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Utility Fog Blog has moved to
UtilityFog.info/Blog
So update your bookmarks, subscribe to the new feeds, fax the cat, twitter the neighbors,
because there ain't nothing new happening here, and whenever I get around to it, it'll be GONE.
Sun-May 24 2009
Utility Fog Blog is Moving
After long procrastination, I've finally set up a host for my own domain, so Utility Fog Blog will
be moving to a new home. There will be no further posts made to this site, and sooner or later it
will disappear altogether.
Reasons:
- More Storage. Sooner or later I was going to run out of room.
- Shorter, Cooler URL. No more yadda-slash-cgi-bin-slash-yadda-slash-blosxom.cgi nonsense.
- Probably Cheaper
- Indexable by Search Engines. Google has problems with the "~" in my old URL. Now Google
can index individual posts, not just a month's worth.
- Better Syndication. The "~" problem extends to RSS and Atom feeds too. No more duplication
of posts.
- Cleanup. Moving a site to a new host is an excellent excuse/opportunity to get rid of all
the unneeded and unwanted files that have built up over the years.
How did I overcome the technical problems? It was pretty simple: I cancelled that hosting account
and set up a new one with another company. Getting everything to work still took some work, but
nothing like the death march before.
The New - UtilityFog.Info:
Note: Everything should work fine, but I'm still tinkering and whittling down the ToDo list,
so there might be hiccups.
Mon-May 18 2009
My Head Hurts
Why the lack of posts? Well it seems that I've racked up 24+ man-hours, dozens of Google searches,
multiple dozens of web-pages, 20 bookmarks, 10 Firefox tabs open at a time,
deep study of the Apache server reference pages for Mod_Write,
RewriteRule, and htaccess, baffled muttering , more Apache research, and uncounted attempts to
upload and test a configuration of my new web site that will do what I want.
And all for naught. The problem kicked my mental ass. I could disable one of the security
measures the hosting company set up, but that would be like cheating, and it might piss them
off too. So I've sent a support-ticket off to the Help Desk. I know they can help me, an Apache
Server can be configured to do just about anything you want, like turn squirrels into pocket watches.
But the question is, will they? The support gods can be fickle, and may decide that my quest falls outside of their
sacred purview.
So here's hoping for a happy answer.
Thu-May 07 2009
Sat-Feb 21 2009
Test Post
Valid, but now the comment doesn't show in feeds.
Test Post
Ok, that kind of worked, but the feed didn't validate.
Try another tweak. Tweak another try
Fri-Feb 20 2009
Test Post
Lets try this again.
Test Post
Let us see if we can add a "comments" link to the RSS feed
without disrupting the space-time continuum.
Fri-Nov 07 2008
Milestone
Utility Fog Blog has passed 250,000 hits. I attribute this more to persistence than
popularity.
Sat-Oct 11 2008
Testing, 1 2 3
UFog Blog has upgraded to run under
Blosxom 2.1.2. Now I need to see if the RSS feeds work.
Sat-Feb 16 2008
Maintenance
Comments will be down for a bit while I upgrade Pollxn.
Update: That took all of 2 minutes. My new branch version of
Pollxn
from Víctor A. Rodríguez (Bit-Man)
includes a
Captcha feature
that I hope will stymie the comment-spammers.
Tue-Jan 01 2008
Tue-Aug 07 2007
Sun-Jul 01 2007
I'm Naughty
"This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
What's My Blog Rated?
Via The Slog
Fri-Jun 01 2007
Slightly Freaking Out
Last Sunday I noticed that my free hit-counter from
Webstat
wasn't working. It turns out that Webstat's free accounts are limited
to less than 20,000 hits a month. Which is fine, they are doing this
for free, and they've worked great until now. So I got another
free hit-counter that doesn't have a limit. And now that it's been
running since Sunday a few things have become very apparent: UFog Blog
is getting 800-900 hits a day (and may be climbing), and 99% of the
hits are coming by way of
Google Image Search. This, kids, is why you should
always put something in the alt field of the img tag.
Some of my highest ranking Google Image Searches:
(periods added to search terms to avoid muddying the waters)
But one statistic pops the party balloon: 90% of my visitors spend
5 seconds or less at the Ufog Blog. Ah well-fame is fleeting.
Fri-Mar 30 2007
I'm Crafty
I've added IP-address logging capability to my Pollxn comments-engine.
The next step is to add IP-blocking of comment spammers.
