Change is always painful, so those of you who read this via RSS may wish to point to the new feed instead (though it will be “temporary” until the full migration). Those of you who read this via LJ, IJ or JF won’t be getting any direct cross-posts for a while, but will instead be receiving updates via Twitter posts (you know, that crap y’all ignore). Comments may, of course, still go on the respective journal entries. And for those of you who just land here randomly, or still live in 2001 and access this site via static links (yeah, I’m looking at you)… well, you’ll be seeing an awful lot of this same post. But that’s nothing new, right?

The actual full site migration is still scheduled for some time in the new year (and yes, all you Ulfrun detractors, it’ll even have a new layout, and I’m sure you’re all breathless in anticipation), so in the meantime you’ll just have to deal with the mess.

Which is actually a pretty relevant metaphor for life, really.

Hey, maybe I can put up a long, ranty splash page about what I’m doing instead of just leaving this message up. With a progress bar! That’s cool nowadays, right? I’m so hipnhappenin!

Stolen from severedscythe. Because memes are cool.

1. Go to your bookshelf and take the 6 in from the left.
2. Post the title of the book in your subject bar.
3. Go to page 136, the 3rd paragraph, 3rd sentence and post it here.

Since it didn’t specify which shelf on which bookshelf…

Occasionally, the business of discovering the knowledge of the ancients is better pursued under cover of darkness than with a lantern proudly outstretched to dispel the shadows of ignorance.

Fun fax I learnt yesterday; vs.hive does not work on IIS. Well. There you go.

Well, okay. It’s actually not a fanlisting for me, per se; it’s for vs.hive, and it’s run by the lovely echo.

I’m still totally buzzing over the fact that someone actually thought something I did was good enough to open a fanlisting for, so excuse me while I go squee in the corner for a while.

In other news, void-star.net β is up. It’s the “second phase” testing platform for the WordPress transition here at v-s.net.

At the moment, the plan is to continue to develop JournalPress locally. β is for “live testing”, as well as for slowly migrating my posting habits, so I can get used to WordPress’ feature-set (I’m typing this at β, for example, and will manually cross-post it later). β also interfaces with my iPhone, so I’ll start to get a bunch of “look what I found on the road” type posts.

When JournalPress has reached a release state (probably sometime in early 2009), I’ll archive the sk.log version of void-star.net, stick up the new WP version and get started on work on the post security plug-in. I figure all that should keep me busy into the new year.

Awesome.

Hi there, my name’s Dee and – at the time of writing, at least – I’m one of the last blogs on Earth that doesn’t use WordPress.

It’s not my fault, honestly. When I started this site – way back in 2001 when it was called synthetickiss.com – WordPress did not exist. Hell, b2 didn’t either. PHP, at that time, was a fairly new language and it’d only just started creeping hand-in-hand with its platonic life partner, MySQL, into the web sphere. I knew about the language because it was what Scot had picked to write the revision of grep with, and I figured that if a language was good enough for Scot then it must be A++ awesome.

At the time, the idea of using a database-driven engine for a blog was kind of novel. Most everyone at the time used Blogger, which was a very different beast than today. Essentially, you’d give the service your FTP details, and it would push out flat-text files for your posts and archive. Crazes of SSI and PHP includes came around and went, all attempting to add flexibility into what was essentially an inflexible system. The only other system available at the time was a Perl CGI script that I swear was called Greymatter but references to which I can no longer find on the Intrawebs. There was no PHP/MySQL solution.

So, in the latter half of 2001, I decided to write one.

It was called sk.log; the “sk” in honour of the acronym for my site at the time. I’d originally intended to release it publicly – and even did, for a while – but the development of b2 started shortly after I was mired in my own script, and rocketed to healthy popularity.

I stuck with sk.log for the next seven years. Despite its flaws – and there were many – and despite its complete and utter lack of anything even resembling an admin panel, I’d written it and, as such, it was idiosyncratically mine.

A while ago, I made a list. Kinda of like New Year’s Resolutions, I guess, except it was, like, September. The list contained two things:

1. Join a gym.
2. Migrate v-s.net to WordPress.

I looked at my list for all of about a day, before chucking the whole thing into the “too hard” basket. Except… I did end up joining a gym. And I’ve been going, on average, five times a week for the last three weeks.

So that just leaves on thing left to do…

Some of you may be aware that a while ago I decided it would be fun to register a domain called Azeroth .ME. It’s a WPMU site, specifically created to host my own WarGirl blog so I could write long, tedious posts about World of Warcraft without it upsetting some of my friends who have some (understandable) issues with the game and really don’t want to hear about it.

Plus, I just like the idea of MU.

Anyway, about two or three days ago I started to get my first splog signups. This is not unexpected; they hit MU installs pretty hard, and I know this from past experience. No fear, says I, and I went off to impliment the usual round of things I do when things start getting spammy.

That was about 9:30am this morning, after a few days of manually deleting the blogs got old.

Noon rolls around and I’m still trying to stop the flood. Nothing is working, and I mean nothing. Step one, Project Honepot. No dice, which, okay, maybe the IPs just aren’t in their database yet.

All the signups are coming from .info domains, and after some Googling, I find out that theoretically you should be able to block those by adding /.*.info/ into the Banned Email Domains list. Still no luck. I’m starting to get a bit… concerned.

I went through no less than two different CAPTCHA plug-ins, with no luck. Grr. Dee angry!

Step back, try and think laterally.

It’s time to do the nasty, and start messing about in MU’s code. I don’t like doing this in WordPress – since all my hard work will get blown away on the next update – but I’m kinda desperate here, so…

I locate is_email_address_unsafe() in wpmu-functions.php; this is the place the Banned Email Domains list is actually implimented, and I throw in the simplest, nastiest, anti-.info domain hack I can think of:

Yuck. But, I test it out and lo and behold, it does actually prevent me from registering at the site with a fake .info email address. Oh. Kay. Good work, I think.

Go off to brush my teeth, come back.

More splogs.

And here’s where I start to get a bit… distressed (well, moreso). Because Something Isn’t Right Here. This is a function I know is being called and it’s still failing to stop these registrations. That’s… not good. Not good at all.

So I poke around in the code a bit more, and add my anti-.info snippet in a whole bunch of other locations, just to see. And, for good measure, I rename wp-signup.php.

That was a while ago, and so far, so good. I’ve received two new user notifications but they haven’t had any information included and no actual new users or blogs have appeared, which is good, and I can still register manually myself, so that’s good too. My non-existant wp-signup.php page is getting hammered, so the sploggers are still trying, but for the moment it looks like they’re beaten.

But it was way, way, way too hard. The CAPTCHA and the regexp on the email validation should’ve caught them. The fact that neither did… Jesus, it kinda indicates that there’s some back-door user registration process and that’s a real worry. The last MU update was supposed to be a security patch, but it looks like whatever they tried, it didn’t work.

Hrm.

And, in related news, lol.