I've blocked a few IP addresses that have been spamming the blog very heavily. The IPs came from China and co-location centers in the US, so it should impact any individuals. But, if you do find that you can't access the site from a system, please contact me. One IP address had spammed the site with 560 comment posts over a 2 month period. My filter caught the majority of them, but it's a pain to filter through them all just time make sure important ones aren't deleted.

From the beginning the site has had nofollow links for the comment section, because I don't want spammers to benefit from the spidering of this site. I may eventually turn off commenting all together since 90% of the comments are spammers, but I don't want to silent any potential dialog for the topics I do post on. If things continue to get worse, I'll just disable comments and ask for people to contact me directly for further discussion and questions

Well, I have finally moved to a new blog platform, which means I’ll write more.  I absolutely hated working with the old platform I was using.  The only thing that has prevented me from migrating was finding a blog that would work on my server correctly, had the customization I wanted and was scalable.  I finally ended up going with the .NET BlogEngine.

It’s not as nice as WordPress or MovableType, but it runs and runs with minimal effort.  MovableType did run, but it would have taken too long for me to get things up and running, and half of the things I wanted to do with it weren’t working correctly.  ActivePerl didn’t have or wouldn’t work correctly with some of the XML packages needed for several of the newer plugins and features I wanted to use.

Moving to the .NET BlogEngine means that I’m giving up the PHP and perl platforms that I was going to work with, and started migrating my old sight towards .NET, but it took almost no setup to get running.  I unzipped it, changed the theme and it was ready to roll.  Three hours of work max.  I spent 24 working MovableType before trying WordPress again, and I couldn’t ever get the PHP for WordPress running with FastCGI correctly on IIS.  In the end, I just gave in and tried .NET BlogEngine.

So, things might start to roll out a little faster now that I’m on a platform that just works with the tools I use and has the features I like and want.

Just for reference, my old blog is still available until I migrate the information from it: http://www.benanderson.net/blog