Over the last weekend I purchased a new mountain bike and along with my habit of walking hundreds of metres (possibly even kilometers) along the banks of streams whilst stalking fish I am moving towards becoming a little like my former self - well if I can lose a few kilo's of body fat and get a six pack I will be one happy chap.

So over the next few weeks I am going to develop my two month diet, follow it as strictly as possible and publish the results right here!

The anti-spam project
Since I have introduced the comments section I have been plagued by internet spammers, they are the lowest form of life on the net. There are usually two types of spammers that travel the WWW, the first is your surfer type that surfs to various sites and pastes spam into online forms and then there is the second type, a relentless and heartless beast - the spam bot (robot), it will crawl site after site after site and automatically place spam data into any type of form that it comes across, a vicious program that really does some damage.

shintara has suffered fiercely from the effects of the afore mentioned web crawler that relentlessly pours more and more spam from its pores into my simple comments form that plasters this index page. For a moment the spam subsided, I thought this was the end, but it was the calm before the storm - the bombarding had not yet begun. On a number of occasions I have had to clear out the spam posts, to find that half an hour later there would be twice as many. I needed to formulate a plan of action against this.

I put together a simple php script to catch the spammer out, log the IP address in a blacklist file and disable that IP address from posting on the site. What I will do on the next update is publish the blacklist of IP addresses, they will be freely available for anyone to use against these spam bot attacks. Analysis of this data may also show some patterns that these bots follow, will be an interesting next few updates.

As things get bigger, they change...
The site is starting to get unmanagable, its not even that big, but big enough to start impinging on management. This has got me thinking about a new form of content management, and the only real way to do this is to start using a database. I have managed to thus far get away without the whole database thing, I have actually prided myself on this fact, the content was extremely organised on the back end of things, but now as its expanding and I am thinking of adding new things its starting to get out of hand.