Google Reader and MotoringFile

Posted on by Ian C.

I happened to visit the actual MotoringFile website today to see if they’d got the latest MINI sales figures; my first reaction was along the lines of “EEK!” related to the formatting of that site (the bold and fat headline font disturbed me!):

But formatting is personal (yes, Robert, I’m thinking of you), so no doubt lots of MF folks like it …

My second reaction was “oh, lots of stories I don’t remember” … Turns out, the Google Reader feed I set up were using the MotoringFile Clippings feed which they appear to not support even though they offer the link – so it’s not had stories updated since mid last year!

Oh well, so I’ve updated the Google Reader feed and it now includes recent MotoringFile stories. I wonder how often a website feed breaks like that? I suppose to some extent, MotoringFile actually doesn’t want me to use the feed, since then I don’t see all their advertising – but I would have expected a broken feed link to give an error, rather than just give many month old data.
Having the non-clipped feed from MotoringFile is a bit disappointing, since they have a habit of blasting a HUGE amount of copied-from-press-release-and-not-edited stuff into a post sometimes, but overall I prefer to read newer news even if it’s a bit of a flood.

Backups, Time Machine, LaCie, and more

Posted on by Ian C.

Yes, nothing to do with MINIs; move along if you’re looking for GBMINI … unless you don’t have backups of all your computer data!

Ever since I accidentally deleted all my email a few years ago, and even more so since a hard drive failure on a PC I owned, I’ve been slightly paranoid about backups. Unjustified perhaps, since really nothing on my computer is life threatening to lose …

Music (40GB)
I guess it’s theoretically all “backed up” on my iPod (though attempting to move music from one computer to another from the iPod was very unsuccessful – worst, I could re-encode it all from the original CDs – but that would take weeks!

Photos (40GB)
Many of my photos, arguably the “more wanted” ones, exist here on GBMINI, or over on MargaretAndIan, but they aren’t full resolution – I’d prefer not to lose the originals!

Videos (45GB)
Mostly un-edited, so I could pull them back off the original DV tapes (so long as those tapes are not too degraded)

Documents (<<1GB)
Very little data space – but stuff that couldn’t be re-created. Although I’m not sure how important the source code for a college project from the mid 80s, written in BCPL, is now …

Mail (1GB)
Arguably, I don’t have a backup for this – Gmail has the originals; though Apple Mail has an IMAP copy of everything, I’m not sure how easy it would be to restore to Gmail if the originals vanished! I imagine if the files disappeared from Gmail, then Apple Mail would mirror those deletions …

I no longer trust hard drives, so while a Time Machine backup is very good, a drive failure in the Time Capsule would be bad – so I use Time Machine with a LaCie 2big Network RAID drive! This arguably gives me three copies of my data, the original on my Mac, and copies on each of the two drives in the LaCie – the LaCie lives in the basement …

 

UPDATE 2017: most of this original discussion is out of date now so I’ve deleted it! My backups these days primarily rely on (a) multiple computers, (b) Apple Cloud backup of my photos & videos (which are the most important data I have), and (c) Dropbox for important documents.

 

Spam comments reviewed

Posted on by Ian C.

A month ago, I had serious spambot comment problems, which caused GBMINI (on WestHost) to basically die. I made a few changes, which included blocking some seriously aggressive IP addresses, but more significantly renaming the standard WordPress comment file (wp-comments-post.php); this file is arbitrarily searched for and accessed by spambot comment programs – the fact that I run the very effective WP-Gatekeeper keeps the spam out of my web pages, but the comments were hitting the site and the SQL database hard.

Of course, GBMINI WordPress also uses Akismet, which filters posted comments and detects spam (un-wanted words, too many links, that sort of thing). With WP-Gatekeeper running, Akismet basically never sees any spam comments – but a curious quirk is that it counts all the junked-by-Gatekeeper comments as blocked, as if it had done them itself.
This makes for a very interesting daily spam comment chart, showing the effect of the changes I made in mid March:


Basically my spam comment count dropped from 2,000-5,000 per day, down to just a few hundred per day – impressive 🙂