Major Mike’s Musings

After a two-week cruise and a week of visitors for Christmas and New Years, I’m finally getting caught up with all the stuff I let go during the interim. Today, I’m finally reading all the RSS feeds on the blogs I read. Whew.

By the way, Bonnie, on of Major Mike’s readers, commented that she couldn’t find the next–previous links when single articles were displayed. After having used the current theme for about a year and not even noticed it myself, I was surprised. So I added links to the next and previous articles above the title to the current article using the next and previous article titles. Thanks, Bonnie, for noticing the discrepancy.

I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.6. It was a pretty painless upgrade. We’ll see what all that means in the days to come.

I got bored again so I changed the theme of Musings. I had to modify it a little because I didn’t like the way some stuff was displayed and it didn’t accommodate all of the plugins I have installed.

I’d also love to do a countdown for Mrs. Major’s knee replacement and for Son Major and The Major’s trip to California to work at the U.S. Open Golf Championship, but the plugin that handles that doesn’t work with this version of Wordpress. I guess I’ll keep looking for a compatible one.

I added a plugin to Major Mike’s Musings that requires that anyone making comments must be a real human. You’ve seen this on other sites. This feature displays two words from a book which you will be required to enter in order to comment. One of the works a computer can’t read.

I’m getting tired of reviewing spam posts. I’ve had over 17,000 of them. 

UPDATE: It looks like the feature wasn’t working and people couldn’t post comments. So I disabled it. It worked fine on my home server test system. Hmmmm.

First, here are some statistics from my email spam catcher, SpamSieve, for the month of March:

Filtered Mail

• 1,040 Good Messages
• 14,076 Spam Messages (93%)
• 438 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy

• 2 False Positives
• 61 False Negatives (97%)
• 99.6% Correct

To be honest, I administer two domains that get mail and I review all the misaddressed mail. Unfortunately, spammers will take a domain, like majormike.net and add a bunch of fake names in the hope that they will get lucky and come up with a real address. This tends to proliferate the number of bogus messages I have to review. But you can be sure I won’t let bzjz@majormike.net pass.

Second, I just converted the underlying software that supports this site to the latest version: Wordpress 2.5. Now aren’t you impressed? I has a few glitches, but it looks like a good product.

I did upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.2 (the latest version of the software that publishes this blog) today. The transition went smoothly with no problems.

I perceived by my earlier post that I get the most comments when I publish stuff that’s incomprehensible to most of my readers. So in an effort to generate more comments I respectfully submit the following:

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Today I made some code changes to the template that displays this site. That little guitar that displays below each post is now part of the background code instead of code in each post. The advantage is that (1) I don’t have to cut code from a text editor and paste it into each post and (2) if I want to change the icon, I can just change it on the server by uploading a graphic with the name post_bullet.png. The disadvantage is that if I change the template, I have to make code changes to a few files in the new template.

Tomorrow we upgrade to Wordpress 2.3 (If I have time).

As advertised by my host, IX Web Hosting, we were only off the air for a short while. Less than a day by my calculations. So now I can regale you with more nonsense.

We may be down for a couple of days. I’m switching the servers tonight.

I’m getting ready to change this site to newer servers at IX Webhosting. So if we go offline for a couple of days, you’ll know the reason why. Hopefully, all will go well and we’ll be offline only a short while.