normally i'd keep this on the "down low" and not blog about it, but what the hell... sure you've noticed all the fucking comment spam around here of late, and while i did try out a few things on the server-side... well, didn't really seem to do much good and i didn't quite get some of the 3rd party comment black lists integrated around here — remember, all this shit is hand coded and most of it goes back at least 5 years or more... yeah, think about that one for a moment.

anywho, the comments seemed to be working a lot better back when i had them all ajax'd in, so nothing was really rendered on the page at load time... i do like this current comment setup and wanted to keep it, so i just added more ajax jquery code to get it all working... but you might noticed a bit of a delay in displaying the comments since it loads them in dynamically after page load.

the only downside is going back into this mess and making any changes to it 6 months from now... but oh well, figure i'll let this run for a few days or more and see if it helps any with these g'damn comment spam bots. *spit*

as you may have noticed, i've been getting bombed with comment spam around here the last few days (weeks)... and it seems to be getting worse... i've added a few lines of CF code on the backend, but it doesn't seem to be helping at all and i'm starting to get to the point of almost removing my damn comments.

before i had my comments masked a little bit since it was all ajax driven, and only loaded it into the page when you clicked on a button to view it... but now with this design, it's front and center, and on every blog post... making it an easy target for these fucking spammers. *spit*

not sure what to do just yet, but i'm getting to the point of doing something drastic around here -- and if that means removing comments for awhile, oh well... it'll totally suck, and i'd hate to do it, but if all else fails what's a pollock to do, right? ugh.

now this is pretty damn cool... we just just released a new feature on AddThis, called the Service Directory, that allows site owners and publishers to submit their service to us and get their sharing services listed in the AddThis menu... basically just opening it all up, which is pretty badass.

so naturally, i played around one day and created a quick "sharing page" or endpoint that allows you to easily share something you might see out in the wild and post it right to my little humble site here... we've been working on this for the last few weeks or so, and it's totally tripping me out, man. here's a quick walk-through of how it works:

Click on the "share" on GameTrailers, and bring up the "more" menu...

Filter the service listings by typing in the first few characters of "forgetfoo"

Click on "forgetfoo" and you land on my sharing page...

Click on a shared link, and you see the sharing "FooBar". heh.

the sharing FooBar is cool because it allows you to retweet the page, post it to facebook, email it, etc... oh, there's also a bookmarlet on my share page that you can drag-n-drop to your browser Bookmarks Bar (Firefox, Chrome, Safari), which comes in damn handy.

check it out and lemme know what you think!

my website was down this morning, so i pinged my buddy ron about it and he jumped right on it -- thanks dude! ...but it turned out to be a lot more than just the server getting hung up on something and needing a reboot.

when my site here came back online, first thing i noticed was this huge blank space at the top of the page... so naturally i went to view-source on the page, and that's when i noticed some iframe at the top of the page right under the body tag -- i sure as hell didn't put that there, and nobody else would've... uh oh.

to add insult to injury, it looks like a whole bunch of pages had been modified adding in this stupid iframe to the pages, which really fucking blows... so i've been going through them and removing it from the pages, which sucks, but not more than the fact that these assholes broke in and ran some hack to do this in the first place -- looks like they got in through my FTP account.

g'damnit.

here's a quick sampling of some of the IP addresses that were hitting the box and were banned this morning:

61.7.213.66
222.143.24.213
222.143.24.213
125.64.16.148
203.162.130.239
203.162.130.239
79.122.217.19
221.4.205.132
221.4.205.132
125.138.96.53
71.15.104.163
59.149.136.101
24.60.34.58

which all seems to be originating from "Asia Pacific Network Information Centre".

yup, looks like the North Koreans are hacking sites again, least that was my first thought. *blink*

p.s. might want to run some anti-spyware/anti-virus software on your computer if you happened to have hit my site earlier this morning, just in case.

it's not really a big deal or anything, but i was looking around on my site the other day for some code to re-use and found myself looking at one of the server-side "header" includes, and saw the snippet of code that's responsible for the page redirect if "iphone" is sniffed on the HTTP Request ...so i removed it, and re-coded a couple things while i was in there.

i know that a few of you have mentioned it in the past... i've had an iphone for more than 6 months, and i'm just now getting around to it.... yeah, i suck.

