, so there will likely be more in a few hours when I need to go shopping – not much in the way of food in the fridge. I have enough for some grilled cheese, which I will make in a moment.

The renovation is going well. I will probably set it to the main page before stopping tonight/today. I did notice that the forums and downloads sections are broken. It took me a few minutes to realize I changed the password on the database and I didn’t update the config files for phpBB and paFileDB. Gallery is okay for viewing, but I have a feeling that I will have to change the info there as well – at least if I want to add photos and do admin stuff.

Time for some food.

Since changing over to the new WordPress, I figured it would be sooner or later before I got some comment spam, even with some of the newer protections it offers. I have the site setup to send me an email anytime someone comments. Since I don’t get that many comments, it isn’t too hard to keep on top of them.

Today, I checked my email after work and saw that I got a comment spam. This one was different than the others. It only had one link, which was to some casino, the rest was some sort of bizarre jibberish comment. I deleted it, then went to bed (strange sleeping hours lately). When I woke up, I started working on some more robust comment protection.

The first thing I tried was a captcha, which is where a person has to type in a random code that appears in an image before being able to post. I couldn’t get it to work, so I had to try something else.

Now I am using WP-hashcash a/k/a Spam Stopgap Extreme. It is an actual plugin for WordPress instead of a hack. It presents some sort of javascript calculation in the HTML code for the browser to work on. If it comes up with the wrong answer, I guess the comment won’t work. There isn’t anything for the reader to do. It’s all done within the browser.

Hopefully this will be the key.

Once again, I’m updating the site. For the main page I am going with the latest version of WordPress (1.22, I think). It is supposed to have some newer features to stop/minimize spamming, so we’ll see. In the meantime, the main page will look funky and show a bunch of errors until I get everything set again. Hopefully, I’ll get most of that done tonight, but some of it will have to wait until the weekend.

Comments are back on, and will hopefully stay back on. I can actually turn comments on and off per article. I will go back and turn them on for the necessary articles.

I also plan on updating the forums to the latest from phpBB. There have been some security/spam issues regarding older versions of phpBB, so hopefully the latest version takes care of that.

The latest Blender is out and can be downloaded here.

I’ve been back on a Blender kick and have started doing some more modelling. Currently, I am making a loft apartment with all of the details. Here is a good shot of where I am at the moment. That image took over four hours to render. All those glass blocks are what killed the time. Anyway, that picture shows the closet (with the door), an opening to the outside hallway to the right of the closet, an entryway to the kitchen to the left of the closet, and the bathroom behind all of the glass blocks. Now that the basic model is set up, I am adding the details. Here is a shot of the bathtub. At the moment, it is the only thing in the bathroom, but I think it looks pretty nice. The details are a bit tedious, but in the end, I think they are worthwhile.

Speaking of details, I recently found a site called Turbosquid, which sells thousands of 3d models and which are avilable for immediate download. What caught my attention was the fact that some of those models cost a good chunk of change. It has me thinking about possibly posting some of my models for download. People put up their models for download, and Turbosquid takes a 50% cut of the price for their services. I haven’t decided if that is a good deal yet or not. It is an interesting idea, though.

Over the past week, there have been a bunch of spambots posting comments to the site. WordPress isn’t quite sophisticated enough to deal with this in the way some other blog systems do, so I decided it would just be easier to kill the comments for now. It’s not like the site gets tons of comments anyway, but I don’t want all of the comments to be BS ads.

So comments are gone for now. They may return in the future.

I created s couple of new categories. The first was Weather since I seem to be posting about that a lot lately. The second is Food. This is partly for recipes and partly for reviews of food products, resturants, grocery stores, websites, etc. nothing major about either of them. Just a way to “categorize” stuff on the blog.

It’s a start anyway…

Gottahavacuppamocha is now officially running on WordPress version 0.7.2. There is still a long way to go, but to use a cliche – every journey begins with a single step.

Alright, enough chit-chat. Back to work.

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Time for an update before I hit the sack:

I have a new logo that just sits in the corner above the menu. The menu itself has moved to the left hand side, plus it got a lot shorter thanks to making things like archives, etc go on their own pages. The overall look is pretty much confined to the front page for the moment. I still have to apply the basic template to the other pages, but I wanted to get it setup right on the homepage first (well, I did a little work on the login page). I still have to setup the downloads and the gallery, but those will wait til tomorrow/today – after I wake up.