What a random and strange conversation.
Tags: wtf, spam


[15:38:31] jackbauerthecoho: *Greetings! I know this is hard to believe, but I'm you - from the future. I bear important news.*
[15:38:58] cmantito: do you now?
[15:39:22] jackbauerthecoho: *not for sale*
[15:40:07] cmantito: what's not for sale?
[15:40:18] jackbauerthecoho: *my pants*
[15:40:55] cmantito: what about your pants? I was asking about your news from the future.
[15:41:23] jackbauerthecoho: *Sorry I dont sell my pants*
[15:41:30] cmantito: I'm not asking about your pants.
[15:41:47] cmantito: you said you had important news?
[15:41:48] jackbauerthecoho: ————— 09:08 am —————CompetitiveCoho: Do you have fancy pants?
[15:41:53] cmantito: [15:38:31] jackbauerthecoho: *Greetings! I know this is hard to believe, but I'm you - from the future. I bear important news.*
[15:42:16] cmantito: also, competitivecoho is not my screen name
[15:42:29] jackbauerthecoho: *i dont see how this is related*
[15:42:36] cmantito: what?
[15:42:47] cmantito: clearly we're having two different conversations.
[15:43:04] jackbauerthecoho: *are you just trying to keep me on the im for 5 minutes so you can trace it?*
[15:43:18] jackbauerthecoho: *because i just x'ed it*
[15:43:22] jackbauerthecoho: *trace terminated*
[15:43:40] cmantito: you can't trace an IM
[15:43:50] cmantito: and what?

Website/blog updated.
Tags: blog, website, code, gamecola, spam


I finally got around to do some stuff I've wanted to do for a while -- improving the blog (and some of the other underlying stuff) laying around on my website. It autoposts to Twitter and I'm not using a combination of Twitter & LiveJournal as my blog anymore (although they still do play a part in it). The RSS feeds have been fixed and there's actually a commenting ... thing now that was missing before.

I felt comments weren't necessary since my posts were being made through LJ and it was possible to comment on there but it actually proved to be more of a mess than I expected and I've gone and fixed it up a bit using what I'm going to be calling ColaBlog -- which is a multi-author blogging backend I wrote for GameCola -- and what I think I'm going to call ColaComments -- which, in addition to being poorly named -- is an ancient commenting system I wrote for GameCola that I've started overhauling (unintentionally -- it happened when I tried to integrate it into this site) to bring it to more modern days. It was written so long ago I look at the code and cringe. Because of limitations of GameCola's hosting provider (back then) it was originally written so that the PHP and MySQL stuff was hosted by me, and then everything was done using cross-site javascript (can anyone say document.write(); ?) to insert the comments and forms into their pages. Everything interactive on GameCola is pretty much done that way -- article ratings, comments, hit counters, everything. It's all done using PHP-generated-JavaScript cross-sitely. I know it sounds terrible, but I've found one HUGE advantage to it -- if the comments, and the comment form are NOT in the HTML when the page loads, and are rather written in by JS after the fact, spambots don't seem to realise they're there. As of yet, GameCola has yet to see any comment spam, and I have not had to implement any kind of captcha or other spam-challenger than that. The forums have been targeted with spam before, the comments haven't seen anything yet.

Anyway, so now that I've fixed up the backend stuff in my site a bit, and restyled the front-end a little, I'm going to have to take some time to update the content on some of the pages. That's next.