/better_late_than_never.png

okay, here's the deal... i talked with my dad earlier, since he's the account holder for this domain here ("forgetfoo.com"), and he's not sure what the hell is going on... there's still a "legal lock" on the domain and we're not able to get much of any info related to why that's the case, and i can't update the Name Servers since it's locked down... the current DNS lookup is hacked together, which was an awesome job by my buddy ron, but i'm not sure how long that'll last... server could hiccup and it come down again at any moment, really.

that's the situation at the moment... so i'm thinking that in the meantime it might be prudent to go ahead and look into buying another domain and using that one for the time being -- but man, i really suck and struggle at domain names... so here it is, any ideas on a new "foo" domain???

i know i've been here before, and it's always been kind of hard to make a decision on these things... "foolicious", "gotfoo", and "fooza" are already taken it seems... i have another domain that i can use, though it doesn't have "foo" in it anywhere... not a bad thing and i might resort to using it, just haven't decided yet.

anywho, if you have any good ones or some ideas, i'd love to hear 'em! *seriously*

update: http://www.forgotfoo.com/ is now live and resolving. heh.

well, as some of you might've noticed my sites been unavailable for the last day or two.... why? to put it simply, Network Solutions sucks monkey balls!!!

a DNS server went belly-up (long story) and this domain was being directed to an old DNS server that's no longer really around, hence the domain failing to resolve... so i needed to get the Name Server info updated for my domain here, but thing is my dad orginally purchased this domain for me years and years ago -- not exactly sure why, think it was a surprise gift or something.

anywho, once logged into the site, it said that "forgetfoo.com is expired" and needed to be renewed... ummm, okay... so i renew the domain, which totally sucked because the site design is absolutely horrid, convoluted, misleading, and generally unpleasant to use or navigate around... but anywho, i did renew and felt like i just got bent over and ass-raped... why? $38 for one year.

yeah, seriously.

every other site is like $10 or something... so to put that into context, it's like walking into Gamestop and buying a new 360 game for $180. *blink*

oh, and on top of it all i spent like an hour on the phone talking to some jackass about why it wasn't allowing me to update the Name Server info on the domain... and why the hell it was saying that the domain has some kind of "legal lock" on it -- and what the fuck does that even mean exactly?!?!?

not much help there... had to get my dad to call them, since he's the actual account holder, and doesn't seem like he got an answer either... and i'm pretty sure that if i was sued sometime over the last 8 years, i'd remember it.

i also received an email today from some legal department (i think), and i replied right back to it asking for details on this "legal lock"... would you believe i got a bounced back email error message right away? seriously, no joke.

{{{{{{ deep breaths }}}}}}

soooooooooooo... if my site goes down again or disappears, you know why.

as a few of you might've noticed, i put a vanilla "taking a break" page for the last few days or so... the reason being that the webserver was having some problems and was simply getting to the point where i couldn't even blog anymore... site was really slow, double-blog posts and comments... or me being able to get a post in, but then having it timeout on me trying to edit it --- finally i just said "fuck it", and decided to take a break until the new webserver my buddy ron's been putting together came online... and tonight he came through!

not that i blog nearly as much as i once used to, as i've mentioned quite a lot these last few months... work has continued to be rather hectic, leaving little time to chill and "play" --- which is both a good and bad thing, depending on how you choose to look at it. *shrugs philosophically*

anyfoo, the new server is up and i'm a happy camper at the moment... thanks ron, you da man dawg!

seems the webserver took a big 'ol hard drive dump on friday, causing my buddy ron to leave work early and scrample around to get some new HDD's up in that puppy... damn glad he was able to get it back up and running without too much trouble, even though i know how much it can suck to have a drive go belly-up on ya.

haven't been able to FTP into the webserver all weekend, though... just checked and got in, so that's great news -- not a biggie, since i've been pretty consumed in watching the playoffs all weekend.

anyfoo, just a quick update... so i'm back... mostly. heh.

just rolled in a quick update to exclude the iPhone from being automatically redirected to my PDA version, since my buddy josh was harping on me a little about it via email yesterday.... so now if you're one of the few that has one, you can hit my site here just as you would with your browser... have to say that it looks pretty damn good. heh.

p.s. thanks josh... you lucky bastard.

just thought i'd post a quick recap of what the hells been going on around here this last week or so... some of you might remember seeing a page up with nothing but a video widget smack dab in the middle of the page --- what was up with that, you ask?

simple... my boss asked if i could throw up a widget on my personal site here, and rotate it between two different versions of the Clearspring Widget Container.... eg: one with the Button, the other with the Dock.... so basically, some simple A+B testing on it, just to get a general idea of how people are using it in comparison.

i was actually kinda stoked, since i havent even touched a line of CF for months now.... it was simple, but i had to add-on another CF App instance, and then using the Application variable for it, create a little counter... with MOD 2 of the value of that variable, it would serve up one or the other... and looking at the stats we track on widgets, it was interesting to note a few things.... heh.

That Link Page.

then i had this fucking brilliant idea of putting up a quick "low maintenance" page, pulling some popular RSS feeds and linking them out on my page... the idea being that instead of throwing up a "i'll be back, motherf0ckers!" page, you would at least have a page with some link'age on it.... well, based on the emails i've been getting, seems that most everybody (except a few) really didnt like it too much, saying alot of things like "it's just not foO", whatever the hell that means anymore.... *chuckle*

soooooooooo.... here we are again, with me rolling back to the blog i've had up for awhile now, since i just haven't had the time to play around with new designs like i used to... it's cool to be busy, but damned if it doesn't have it's downside.... oh well, that's how it goes mang. *shrugs*

p.s. are you happy now?