I fought the spam and the, spam won…

almost.

After writing my first post in a couple months I decided to go through the comments on my blog and I found I have been getting killed with spam.

I know there are different things that I can/should be doing to guard against spam but for the most part my blog has been pretty clean for the past 1 1/2 years so I haven’t worried too much about it.

Being lazy, I wasn’t going to go through and delete a few hundred comments by hand because that would be crazy! I logged in through SQL and started going through the Community Server schema. I was pretty sure I was in the proper table and I started looking for patterns and deleting records.

I was alternating between:

SELECT * FROM CS_POSTS

And

DELETE FROM CS_POSTS WHERE �bla’ AND �bla’

Not too worried about blowing up my “production” blog I wasn’t being too careful. I was about 10 deletes in when I dropped the �WHERE’ clause from the above statement and clicked execute to see the remaining entries�

Whoops, that leaves�

DELETE FROM CS_POSTS

Damn auto-commit!

Luckily I had set up a backup process long ago.

After the restore I was a little more careful.

You know your blog is inactive when…

your newsreader asks you if you want to disable your blog.

I have been using Great News as my newsreader for close to a year now and the other day it asked me if I want to disable my blog because it is inactive. Not that I read my own blog but I have always had it in my aggregator to make sure the site is working.

I’m not sure why I haven’t posted much the past few months. I guess part of is that I have been busy at work. There is always a lot to do around the house especially with all the shoveling lately. With Isabelle now in grade two she is bringing more home to read every night and now math too so I spend a fair amount of time helping her.

Another reason is what to write. I generally end up writing about things that drive me nuts. Things so stupid that all I can do is shake my head. You’d think I’d have all kinds of things to write about but the closer those things are to my everyday life the harder they are to blog about. Actually, they are pretty easy to blog about but they might limit the career a little

Anyways, this should be enough rambling to appease Great News.