stblogs.org

April 16, 2008

A little maintenance

Hi, bloggers and readers--

I've been improving the anti-spam rules on the stblogs.org web server this week, so if you've been seeing many spam trackbacks and comments on any of the blogs here lately, that nuisance should be noticeably diminished, at least for a while.

Things are busy for me now (school work), but I hope to upgrade the blog software this summer and migrate the blogs -- at least, the active ones -- to an external server (i.e., not here at home). That should make the whole operation a bit more reliable for the bloggers and for readers.

Posted by RC at 11:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

January 4, 2007

Everybody wants to get into the act!

Got this in the mail. How do you say "chutzpah" in Latin?

From: "Lee Anderson"
Subject: Stblogs.com - A new home for Catholic writers
To: leeanderson2000@hotmail.com
Dear Friend,

Please accept a special invitation for a sneak peek to a new community for Catholic writers — Stblogs.com.

StBlogs.com is currently in Beta, and has not yet been launched publicly. We are still working on exciting new features and free services to raise the profile of Catholic writers and cover breaking Catholic news.

But right now we are pleased to offer you and a select group
of others a chance to register yourName.stBlogs.com and claim your space and place in the newest community of Catholic writers on the web.

If your involvement in the blogosphere has been limited so far to lurking or commenting, you will want to open a blog at Stblogs.com immediately.

Isn’t it time you contributed your thoughts, insights or expertise to the Great Catholic Conversation? Stblogs.com gives you the means to do so…quickly, easily and at no charge.

But what if you already own a blog? That's ok. Let me share 3 reasons why you will want to start a Stblogs.com blog too.

First, Stblogs.com is a Powerful Domain — For years Catholic bloggers have affectionately called their community "St. Blog’s." Today St. Blog’s has entered the lexicon, with Google indexing nearly half a million references on the web!

When readers search for Catholic bloggers, chances are good they’ll end up at Stblogs.com. Shouldn’t you be there too?

Second, Stblogs.com offers Powerful Tools — Don’t take my word for it. Spend a few minutes opening a Stblogs.com blog today, and discover how easy and fun it can be. Choose your own template. Reserve your own Stblogs.com blogname. Publish your thoughts and even upload video effortlessly. Our suite of blogging tools is intuitive yet powerful (and more features are being added daily!)

Best of all, as a member of Stblogs.com, your recent posts and your popular posts may be featured on the Stblogs.com homepage, in addition to our homepage blogroll. This is just one of several free promotional tools Stblogs.com has planned exclusively for our members.

Finally, StBlogs.com is Free — Blogging at Stblogs.com is easy and free…so what do you have to lose? Find new readers by reserving your Stblogs.com blogname and uploading at least a selection of your writings. You are already an established member of the St Blog’s community. That's all the more reason to become a member of Stblogs.com too!

As a voracious Catholic reader and sometime-writer myself, I’m very excited about the launch of Stblogs.com. I’m looking forward to helping cultivate one of the most intellectually stimulating and invigorating Catholic communities on the web.

I'm writing especially to you today because I believe your particpation will help make StBlogs.com all the more invigorating and vibrant. I hope you’ll join us there!

Sincerely,
Lee Anderson

P.S. Opening your free Stblogs.com blog, can be done with a few simple keystrokes by going here http://stblogs.com/wp-signup.php/ And if you have any questions, comments, concerns (or words of encouragement!) you’d like to share with me directly, please respond to this email or write to me at leeanderson2000@yahoo.com

It appears to be an effort by book publisher Rick Rotondi. I wish him all the best in his work, but there does seem to be a strong possibility of confusion between stblogs.org -- a non-profit group domain for Catholic blogs, active since June 2003 -- and his stblogs.com -- a new project that runs ads and looks like a commercial venture -- so I'd have preferred he choose some other domain name. Pff.

Posted by RC at 10:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 22, 2006

Can't Comment?

A couple of the blog owners have let me know about readers getting a 410 HTTP error when they try to post a comment. It doesn't happen consistently, but only if your comment text matches one of the spam-test patterns I've defined in the Apache web server's mod_security module.

If you get a "410" error on a comment, drop me a note, and please include the text of your attempted comment. Also, if you can provide your IP address and the time of your attempt, it'll help me find information in the server's error log. Once I find which pattern is triggering the error message, I can fine-tune the pattern rule to avoid this "false positive".

Posted by RC at 12:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 4, 2006

It's time to play "Am I Nuts?"

