Pyblosxom · I still don't have a title

Upgrade to PyBlosxom 1.4.3

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:24:00 +0000

This week I spent some time upgrading PyBlosxom to version 1.4.3. I was still using 1.2, which probably was insecure and buggy. This is the first step in a bigger plan to replace Apache2 with nginx in this server, but that will come later.

I was lucky to find PyBlosxom’s author, Will, on IRC at the right time, who kindly answered a few questions and helped solve a few issues with the comments plugin and flavours. So, after a while, I had fixed a few subtle, 4 year old bugs in my XHTML templates and more notably, fixed lots of small bits in the rss feed, which finally makes Liferea and Advogato like my entries.

But, the biggest achievement was getting a brand new comments.py plugin from Will, which allows to close comments on entries after an expiration date. So, even if I was happily using Mako’s Akismet plugin, I still was getting 5 or 6 spams each day on very old entries (favourites being one about Alonso visiting València and one remembering the 70^th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War). Well, not any longer.

My dear spammers, you can now go pester someone else, or pick new entries pretty quickly before they get closed down. It’s been a nice fight, but it’s a good time to wish you go away and fuck off. With love, Jordi.

Thank you, Will!

Comments upgrade

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 18:14:00 +0000

I just upgraded the comments plugin from the PyBlosxom contrib prerelease distribution. You should not find tracebacks so easily in this blog now, and actually submitting comments without an email address won’t break it badly anymore. Thanks for the pointer, will!

Upgrade to pyblosxom 1.2

Tue, 24 May 2005 19:47:00 +0000

Today, being on vacation and with little fun stuff to do, I decided to have a look at my old blog spam problem. Lately, I had been using a poor-man’s spam cleaner for the comment spams, consisting on combining find, grep with an always growing list of forbidden patterns, and rm. This worked well for some time, and the spam problem was a minor annoyance now: I just had to check for non-removed entries every now and then and add those patterns to the regexp.

Yesterday I found out I had something like 3.000 new comments, so I thought my cheap system was broken and it hadn’t deleted anything in many days. Nope, it was working correctly according to the logs, but everytime it ran it deleted something like 100 files or so. After adding the missing patterns and deleting the thousands of new files, I observed my webserver logs with tail -f for a moment and found I was getting one new comment every two seconds or so. WTF?! Are they generally getting this aggresive everywhere, or is this dude just pissed about my site? I hope the mail to the corresponding abuse@ address works.

As they submitted them quicker than the slow CPU could delete them, I removed comments temporarily, and looked at installing PyBlosxom 1.2, as people had told me there’s improvements against spam in this release.

This site is now running 1.2, but I see nothing spam-oriented in the new comments plugin. Does anyone know what the Nice Way of blocking spam in PyBlosxom is, that is not too expensive CPU-wise? Comments should be working right now.

On another note, the site is crawling today because of the two triathlon pics I posted earlier, which are making people hit MaxClients quite fast.

A few suggestions to parasites

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 10:40:00 +0000

Dear assholes,

If you plan to take advantage of my blog to rank your shitty pharmacy webpage high on Google, take the following into consideration:

if you hit my poor Pentium 150 with hundreds of stupid HTTP requests to my blog, at least do it a few at a time during the day. Your referral stats pointing to your pharmacy shit will still show up (in the case that the blog stats are public, and in my case they aren’t), and you will not kill the box in about 15 minutes like you did 3 times in the last two days.
if you kill my box, Google won’t be able to do its fine job and we’ll both lose.
at least, point to an existing website.

Thanks for considering a symbiotic relationship in the future.

So the bastards did it again yesterday, and this time I had to drive to where the box is located and see what was going on in console. As expected, OOM killer fun, and by no means I could recover it, even after taking it off the network and trying to SysRQ it a bit.

It seems the spammers are trying to take advantage of referral stats now, and hit sites with tons of requests. Every request to /blog in this site means a not so cheap python process which takes quite some memory, which is a scarce resource in poor natura.oskuro.net. With just a few blog processes going on, the box starts swapping to its death.

I know, I should add limits to my Apache2 configuration, and possibly pyblosxom caches. For now, stopping spamd has helped a bit, as that process only was sucking ~35% of the memory.

Note to self...

