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, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 102345 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Spam stats

One technical interest I haven't written much about here is spam. I have a fairly aggressive anti-spam setup, and I have a simple spam statistics page that gives hourly breakdowns. But what I've wanted for a long while is some way to aggregate spam stats from other servers into a sort of spam weather report. There are all sorts of reasons why this is impossible to do perfectly -- people have different criteria for what constitutes spam, for one -- but I still think a useful model for sharing data could be worked out. People who are already generating spam stats could publish their data in a microformat, for example. Alternatively, they could submit periodic automatic reports to a central server, which would then make the stats available in machine-readable form. The key would be to make it easy for people to make their data available.

This is sort of a lazyweb post. Does any project or standard for this already exist?

Sunday, August 14th, 2005
spam