Error on my blog last night

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: September 6th, 2009 | 2 Comments

Last night i was just about to start to write a blog post and then when i went to my site to write it, i could not access my site! For some reason there was an error on my site, it displayed a white page saying: HTTP Error 500 - Internal server error, after looking about the internet for what this exact error is, it turns out that it is nothing to do with client-side so therefore it was out of my control on how to fix it. In order to find out what exactly caused my site to crash last night i would have to contact my hosting account holders (Dreamhost) and would have to ask them to inspect the log, however i reckon it would take too long to get them to do this so, for now i will leave it, however it it does happen again i will most certainly be get in touch with them. The funny thing is that this blog is on a server with a few of my other sites and only this one went down, my Newmovies.ie site was still working and so was SeanLucas.com and a few others, i wonder why just this site failed? If you want to know more about the error 500, go to this site, it is where i read about the internal server error 500 ;) .

Gravatar – Do You Have One?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 26th, 2009 | 0 Comments

On many sites nowadays, especially on blogs, whenever you leave a comment a little picture will display in a small square beside your comment. This is known as a gravatar.

A gravatar is a little picture that represents you on the web. It is a simple picture that you can choose to show who you are. It is similar to if you are on a social networking site such as twitter, you will have a profile picture to show who you are.

The way a gravatar works is very simple, you simply go to the Gravatar website here, and then click on sign up. All they ask for is your e-mail address!

So why do they only ask for your e-mail address? Basically that is the only thing they need to have your image follow you on the web. So how does it work? Whenever you are on a site that has the gravatar feature on it, such as this site :D ,  when you leave a comment, it will ask for your e-mail address. By entering your e-mail address into that comment box it then checks to see if you are a gravatar member and if you are it will pull down your image that you chose and then display it next to your comment.

It is really simple and it will give a more personal touch to your comment. On some sites if you do not have a gravatar it just shows the gravatar logo, on my blog here if you do not have your own gravatar, a little cartoon character will show :D .

So go on, get yourself a Gravatar!

Spam

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 4th, 2009 | 2 Comments

I have never had much trouble with spam before, sure i get loads of spam to my e-mail account but it never reaches my inbox. Over the past month i have noticed a rapid increase in the amount of spam that i have been getting to this blog. I have gotton over 500 spam comments in the last month alone!

Luckily i have the askimet wordpress plugin, without it i would of been overwhelmed with spam on my blog. I would have to delete each comment individually, and if you try to delete 500 comments it would take a fair bit of time.

The graph above is a view of the rise in spam in my blog post, as you can see it really started to take off around the March 2009 section of this year, this is a complete reflection on the fact that i started to blog a lot more from the beginning of March. It just goes to show if you work more on a site and that site begins to get traffic that you will not escape the spammers. Well good luck to them because they are not getting publicity on this site, as soon as there few hundred word comments with god knows how many links gets left, instantly Askimet will detect it and remove it before it appears on the site at all. Now thats what i call service!