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 12:08:00 +0000

If you ask for comments, make sure your comment system doesn’t break. I hadn’t noticed the permission problems after moving the cgi to /var. It’s fixed now… sorry about that, folks.

In the meanwhile, Ross and I agreed on IRC that suffixes are bad, and I got rid of them entirely. He also told me about the py[‘defaultFlavour’] config option, which I hand’t found, everything is ok now (well, except for the content_type vs. IE problem which I still need suggestions for).

Update: James pointed me at a nice post on blog URLs.

PyBlosxom and XHTML

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:32:00 +0000

As I said in a previous post, I spent some time cleaning up my PyBlosxom flavour to make it XHTML 1.1 compliant. I also decided to start using my vanity domain a bit better, and moved the blog to the webserver’s rootdir. In order to maintain backwards compatibility and not break a lot of links to my blog out there, I installed a Redirect rule so calls to the old dir look at the new dir, and that seems to work.

The main problem is now that I’m not too sure about how to solve the application/xhtml+xml problem with Internet Explorer. The mod_rewrite rules sjoerd and thom shared don’t work too well for pyblosxom:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.xhtml$
RewriteRule .* - "[T=text/html]"

It’s easy to have URLs like /blog/2004/Jun/28, and if I understand correctly, the Redirect won’t work with this type of URLs. I also don’t know if it’s possible to make “xhtml” the default flavour in pyblosxom, instead of “html”. I’m actually not sure if the permalink for this entry “should” end up with .html, .xhtml, or no suffix at all. Suggestions welcome. :)

Upgraded to pyblosxom 1.0.0

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000

This afternoon I spent some time upgrading pyblosxom to version 1.0.0.

I had been using the Debian package, which had 0.8.1… in experimental… the package in unstable is still at 0.7.x. I obviously grabbed the tarball and installed it in /usr/local. After the upgrade, it seems the rss generator has become a lot more picky, and would choke in the dozen HTML small errors that I had all over my blog posts. Omnic noticed my posts were empty in Planet Debian just as I was closing terminals in preparation for heading to bed. It should be ok now.

I’ll probably start writing a new style sheet for the entire web tomorrow, and think about moving the whole blog to the topdir of my webserver, as I really have no other uses for it.

Blog spam: nothing new...

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:52:00 +0000

Thanks to all the people who replied to my previous post on blog spam. It’s obviously not new, and it seems MT users have been hit quite badly by this. I guess removing links from comments is the first, quick step, but some kind of URL filter for the comment module in pyblosxom would be handy. Has anyone hacked something similar?

Just an extension that lets you create a blacklist of URLs would be a start, as the spammer URLS are always the same. They do know about some anti-anti-spam techniques though, and for example write “online casino” as “online-casino”, so to read links they should be rendered first.

Blog spam

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 16:54:00 +0000

The other day I found one comment in one of my blog’s posts which sounded weird. It said “HI, Wow.. this is a very informative website! I enjoy your site very much! Keep up the good work!” or similar. The author name linked to what looked like a pretty boring personal website. Yesterday I discovered most of my blog posts have one or more of these messages. What the fuck, they are spamming me through my blog! They basically write random nonsense like that, and add a link to an online-casino or whatever in the link you can leave as signature in pyblosxom.

Has anyone else had problems like this in their blogs? If it continues, it’ll be easy to fix: I will just remove the comments module from my install and be done with it. Thanks to those who post useful stuff every now and then, though. It’s nice to read replies to some of my posts.

Yet Another Blog® is born

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 20:35:00 +0000

Yes, I had been procrastinating about doing this for a looong time already, but never sat down to do it, basically because I didn’t know what software I should use, or anything.

I have been an Advogato user before, but gradually stopped posting there, even if I liked participating in that community. Now, with Keybuk very recently opening PlanetDebian, IRC appears to be full of people that just stopped procrastinating about building their own blog, so here I am.

Of course, this site needs a lot of work, and it’ll get there, but for now it’ll be using the simple 1993 look that comes with the pyblosxom Debian package. Pyblosxom is quite neat, I must say!

I plan talking about my Debian & GNOME stuff here, and hopefully less about my triathlon stuff. For that, I tend to use my Drupal-based blog at my team’s website.