787-523-6774
Technology Enabling People
Home

Wordpress Spammer Bots - A Workaround that Works

Submitted by James O'Malley on August 10, 2010
in

Overestimate the quality of Wordpress code at your own peril.

We run a small sitewide multi-domain Wordpress installation for blogs and simple sites.  Wordpress (and before that Wordpress MU) is easy to install, manage, hack, and looks nice out of the box.

The only problem is that it is just not that well engineered, and I have done more than my fair share of double takes as to how primitive the system is. read more

Rewrite of inter7's qmail-tap patch (now works with netqmail-1.05-r8 for Gentoo)

Submitted by James O'Malley on December 4, 2008
in

This is a fresh rewrite of inter7's qmail-tap patch, adapted to work with current versions of netqmail on Gentoo Linux. If you use another flavor of Linux, this is not for you.

To use:

Set QMAIL_PATCH_DIR="/foo/" in make.conf, drop this file in there (I use /usr/src/qmail-patches/), and emerge netqmail. This patch works with with the following USE flags: USE="qmail-spp ssl".

Download: 
cannot open `sites/altamente.com/files/netqmail-1.05-r8-tap.patch' (No such file or directory) iconnetqmail-1.05-r8-tap.patch

Mysql ISO-8859-1 (LATIN1) to UTF-8

Submitted by James O'Malley on December 3, 2007
in

I thought I would throw in a link to a howto I wrote over at OG Consulting. I would wager there are a few people out there that have legacy data in an old MySQL installation (4.0.x and below), and need to bring their installation up to date. I believe the MySQL folks are going to EOL (end of life) MySQL versions less than 4.1.x, so it is now a necessity to get it up to speed. For those of you with a lot of legacy data, I've written a little tutorial on stuffing your mixed character encoded data into a fresh shiny new MySQL installation.

Take a look here.

Drupal + BBClone

Submitted by James O'Malley on November 26, 2007
in

I like BBCLONE's visitor statistics package. It has served us well for more than a few years. Our customers like it too. There is a problem though. Drupal and BBClone do not get along very well. Here are a couple of tips to get BBClone working with virtual hosts (multiple sites hosted via one single drupal installation), and with caching enabled.

Most of the helpful hints proposed on http://drupal.org/ suggest installing the relevant BBClone code in the ~drupal/index.php file, like so: 

$bbrequest = strtolower($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);
define("_BBC_PAGE_NAME", $bbrequest);
define("_BBCLONE_DIR", "bbclone/");
define("COUNTER", _BBCLONE_DIR."mark_page.php");
if (is_readable(COUNTER)) include_once(COUNTER);

This is all fine and good, but if you are hosting multiple sites under ~drupal/sites/ then you are going to have a problem. Each virtual site has its own statistics counter and bbclone directory. We want each site to count only its own vistors. read more

User login