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.

Akismet anti-comment-spam

I've yanked out my own crude anti-comment-spam tests and replaced them with a nice tidy call to the Akismet API. If this works out I'll most certainly incorporate it into the Django version of the blog -- there's a nice Python interface as well.

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006
blogs + php + site + spam
2 comments

Some related posts: Toolbot.com source code available on request • Comment Spam Stats • Comment Spam • Library of 1000 scammy spams • Most boring upgrade ever • Blog flair backlash • Spam stats redux • Spam, del.icio.us spam • Is Akismet broken again? • Comment spam

• Comment from seanrox , 4 weeks later

Akismet is nice and works wonders on comment spam as you'll see on your site.

The guys over at automattic.com really know their stuff.

• Comment from Paul , 4 weeks later

It has worked quite well so far, with the exception of a rash of annoying ones coming in this evening (8/26). Akismet's strength is also its weakness -- spammers have a strong motivation to craft posts that fool it, since that gives them a magic ticket to all Akismet-protected blogs. I reallly should use the API to report all these false negatives.