Alright! I've got everything set back up. My whole FreeBSD server went down on Friday night, as promised. The process of setting Fedora Core 3 back up has been relatively painless. FC3 has a pretty decent package updater called yum (acronym for Yellow dog Update Manager), and that's made it pretty easy to install everything. I haven't needed to hack any makefiles (although a few of the Perl modules I've had to install have had a couple of hitches, but nothing ridiculous).
I just spent the better half of today getting Movable Type back up and running, and reconfiguring my template files so I have the same layout as previously. My friend Chris wrote me and suggested using a simple Turing test to determine if it is actually a spam-bot or a human entering my comments. I'd considered this a while back when I had initially set up MT-Blacklist as a means to regulate the incoming spam. Blacklists seem like a relatively poor method of combatting spam (it doesn't take too much effort to switch servers, or provide a new URL, or even to code the URL in some manner), and I was surprised to not have seem something like gif images being used to display a code that needed to be entered. Well, you'll now all be thrilled to know that there is exactly that. Horray!
I searched Google and tracked down what I was looking for and set it up. Feel free to test the install by entering a comment. If you can break it and sneak through without the correct code, I'd like to hear about it. Given that, it means I can actually open up comments again, which is good.
I needed a break last night, so I put up on my camera and threw together a quick dance video. At the time the music was really doing it for me, but it sounds pretty repetitive to me now. Some of the isolation I'm doing is very weak (my arm waves really suck). Some of the other stuff is cool. Halfway through Maui got irritated by the fact that I was dancing in her space and tried to intimidate me out of the way, but it didn't work. In retrospect, the bit at the end is pretty horrible - I was trying to strobe my way back to the camera, but it looks more like I have vertigo and can't properly balance myself. And I'm also retarded. And doing the scary walk.
So.. Everything is up. I'm going to try and learn some 3D Studio Max, and catch some Zz's.
Update: I've had to purge almost all of the comments in the blog - there were about 6500 total, maybe 100 of which were legitimate. I didn't want to reinstall MT-Blacklist, because I don't like the way it hooks into the rest of Movable Type (it's actually a different comment script you're running altogether). That left me with two options - manually delete each comment, or massive SQL deletion. Option number two won out, for obvious reasons, so now there's 20 comments left.
FEAR ME! I AM THE MIGHTY SPAM BOT AND I HAVE DEFEATED YOUR PRIMITIVE ATTEMPT TO STOP MY SPAMMING! Clck hear 4 v1akra.
Anyways, hmmm... mass deleting your comments, was it because this anti-spamming scheme didn't work? Hopefully that wasn't the case.
I downloaded your video, and your dancing is pretty cool. I didn't think kicking cats could be incorporated humanely into a dance form, but you've proved me wrong. You guys make a good duo.
Well, the anti-spam technique seems to be working great, but after installing it, I still had 6000 plus spam comments that I had not yet deleted (as the new anti-spam tool I've installed is a preventative measure, rather than curative) - rather than install MT-Blacklist again to delete them (which I would then just uninstall again), I decided to just blow away most of the comments in the database. If anyone is really upset about that, they can go and re-enter them. Fortunately, I still managed to save Claudia's comment about Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. Whew!
Thanks for the compliments on the dancing.