Site update

By Todd Stadler · Friday, March 31, 2006 3:18pm

Some of you clever folk have already noticed some changes 'round these parts, but I figured I'd go ahead and make an official pronouncement for the slower kids.

In order to deal with an increasing amount of comment spam, I've installed a test for you humans that want to say something on my blog — you have to solve an equation. Or as Jason said, "Hahaha you make people do math to comment." Just so.

I'm under no pretenses that this will stop all comment spam, because within hours of my writing this new safeguard, I was massively spammed by a rather rude spambot from Poland or Russia or so (who was then blacklisted — oh, what a power rush that was!). But it'll probably cut back on some of the dumber spambots, and at the very least it will contribute to an increase in arithmetic literacy. So I'm doing my part for math.

That means those of you who are younger than six or haven't mastered basic addition (yes, you must learn to carry the one!) will just have to write me an e-mail if you have something to say.

And I know you young'ns have something to say, because you said it all over this entry. I have no idea why so many Raven-Symone fans possess the lethal twin attributes of rabidity and severe inattention to detail, but nonetheless they do, and I decided I'd had enough of their blathering all over that post in an attempt to find said ex-moppet's phone number or e-mail address. Which, by the way, is raven.symone@whitehouse.gov.

Anyhow, I realized that my home-brew blogging system needed a way to disable comments for particular entries. I'm normally not one to squelch the people's expression — let them eat cake and talk endlessly! — but it was a bit disheartening to see that so many of my recent comments were not so much from people who liked my blog or wanted to make some point as rather from Disney Channel zombies rising from their couch/grave to seek the phone number/brains of the ... uh ... hmm, that metaphor needs a little work.

And of course I have no doubt that I'll have to turn off comments on this very entry some day soon, as it contains such hot! hot! hot! keywords as "Raven Symone" and "phone number" and "e-mail address" (by the way, Raven's double-secret e-mail address is raven@wiretapping.fbi.gov, but she asked me not to tell too many people where she's working now).

Finally, in response to many people's requests (both of them!), plus my own accumulated guilt, I have finally added a feed for the Cockahoop blog. You might be tempted to call it an RSS feed, but technically, it's an Atom 1.0 feed. I can feel your eyes glazing over. It should work with whatever feed-reader you use, but if it doesn't, please let me know in the comments.

What's nice about this is that you no longer have to wait days and days and days for your favorite Cockahoop content. Well, actually you do, but you no longer have to spend those days or weeks on end continually hitting the refresh button on your browser while looking at this here blog. You know you were doing that.

Now, through the miracle of push technology, Cockahoop content can be delivered fresh to your computer whenever I finally get around to making some. And now it can be read while piping-hot new, instead of the annoyingly room-temperature way you used to read it. Truly, the future is now!

Now I just need to give this blog an actual design, allow for tagging, perhaps change the canonical URL, bring old entries up to the current formats, finish all those entries I've started, and finish all the non-blog content for Cockahoop that I have lying around in various partially-completed states, and I'll be done. Pardon our dust!