Brian's progress on Specialty Gamer

Well I would guess that the Specialty Gamer website must be starting to get known since the website has been getting a fake spam comment per day for past five days.  By fake comments, I mean like this one:

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Links have obviously been removed, but they were supposedly to websites to make money and see Adriana Lima nude.  (whoever that is...)

To combat the fake comments, I've added in a couple spam blocking plugins.  I figure that one spam message per day is easy enough to manage, but as the website gets more known, I would guess it could become a real hassle in the castle to have to take the time everyday to sort and delete all spam messages individually if I continue to get them.

The first plugin is AutoBan, which is an IP blacklist program that whenever I set a message status to "Junk", then the IP address of the message sender is added to a blacklist and banned from my website.

The second plugin added is NoHarvester, which was made to prevent the messages sent from computers that harvest comment forms and send automatically generated messages thru zombie computers.  The plugin checks the IP of the message sender, and blocks the message if the IP of the host computer is different than the one where the message was being sent from (if its a zombie computer).

With the anti-spam plugins in place, I still am averaging a spam comment per day.  Distressing to me, because I don't even average one real comment per day yet...  so I added various "porn" type words to the spam blacklist typically only used in spam type gibberish messages.  Hopefully it makes a difference.

I did notice at least one spam message was caught and automatically blocked so far.

Thinking maybe about adding a sender verification type thing where a person has to enter in a word to submit a comment.  I hear that websites do that nowadays to combat automated comments, which supposedly are easy for real people to do opposed to zombie bots. 

I found this really cool website thru some magazine I read.  The post didn't really fit into any of the Specialty Gamer categories, so I put it here.  Anyways, the website is called Get The Glass and its a promotional website by the California Milk Board, the "got milk?" people. 

Note that before anyone heads off right away to check it out, the website is very graphic intensive and requires a broadband connection to play properly.  Despite the loading screens and everything, it is very worth playing in my opinion.  Keep reading on for more info.

The website/game features the Adachis, a family of four criminals trying to break into Fort Fridge to get the glass of milk, while avoiding the Fort Fridge Security and being sent to Milkatraz.  The game is in Flash and is a tabletop style board game where you roll a dice to advance on the board.  The Fort Fridge Security, however, is behind you and gets to roll a black dice after everyone of your turns, so you want to always keep ahead.

The game takes approximately fifteen minutes or so to complete and consists of four different minigames (one for each character) and some various quizzes and puzzles to complete, depending on what space you land on.

The game is very smoothly animated and in 3D - think Pixar quality.  A nice classic/vintage setting.  (50's?)

The dice is rolled by clicking on it with your mouse pointer, holding down the button and flinging it.  Watch it bounce around your screen!  Its really a very cool effect.

The Fort Fridge Security gets a roll and creeps towards you with every turn.

Among the different spaces are Fortune, Misfortune, Mastermind, and Hideout.  Here I landed on Misfortune so had to draw a card. 

Anyways, got broadband?  Then check it out!  www.gettheglass.com

Well, I gotta say this was a lot more complicated for me to add this than probably should have been.  I used Formmail from Matt's Script Archive, said according to the website:

FormMail is quite possibily the most used CGI program on the internet, having been downloaded over 2,000,000 times since 1997.

Whether that's true or not, it is basically what I needed to add a basic contact form to my website.  Very much a DIY script.  I needed to use my HTML reference book to make sure my code was correct as the readme file gives all the necessary attributes, but doesn't tell you basically how to do everything if you don't know the proper HTML. 

Anyways, I added it to the bottom of my Privacy Policy page.  I think it looks nice.

Also, I made a referring page so that when someone sends me a message, they are sent to a page saying the message has been sent and that I'll reply soon.  http://www.specialtygamer.com/features/sent/

Elsewhere:

• took off the old polls, made up two new ones
• rearranged the order of the menuboxes in the sidebar
• edited the Privacy Policy wording a bit
• added a little "callout" link at bottom of Authors menubox for people to contact me on becoming an author

By default, Movable Type uploads files to the root directory.