Sat-Mar 24 2007
Tinker, Adjust, Fiddle, Repeat
I think I've managed to get the Internet Explorer and Firefox rendering of
Utility Fog Blog to look pretty much the same on both Windows and Linux. It
certainly helps to set Firefox so that it doesn't override the way the page wants
to be displayed.
Sun-Mar 18 2007
Woohoo
Sometime in the last hour Utility Fog Blog passed the 100,000 hit mark.
Sun-Dec 17 2006
Big Wind Bad
Why was Utility Fog down since sometime Friday (12/15/2006)? Well, it seems that
the Pacific Northwest had some weather problems
. Thursday night there was just a teensy bit of torrential rain followed by
record winds early Friday morning. The result was your basic minor apocalypse,
minus the cats and dogs living together and any appearance of giant marshmallow men.
Over a million people were without power (and heat), traffic has been a nightmare
due to dark signals and downed trees and gasoline has become scarse because of so many
powerless stations. And somewhere in the middle of all this something bad must have
happened to my ISP, hence no blog (or email).
Mon-Nov 13 2006
Testing

Short Url

Long Url
Test
Mon-Aug 07 2006
The Web Knows
A little Internet research turns up 2 explanations for comment spam that contains
invalid links or even no links at all:
1: Some comment systems record the IP address of the commenter and use a sort
of "karma" system to combat spam. Leaving a lot of linkless comments could give an
IP address enough good "karma" to then deposit spam.
2: Spam with bogus "number" links (like "www.865425.com") could be trackable
"scouts". The spam-robot deposits a comment and then checks back later to see if
the spam is still there. The numbers let the robot keep track of where and when
the spam was deposited. If the scout spam has survived then the real spam will be left.
PS. I'm making invisible links on the bottom of the blog to any e-mail addresses I find on sites that spam me. The idea is that email-address harvesting web-robots
will find the links and then start spamming the spammers.
Sun-Aug 06 2006
My New Hobby
More happenings on the Comment Spam front:
1: Friday I got my first batch of Chinese spam. They think big in China-these
buggers had around 100 links apiece. Only 3 spams though, so it was hardly a
major onslaught.
2: Sunday seems to be THE day for spam. I had nothing all week, but just like
last Sunday, here they come again. Today's spams are puzzlers. They have links,
unlike last week's, but the links are to non-existent addresses like "www.561383.com".
Tue-Aug 01 2006
Comment Spam Redux
If you left a comment yesterday (July 31) I'm afraid it got deleted in my
latest round of mass deletion of comment spam.
Now riddle me this: Why would
someone (or something) leave comment spam that doesn't have any links? Or any
commercial reference at all, just "random" words?
Sun-Jul 23 2006
Out, Damn Spam
Utility Fog Blog got slammed with over 250 comment spams yesterday. Adding a few words and an
internet address to my homebrew blacklist seems to have stemmed the tide.
Mon-Jul 10 2006
FireFox Fun
I installed the Java Runtime Environment plugin successfully- Yea me-I'm such a small-time hacker stud. Now if I could only figure out why Firefox bounces between
having one and two rows of bookmark toolbars. Oh well, it's not like it's a life
threatening problem.
Mon-Jul 03 2006
Aha!
How to subscribe to a YouTube user's RSS feed with Bloglines:
YouTube says a user's feed follows the form:
feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/username/videos.rss
Unfortunately, Bloglines finds no valid feed at this address.
But the template
http://youtube.com/rss/user/username/videos.rss
works just fine.
Fri-Jun 30 2006
Testing
Nothing to see here, officer.
Thu-Jun 29 2006
Blush
bookofjoe calls Utility Fog Blog "One spectacular website". He's on the blogroll now for sure. His site isn't too shabby either.
Fri-Apr 21 2006
Click At Your Own Risk
This page crashes my
Firefox version# 1.5.0.2 browser running on Linux.. I saw this before with Mozilla
(with another page) but not
for some time. The browser crashes with Greasemonkey, Adblocker, Javascript, and Autocopy
disabled. Other similar Wunderground pages, like the one for the state of Virginia and Danville, Virginia don't crash Firefox. FF 1.5.0.2 on Windows XP doesn't crash.
Update: It just stopped. Another one of life's mysteries.
Wed-Apr 12 2006
Success
Utility Fog's comment system now rejects the chuckleheads who have been spamming me with
crappy prescription drug ads. It only took a half-hour, even with my almost nonexistent Perl
skills, so it will be easy to revamp if the problem reoccurs
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