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Cat and Mouse with Comments

August 6, 2010 01:25 by ckincincy

So I have re-enabled comments on this site.  It is a cat and mouse game, but this time I implemented something custom to my DotNetBlogEngine site, so the default hacks that exist for DNBE sites won’t work on mine.

I simply require that a basic math problem be answered before the post goes on.  Will be interesting to see how this works.


Website upgrade

May 2, 2010 00:26 by ckincincy

Something you probably shouldn’t notice, but this site is now running under .NET 4.0. 

If you notice anything odd, please notify me. 


Recent Referrers User Control

March 1, 2010 06:00 by ckincincy

In the past, Chris Blankenship had written a user control to show the recent referrers in DotNetBlogEngine.  I’ve used it on my site since then.  However in a recent upgrade of the code base it stopped working.  Having a little free time on my hand, I took the time to fix it for version 1.6. 

While doing that I wanted the ability to white list and black list certain domains.  The logic in DotNetBlogEngine to see if a referrer is spam is a little limited.  It does a simple web request on the referrer to see if it can find the host domain in the returned HTML.  This leads to a lot of good referrals being marked as spam.  Then there are some ‘good’ domains that I want hidden.

imageSo I added a white and black list to the referrer page.

The end result you see on the side bar of my site. 

If you’d like the code, you download it below.  This change does require a recompile of the business logic dll, and a schema change if you are using SQL.

Download Referrer Patch 1.1 – 31.4KB


Stop DotNetBlogEngine.NET Comment Spam

February 27, 2010 16:57 by ckincincy

image Comment spam on the DotNetBlogEngine platform has been a huge frustration.  Spammers have taken aim and generally have won. There have been various solutions offered up from the community.  Version 1.6 was almost solely targeted to combat spam.  So what happened?  The spam got much worse.

So in this cat and mouse game a new trick has been deployed.  Filip Stanek has incorporated the reCaptcha solution into DotNetBlogEngine. 

I deployed it last night and went from 20+ spam comments a day, to none so far.  Now, obviously, this is just another step on the cat and mouse game.  Will be interesting to see how long this works.


Domain Name Changes

August 8, 2009 10:59 by ckincincy

Well for readers of OCDProgrammer.com some things happened last week that may change the direction of this blog.  Last week I orphaned my old domain, CKURL.com and just had it resolve to this site.  So if you are looking for CKURL.com and my personal post… well those days are gone. 

However there are times when I want to comment on politics, life, or my Christian faith.  Those post will not happen often, but they will be here on occasion.  For readers of CKURL.com, you will likely want to unsubscribe from my RSS feed or email list. This blog is fairly technical and I don’t plan on changing that.

Thanks for reading either of my blogs.


Categories: Site Stuff
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Upgraded Blog

April 20, 2009 03:00 by ckincincy

image I took the time today to upgrade my blog to version 1.5. 

The main new item in this release for my casual reader is the ability to have nested comments. So now you have a ‘Reply’ option to comments so, who you are replying to is obvious.

Overall DNBE is a very good blog engine and if you run a blog, well worth the transfer to it. 


Site updates

January 17, 2009 20:06 by ckincincy

I’ve made a few updates to the site recently.

First I added a blog roll to the site. I’ve added just two blogs for now, if you think your blog would be a good fit… let me know.  I included Chris Blankenship due to his great support of DotNetBlogEngine and Rob Lindley, co-worker and friend.

Then I decided to list all the of the extensions I use on this site.  These are the little things that I use to manage this site, or make it work.

Finally I added a ‘StumbleUpon’ link to the bottom of each post.  If a post interest you, give me a thumbs up.  I’d appreciate it!


Categories: Site Stuff
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Abusive Spiders - GateKeeper

January 11, 2009 15:39 by ckincincy

image

Chris Blankenship has been on a crusade lately about abusive spiders.  I was interested in some of the fixes he was applying to it, but a few weeks ago I got an email from him about a solution he was developing, ‘GateKeeper’.  I reviewed the code and it all looked good, but he wasn’t ready yet to fully release it into the wild.

It finally got to that point and I installed it on my two DotNetBlogEngine.net blogs. So far I have been really impressed with it.  I’m really interested to see how it affects my overall traffic.  Right now I have four blocked user agents:

baiduspider, larbin, sogou, sosospider.  All of those came from Chris’s recommendation.  Then I immediately got a Slurp violation, though I am going to give them one more failure before I block them.  Chris also has MSN blocked.  A lot of my traffic comes from Live Search, so I’m a little scared to do that.

I did fall on one issue with the solution though.  When I installed it, I had it set to automatically block violators.  Unknown to Chris and I is that Google caches the robots.txt file!  So since they didn’t get my new robots.txt file, they were blocked!  So it is recommended to not turn on the automatic blocking for at least a few days.

Related post from Chris’s site:
The Continued Struggle With Spiders
To catch a spider…
Abusive Web Crawlers
Blocking Bad UserAgents and IP Addresses
The elusive Robots.txt file


New domain and theme

November 10, 2008 17:09 by ckincincy

If you subscribe to my site's RSS feed you just got loaded with the last ten post.  Sorry about that.

However check out my new theme and domain @ http://www.ocdprogrammer.com

Would love your thoughts. Still under construction and all, but you can get the idea.


Categories: Site Stuff
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Category Control Edited

November 5, 2008 19:00 by ckincincy

For the longest time I've wanted the ability to choose which categories show on my site.  Took the time tonight to add a small patch to the category list control to add a display property to it.

Download the file below and just copy it over your current files, or consume the changes if you've made customizations.

Its pretty simple to use, go to your admin screen on the category tab and use the check box to set the value.  It defaults to true for all of your existing categories.

Admin Screen for Updating
image

Admin Screen for Viewing
image

Version 1.0
CategoryPatch.zip (8.81 kb)