It's come time for me to do something about my blog because lately I've been getting a 15 to 1 comment spam. That means about for every 1 real comment get 15 comments that are spam. The really annoying thing is they are typed by live people who attempt to leave a comment that sounds relevant, but then they leave a link to some website that makes it clear it's not a real comment. That it's just spam.
Spam is a problem for every blog but most blogging software has some stuff to help. They have comment moderation, they have comment spam filtering, they may have the option to require registration to comment.
Mine does not. Why? Because I wrote mine blog software custom before all that other blogging software even existed. In relation to spam there are some benefits. Because there are so many blogs using wordpress and movabletype those blogs get the most spam. Spammers spend time trying to write automated scripts to spam those systems because if they succeed they get to spam thousands and thousands of systems. Mine on the other hand, being custom, just doesn't warrant the effort. On the other hand, I don't have comment spam filtering, comment moderation and while I used to have registration it's also custom. Most of those other systems use standard registration systems like OpenId or others.
Anyway, because of this and other issues I've often thought about switching. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the blogging software out there has the features that my custom software has. Those features are as follows.
If your browser is set to prefer Japanese content this blog will appear with a Japanese skin and every article *can* be written in more than one language and if that language is available it will be served in that language. If you want an example of this see my Hawaiian Food page. In Firefox go to Tools−> Options−> Content−> Language−> "Choose your preferred language for displaying pages". Add Japanese and move it to the top. Then go view that page again. As far as I know, no other blogging software does this.
This software can look at the ID of your browser and serve a different version of the page for that browser. For WebTV it serves a different simpler version. For Google yet another. For certain cellphones another. For netscape 4.7 yet another. As far as know, no other blogging software does this.
This rules out wordpress. While there are hacks to get wordpress to support multiple blogs I don't want to use hacks as that only brings more problems.
On this blog, if I put a link to an image like this <img src="/travel/shanghai/place−03−01−sm.jpg"/> it will notice that the image name ends with "−sm" and it will look for a corresponding image without the "−sm". If it finds it it will AUTOMATICALLY wrap the image in a link from the small image to the large image like this
If I add custom attributes to my img tag, this blog software will wrap the image.
<img src="/travel/shanghai/tea−house−sm.jpg" width="100" height="100" class="gman−border−cshadow" alt="Tea House"/ >
produces this:
I'm sure there's a host of other features that may or may not be available in other blogging software. The icons that go with the posts. Embedded emoticons so :−P becomes 😛 automatically. Automatic code coloring so
<gatcode lang="cpp"> printf("Spams today %d", numSpams); </gatcode>
becomes
printf("Spams today %d", numSpams");
So that brings up the question what to do. Given that the comment spam is getting too annoying I'm left with the following options
That's no fun. Comments are about the only concrete pleasure I get from this blog.
I don't think I could get myself to do forgo the language features.
The problem with that is the advantage to switching is other people continue to upgrade, add fixes and features instead of me. If a new ID system comes out someone else will make that work. If I do it myself then I continue having to add stuff every couple of years.
This site started as my very first perl program. As such it's REALLY BAD PERL. Perl is also slow. The problem here is it's a friggen lot of work to re−write this and when I'm done nothing will have visibly changed. And it still leaves the previous problems.
What to do!?