E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 70644 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Trac spam

It's a problem.

Trac is a fantastic, world-dominating software project management and bug-tracking system written in Python. It integrates with Subversion and has a wiki and just works. Even the Rails guys use it. It's possible that if Trac and Chuck Norris walked into a bar, only Trac would leave.

But unfortunately, the comment-spammers and wiki-spammers have noticed Trac and have been updating their scripts. Hence the ~~12,000~~ 15,000 hits for "trac spam."

So if you run a Trac installation, now would probably be a good time to start trying out Edgewall's experimental spam filter and the Account Manager Plugin from Trac-Hacks.org.

Saturday, May 6th, 2006
spam + tips + trac