Category: Site Info

I’ve Been Banned In China

Has your site been banned in China? Plug your URL in here and see. Of the sites I’m in charge of:

Just for giggles, I ran a few other local sites through the service:

I’m sure that pretty much any blog is probably banned or any sort of discussion forum of any sort. Anybody else find their sites banned?

March 6, 2007

Join The UtterlyBoring.com NCAA Tournament Pick ’em (2007 Edition)

Selection Sunday is coming up next week which means that it’s time for offices all over the country to create office pools for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship. And it’s time for the readers of this site to compete for bragging rights in the annual UtterlyBoring.com Tournament Pick ‘Em.

While the field for the tournament hasn’t been set yet, you can still get signed up in my group and be notified when the field has been set and you can start making your picks (expect that to happen next Sunday night). Sign up here or if that link doesn’t work, go here, click on the “Join Group” link and use the following info:

Group ID#: 29821

Password: utterlyboring

The group’s page is here, which I think you can only see if you sign up.

Brad ended up winning Last Year’s Tournament and was the winner of a t-shirt from Bend, Oregon Tees. We currently don’t have any prizes lined up (though I’m sure I can find something from my last Bag O’ Crap that might be fun — anybody need 100 floppies?). But if any local companies or individuals are reading this and want to donate some prizes to the winner, comment here. All participants and prize donators will get links on this site and names listed on the group page on Yahoo.

Also, you can fill out up to three brackets per-person, if you’d like. Why am I allowing this? Because, realistically, there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 ways a bracket could be broken down, so having up to three per-person isn’t going to help you a ton, but if you have that kind of time on your hands, knock yourself out.

Update on 3/7/07: Now we have prizes! So far, I have the following to contribute to the prize pool (random stuff I found around the house):

  • Virgin Pulse 2.4ghz Cordless Phone (gently used, in box).
  • 100 Recycled Floppy Disks (oh come on, there’s gotta be a craft project for this).

Anybody else have something to donate to the prize pool? I’ll look around and see what I can find.

Update on 3/12/07: The field’s been set, so make sure you get your brackets filled out! And in addition to the fabulous prizes above (quit laughing), we’ve got a couple more to add to the list:

  • Dinner for Two at Jake’s Diner here in Bend. Thanks to Lyle for throwing that in there.
  • A prototype Paizano’s Pizza trucker hat, white with black mesh, thanks to that crazy lady in Baker for that.

Anybody else with something to throw in there (and provider’s of prize can’t actually win said prize, nor can I).

Update on 3/13: Another update to the prize list: A basic will (by basic, I meaning no estate planning to avoid taxes and the like) for the winner, created by last year’s winner, Brad (who is a lawyer, don’t worry). Looks like the prize pool is getting more fun (or depressing, depending on how you look at it), so get your brackets filled out today!

March 4, 2007

NewsGator Test Post

Just a test post from News Gator’s built-in blog posting tool (experimenting with it, because apparently I get a free copy) to see if this thing works (thought I doubt it’ll replace SharpMT for me). But since I hate posting something that will undoubtedly be picked up by RSS readers out there, even though it might not stay on the site, here’s a practical joke I wish I’d thought of.

Update: OK, after that little test run, NewGator’s blog posting function works, but since I totally hate composing HTML and adding links in Outlook, and I can’t select categories, I’ll stick with SharpMT for now (but I could see it being handy for folks who just have a simple site).

December 13, 2006

Comment Spammers Are Evil Bastards

OK, let me rephrase that: Comment spammers are evil, but the folks who let their systems be infected by malware that turns their systems into zombies are just as bad.

On a nightly basis, the server running this site is set to do usual middle-of-the-night maintenance chores: update cPanel and various other software packages I have installed (including the great ConfigServer products), check the logs, run AWStats, etc… . Obviously, it pushes a bit of load, but I tried to spread it around the night a bit so Apache is still responsive to the few requests that will come in. Last night, this server was attacked hard by comment spammers, with my comment script on this site getting hit by zombied computers at a rate of about 100 per second. My various MT Plugins were fighting off a lot of it, but the load was still up to 30 in top at many points through the evening (according to my log reports I read in the morning). Web pages were still getting served, but just not as quick as they could’ve been.

Renaming my comment script, and installing this plugin hasn’t put my load above .5 all day. There are still tons of requests coming in for my old comment script, but they’re just getting 404s or sand trap redirects, which Apache can serve up without issues or load.

What that does mean is that if you’re visiting this site with Javascript disabled, you will not be able to comment. I was trying to avoid that, as I know some folks insist on turning Javascript off in their browser, but the reality is that zombie spamming bots can read straight form tags far easier than broken up Javascript that actually gives the proper form action target. I’ve tested it in a few places, and it appears to work OK, but if you’re noticing that you can’t comment, e-mail me using the form to the right, tell me what browser you’re using, and I’ll see what can be done.