By default, Movable Type will store the file you are uploading in the blog's root directory, but with the "Upload Destination" field you can customize where the system will store the file.

http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/author/adding-images-or-files.html

Personally, I never liked that because I hate to have a bunch of files clogging my root.  So I added a folder named "images" that I put my images in.  So every time I want to upload something, I select "Choose Folder" and select the "images/" radio button to have my images go there.  The problem is that seems like an unnecessary step since I want ALL images to go to the images folder.  Plus the bigger issue is that I have other authors on my website that may not all feel like (or remember) going thru the process of selecting the "images" folder each time.

So it took pretty much an insane amount of searching to find the solution.  I came across this page:  http://www.learningmovabletype.com/a/how_to_change_t/

Although my solution was similar, it was a little different as the tmpl/cms/dialog/asset_upload.tmpl file referenced the tmpl/cms/include/asset_upload.tmpl which I needed to edit instead.  I'm guessing it must be a change in MT4.1. 

So anyways, I just edited my tmpl/cms/include/asset_upload.tmpl file by changing the following line from:

/ <input name="extra_path" id="extra_path" value="<mt:var name="extra_path" escape="html">" />

to:

/ <input name="extra_path" id="extra_path" value="images/" />

"images/" being the default folder I want images to go to.

And then also adding the edited asset_upload.tmpl file to alt-tmp/cms/include.

Still figuring out all the new features to MT4.1.  One cool thing I'd been meaning to check out is the global templates.  For someone with multiple blogs/websites, it used to be a person had to edit each template per blog individually, even if there was various elements that would be the same between them.  Now with Global templates, I can just link to one template and if I need to make changes, I just have to edit the one Global template, rather than having to make the same changes individually to each blog.  Plus its smart too, if you use the same name as a template in your blog, it searches for that template first, if not there it goes to the Global one.  So if particular changes need to apply to a specific blog, I can just include the template in that blog to override the Global one.

Of course, this means I need to delete my templates in individual blogs if I want them to go to the Global ones.

Also, I noticed the anti-spam measures I've added seem to be working.  Various spam comments have been caught and deleted/junked without any action on my part.  I'll check the spam box for comments and see obvious bad comments being collected.  Legit comments seem to go thru just fine.

Other small changes:

• Updated dates in website to 2008
• removed period (.) from end of title in Brian's progress on Specialty Gamer
• halfway installed the Pagination plugin.  Install is sort of involved so I'll work on it later.
• removed YesAsia banner links to PS2 NiGHTS remake.  I don't think anyone cares. 

So as of right now, I have eleven zombie spam comments on Specialty Gamer so far for the current day.  (yes, 11!!)  Three of them got thru my filters, so all that I've put up isn't working yet.  So I have added additional IP and domain blog spam blacklist services to my lists of those.  Added are bsb.empty.us, opm.blitzed.org to IP blacklist lists and multi.surbl.org, bsb.empty.us  to domain blacklist lists.  Plus I continue to update the keyword blacklist as new words show up in spam, typically unlikely to be used by a real visitor commenting on Specialty Gamer.

So far, no legit comments have been caught by the filters in place. 

For those that may actually check the ProgLog to see what I'm doing, you may have noticed I haven't posted in here for a while.  Its because I've started my own more focused business journal on my personal website.  Its mainly just a checklist of things I've done and need to do, so I haven't put any links to it.  And certain things, like numbers, its often easier to know that not just anyone can read about all my business.

So anyways, I'm currently in the progress of setting up my merchant account.  That is, to accept credit cards thru the website.  I'm talking with the e-commerce guy of my bank to make sure that what they have will work with the e-commerce software I want to use - Magento.  If it doesn't work, then I'll have to find a different software to use.

For now, I've just upgraded my Magento install to a more current release.  As Magento is still currently in Beta stage, they recommend doing a clean install as upgrades are said to not be fully implemented yet.

The install page is here:  http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/magento-installation-guide

And another important page with info on installing on a PHP4 server (which applies to me currently):  http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/installing-magento-on-a-php4-server