It seems I tend to stay with jobs. I work in IT as a system administrator; my first job (after college) lasted ten years, and my current one has lasted thirteen. However, I've decided to take some time away from full-time work. I'm switching to "on-call" status in a little over a week, which means that the company can call me in if there's some urgent need or some particular technical problem I can help with, but otherwise I'm basically done there.

For somebody as attached to job security and money as me, this is quite a move, but I expect that I'll be able to do all right with some short-term work and some income from my savings. That on-call status means the company can call me if there's some particular need during the transition, but I don't expect it to be an ongoing thing.

So it's time for me to get in some travel, some housecleaning, maybe some school or some training, some back-to-the-basics spiritual renewal, and some exercise (e.g., walking the mile to the parish for daily Mass: thank Heavens they have one at 11:30!)

I have to get one of those guide books to "offbeat" attractions. :-)

Posted by RC at 1:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

October 27, 2006

My congressman is a dope again (Updated)

In the past I figured that Ed Markey, the congressman who represents my one-party district in Massachusetts, was fairly savvy about technology issues, so in spite of his general left-liberalism there was at least one positive feature about him. Well, I can't be so positive about that any more.

After a researcher at Indiana University drew attention to a weakness in airport security, Markey (D-MA) didn't thank him for performing a public service, but called for his arrest. Now, this does give Soghoian some extra publicity, which serves his purpose, but really it's not a good idea for public officials to give out such a message as Markey (D-MA) is giving: that public ignorance about security weaknesses should be maintained. The public is more likely to approve security improvements and their costs if they know that the changes really are needed.

Update: As the folks at BoingBoing report, the congressman (D-MA) has seen the error of his ways, after getting complaints from tech-industry constituents like myself.

Posted by RC at 6:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 23, 2006

Big "sorry"

Sorry for the downtime, folks: the stblogs.org server was knocked down by a power failure three days ago, and since I was away on vacation I wasn't able to correct the problem until today. We're back now.

Posted by RC at 5:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

September 13, 2006

On the mend!

stblogs.org is over the hump, with regard to our technical troubles this summer.

A word of apology to commenters and blog authors who were inconvenienced by them. Our web hosting provider at the time, page-zone.com, had enabled the Apache web server mod_security feature in a way that I consider indiscriminate, causing us trouble, and gave up all too easily on an attempt to diagnose the cause.

Commenters and blog authors were frequently getting "no access" errors from the www.stblogs.org server, and it took me a while to understand the source of our troubles, let alone to take corrective action.

To resolve the problem I moved the web server to a home-based machine and dropped PZ's service. The home server has its own weaknesses (e.g., occasional disruptions to my DSL service), but is bringing results definitely better than the service we were getting from PZ in July and August.

For you fellow web admins, here's where the problem was: the package of rule sets that comes standard with mod_security aims to protect the web server by aggressively blocking user actions that might attempt to upload malicious code (Javascript, etc.) to the web site, and even blocks many uses of HTML tags in user-entered data. A few of the rules are a problem for a content management system (CMS) whose very purpose is to create web pages containing HTML and Javascript.

The mod_security documentation actually includes a warning about using those rules on a web server running a CMS, so if only the well-meaning folks at PZ had read the friendly manual, as we say in the IT biz, and followed it, we'd still be their customer. Maybe.

Two benefits from running stblogs.org on a home server instead of that commercial hosting provider: (1) although this server is a modest machine, we no longer have to suffer performance troubles from other customers' activity; (2) I can now modify the system firewall and mod_security rules to block spam-commenters more effectively and quickly. I'm also running the server on a system with redundant disks now, which should help us keep going in the event of an occasional disk failure.

For the curious, the server is a 32-bit Athlon XP 2200+ (1800 MHz) with 512 MB memory, running Mandriva Linux 2006.

Posted by RC at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

September 2, 2006

New blog: Vultus Christi

Don Marco (Fr. Mark Daniel Kirby) is a Cistercian monk of the Abbey of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem in Rome, and chaplain to the Benedictines of Jesus Crucified in Branford, CT. Readers of Fr. Keyes' blog will already be familiar with Don Marco, as his homilies have been posted there already from time to time.

His weblog takes as its theme The Face of Christ. Welcome aboard!

Posted by RC at 7:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 31, 2006

Moving on up...

I've upgraded the blog software to Movable Type v3.32, so would the blog authors please check through their configuration settings and see the various new options available?

Also, I've relocated the site to a new server machine which I manage directly. This will let me avoid some security headaches.

Posted by RC at 6:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 13, 2006

The list server is back up

I've set up the cathmoms list and entered subscriptions for as many of the members as I could find addresses for; a notice should be in your e-mail.

Posted by RC at 12:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)