December 7, 2006

Most Commented On Entries

It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I get e-mailed whenever a published comment goes on my site so I see some pretty fascinating conversations on some of my entries. Thanks to the power of Google searches, I get lots of comments on older entries on this site, with the most commented on entries being over three years old. Some of it is just idiot bait (like the AOL entries) and some of it is just weird (like the green poop, panties, and small penis entries). Some of it (like the band geek post) shows that my site is just apparently the only site not blocked by some middle-school Internet filter. Some are just places to vent. Some are pleas for help.

Just the same, it’s all entertaining reading.

As of this writing, here are the entries on my site with 50 or more comments and their comment count (you can see the 30 most commented on entries — a list I’ll occasionally rebuild to update — here):

473 comments: Do Not Call List — Red Hot, Big Loopholes

392 comments: Extreme Dodgeball

255 comments: Only a band geek will appreciate this

242 comments: How to cancel an AOL account in 3 minutes

166 comments: Do You Have Bright Green Poop?

121 comments: Panties Just For Men

104 comments: Kurt Kobain a better guitarist than Jeff Beck and Carlos Santana? Not bloody likely!

96 comments: That’s One Killer Christmas Light Display

90 comments: Michael Jackson has never had plastic surgery

88 comments: What comes after trillion?

86 comments: Are hyphenated Yahoo names that rare?

84 comments: Smack the Penguin

83 comments: Have a small penis?

81 comments: Help pay for a girl’s boob job

77 comments: Dateline to focus on Michael Jackson’s face

74 comments: Another Reason to Hate AOL

74 comments: Learn to throw cards like a ninja

74 comments: Yet another reason to hate PETA

61 comments: We All Hate Work

50 comments: A 2,200 Acre Mushroom in Eastern Oregon

December 5, 2006

Finally Got Around To Editing My Blogroll

The list of blog links on the right side of this site has been pretty stagnant for quite a while. There were quite a few dead links on it, and I really wanted to include some other local blogs that I frequently read but just hadn’t put them on the list yet.

So on the bottom of the right column of this site, you now see my updated blogroll. If you comment a ton on this blog, I’ll happily add a link to your site, I just need you to comment here to remind me and I’ll get it done

November 16, 2006

Comment Spam Weirdness

I’m working through some issues on the site here, folks, regarding comment spam. For some reason it’s appearing on the site, despite being marked as junk in Movable Type. I think I found the offending bit of code, and I’m doing a full rebuild to hopefully clear things up, but if you notice obvious comment spam somewhere on the site, please e-mail me at utterlyboring [at] gmail[dot] com and let me know the URL where you saw it (or post a comment here).

October 5, 2006

Another Movable Type Spam Prevention Method

I get hammered with spam on this site, and for the most part Akismet, Spamlookup, MT Autoban, along with a few other hacks, have kept it from appearing on the site and putting too much of a load on my server. I recently installed a new plugin called NoHarvester, which blocks comment spammers from using zombie computers to do their spamming (basically does an IP address check) as that seems to be a fairly common attack lately.

While so far it appears to be working just fine, please let me know if you’re having trouble or if it thinks you’re spamming by e-mailing utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com, as I can only test this so much.

Speaking of spam, I have 10,123 published comments on this site, but the comment table’s auto-incremented ID is set at 55,442. So for every one published comment, I’ve received nearly 4.5 spam comments (and that’s only counting ones that have made it into my database — I’m sure I’ve blocked thousands of others that have never made it to my server).

Update: Yes, I know there is spam on this entry. It’s been marked as junk on the back-end, but it’s still showing up. I’m working with SixApart to troubleshoot the problem, as something isn’t right, so I’m leaving the spam there temporarily as an example.

September 27, 2006

I’ve Been Hit By Digg.com

My Life Is Now Complete. This site has been hit up on Digg thanks to the morons who keep posting comments on this really old AOL story. So I’ve now been mentioned on Digg and the New York Times because of AOL morons because of this.

So welcome Digg readers! Feel free to post a comment here. And you’ll be happy to know that despite all this traffic, my server’s barely been pushed at all (thank goodness for MovableType’s static page creation).

July 1, 2006

Running Google Analytics

Like Dave, I finally got an invite to Google Analytics, and it’s now tracking the traffic on this site, Sunray‘s (with some advance tracking there for when bookings are made) an Bend Blogs. I haven’t quite gotten used to how their back-end works, but the stats are certainly presented in a nice, easy to use, interface that will make non geeks like it (especially more so than AWStats, which track all the sites on this server). It has lots of pretty pictures, charts, graphs, and reports catered to the Webmaster and the executive type. So for a corporate environment, and to track folks browsing through a site, it’s going to work well (which is why I immediately put it on Sunray’s site). It also has nice Web interfaces for filtering, so I can very easily turn off counting of accesses for Sunray’s office, which has the page set as their home page.

But I’ll post sometime down the road when I get more traffic into it to see what kind of reporting it really can do.

April 6, 2006