http://www.planetbods.org/blog/build/images/me.jpg 2008-07-16T12:56:55Z Ah, the internet. It's so wacky isn't it? tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog/Internet/2 Movable Type Copyright (c) 2008, Andrew Bowden 2008-07-16T12:56:55Z 2008-07-16T12:49:25Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.955

By chance I noticed the an interesting case of BBC related database overload. And it's in the form of recipe databases. Boy, is there a lot...

Andrew Bowden 2008-07-01T15:53:51Z 2008-06-30T20:57:56Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.949

Roughly 50% of all the spam for bods.me.uk consists of phising attempts for NatWest customers, repeated over and over and over again.

Andrew Bowden 2008-05-24T14:18:23Z 2008-05-24T14:08:17Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.939

Martin Belam has recently been experimenting with Twitter, and has blogged about his month long experience of using it.

Andrew Bowden 2008-04-23T08:45:51Z 2008-04-23T08:26:37Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.790

As I mentioned recently, the BBC's Doctor Who website recently redesigned and moved their XML feed, without putting a redirect or message in the old feed to point people to the new one.

Andrew Bowden 2008-05-07T20:34:22Z 2008-04-20T08:21:19Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.789

Launched in 1999 as freebeeb.net, and later renamed beeb.net, BBC Worldwide's ISP slowly and quietly kept chugging along. By 2001 it had entered profitability with 140,000 users. And it's been around ever since. But this year will be its last - on the 30 June 2008, Beeb will close down and be no more.

Andrew Bowden 2008-04-16T22:19:57Z 2008-04-16T18:33:38Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.788

One of the reasons I quite like Plus.net as an ISP is that they're pretty open and honest with you. For example, for those of us on a capped broadband package, they provide a simple online tool that tells you how much you've used in a month. Very simple but you'd be amazed at how many ISPs don't do this.

Andrew Bowden 2008-04-07T15:20:47Z 2008-04-07T12:48:05Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.786

One of the wonders of having XML feeds is that you can keep up to date with what's going on quite nicely from one place instead of having to go through hundreds of different bookmarks, remembering what you've seen and what you've not. And it's something more and more sites are now realising that they should provide, and which will bring them traffic.

Andrew Bowden 2008-03-24T08:28:09Z 2008-03-24T08:13:39Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.783

For some time, I've been wondering why Movable Type has been, well frankly, so slow on my home PC. And specifically my Linux PC. It's been an insane situation where trying to add one entry could take five minutes.

Andrew Bowden 2008-02-26T12:50:26Z 2008-02-26T11:07:33Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.772

Blogs for me are a great way for the BBC to communicate with the people who use, and pay for, its services and it's great that they've been a success. Indeed, probably too much of a success if the continuing comment problems are anything to go by. The problems in trying to put up a single comment are, frankly, terrible. Timeouts... Server problems... You're not even sure if your comment has even got through to the server backend half the time.

Andrew Bowden 2008-02-18T16:43:27Z 2008-02-18T19:35:01Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.770

This will hopefully be the last post on the whole comment spam thing - for now anyway. Today I actually (and accidentally) tracked down the reason why spam comments were going live on this site.

Andrew Bowden 2008-02-18T09:27:08Z 2008-02-18T09:16:08Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.769

Ah, I thought. A false positive. A rather crap comment true, but one which presumably was in response to the whole comment spam issue.

Andrew Bowden 2008-02-16T10:33:38Z 2008-02-16T10:27:20Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.768

Well you're a right bunch of miserable people. Not one email to keep me company whilst the comments were down! Tsk! What do you think you're playing at? Call yourself blog readers... Anyway, they're back up now following some intensive hunting to find the cause of spam comments somehow making it on the site, despite all comments being pre-moderated.

Andrew Bowden 2008-02-13T10:17:00Z 2008-02-13T12:52:01Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.767

An observant person might notice that comments on this blog are currently turned off. There's a very good reason for this - today I logged into Movable Type and found that over the last few days, 44 spam comments had somehow gone live on the site.

Andrew Bowden 2008-02-05T16:58:53Z 2008-02-05T16:43:49Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.763

I confess to being mildly concerned when I logged into Movable Type just now and found a great big whopping piece of comment spam had somehow managed to get itself onto an article yesterday.

Andrew Bowden 2008-01-17T18:00:56Z 2008-01-17T17:36:06Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.757

The problem is all in the file names Blogger and Movable Type publish out to.

Andrew Bowden 2008-01-16T14:31:01Z 2008-01-16T14:28:26Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.756

When it comes to hosting, I'm a bit clueless (having never needed any) I thought I'd open the door to suggestions.

Andrew Bowden 2008-01-14T23:18:39Z 2008-01-14T21:02:08Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.755

Every now and then my email accounts suffer what I suspect many people who own domains do these days - log on to your email and find a couple of thousand emails saying 'Message can't be delivered' or that kind of ilk.

Andrew Bowden 2008-01-03T16:00:21Z 2008-01-03T15:59:02Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2008:/blog//2.752

"Web icon set to be discontinued" screamed the headline from the pages of BBC News's website.

Andrew Bowden 2007-12-19T10:42:36Z 2007-12-19T19:49:15Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2007:/blog//2.745

Anyone reading the BBC Internet Blog will have noticed a flurry of posts celebrating the 10th aniversary of bbc.co.uk. All the reminiscing has, to be honest, got me reminising about my old memories of working on the BBC website

Andrew Bowden 2007-12-11T15:56:13Z 2007-12-11T12:22:57Z tag:www.planetbods.org,2007:/blog//2.741

Lots of people have blogged about it - with comments ranging from celebrating about the lack of the bbc.co.uk logo, and celebrating that lovely retro clock. So here's my bit.

Andrew Bowden