I would have posted this earlier but I’ve only just realised. The Prattle is 5 years old today!

Who’d have thought that the person who is well known for starting lots and lots of projects then never finishing any of them would keep up a blog for half a decade?

There’s a moral in that somewhere. I’m just not sure what it is.

So, the new version of WordPress is out and everything has been duly updated.

What did they do to the user interface? It’s like Noddy’s guide to blogging. Everything is in pastel blue shades (ugh) and with very big buttons, but at the same time they’ve moved stuff all over the place so you’re continually having to scroll and change tabs to work out where the hell they’ve put it.

And they’ve kindly put in a stats package, but you have to use your WordPress password (rather than your site password) to get in – but helpfully haven’t put that information anywhere and the input field looks exactly the same.

*scream*

I’m home!

Got huge big cuddles from all my boys (Akra Jr in particular had been very tearful this week without me, so it was a lovely reunion). Mum is recovering well from her operation.

I’ve got loads to catch up with over the next couple of days, so bear with me if it takes me a little while to get up to speed.

And to start with … I need to go and unpack… *sigh*.

As the more observant (non-RSS) readers will have noticed, I’ve had a redecoration of the Prattle. I was bored with the old one.

It’s only a superficial colour change so I shouldn’t have broken anything, but hey – I’m sure you’ll find it and tell me if I have, won’t you?

Also, comments of love and admiration of the new colour scheme are welcome. As of writing this entry only one person has noticed and they hated it… bah!

Akra has been doing some clever background code stuff to reduce the ever increasing comment spam I’m getting (even though Akismet and comment moderation gets the most of it, it’s still a pain).

I’m hoping it shouldn’t make any visible difference to you, the genuine commenter, but as always if there are any problems please can you drop me an email on Pewari [at] may [dot] be. Thanks very much!

This is advance notice that tomorrow, the server this blog is hosted on is due to be down for maintenance.

Hopefully, if all goes smoothly, it should only be for a short while, but planned maintenance duration is 10.00 to 22.00 GMT so don’t panic if you find that the Prattle has disappeared for a while!

In addition to that, I’ll also be without email for the day. I’m hoping the withdrawal symptoms won’t be too severe this time.

Just a quick note to apologise to anyone struggling to amend their comment subscriptions recently.

I’ve just been notified by a reader that they get a page error when trying to unsubscribe to the new comment notification emails. I’ve no idea how long they’ve been broken – can only assume that it happened on one of the WordPress upgrades we did a while back.

I know how frustrating it can be to get bombarded by unwanted emails and I really hope that not too many other people were affected.

As always, if you notice something broken on the Prattle, let me know and I’ll try and get it fixed as soon as possible.

So, there I was flipping through the stats for my ‘umble little blog.

I think in general I have fairly respectable numbers for a personal blog whose outlook on life tends to be fairly … random… in terms of topics – Mooncups, baby gurus and chicken & mushroom pies for some reason getting a large slice of the fame.

My daily unique visitors have been as high as 150 a day, but are mostly around the fairly respectable 80+ of which I guesstimate that half of them are coming in via searches from Google and the like, either finding what they need or being bitterly disappointed and buggering off again.

Up until recently, I’ve been fairly ignorant of my RSS readers. Then I got a plugin for my stats package (Mint, for the terminally curious) which kept a count of feed subscribers – fantastic.

About 11 a day – it sounded a little low (as I knew bloglines had 12 subscribers alone) but assumed it was the right order of magnitude and that aggregate feed readers probably only counted once or something.

Small but respectable. It warmed my heart that there were a few online friends who liked it around here enough to visit on a regular basis and see what I was up to.

However, about half an hour ago I realised that there were other tabs to the plugin, and the number 11 only referred to Atom subscribers. After a few seconds of feeling a bit stupid for not noticing before, I flipped over to RSS2 out of idle curiosity.

400+ daily subscribers.

FOUR HUNDRED!

There are four hundred of you out there reading my god awful witterings about my children, stuff in the news and whatever current mind-bogglingly stupid scheme I’ve got going at the time. Given that my average is 5 comments a post (and that includes me replying to people), a lot of you are being very very quiet.

My flabber is well and truly ghasted.

And each and every one of you are now commanded (oh… okay… humbly requested) to comment and say “hi” – we’ve got 156 comments on the Mooncup post to beat…

Nope, I’m not complaining about my mental state again, just thought I’d give you a heads up that on Tuesday (27th) this site will be down for a substantial portion of the day while the server gets some major upgrades.

My email will also be affected, so I’m not ignoring you and nothing disastrous has gone wrong!

I’m going to try and control the shakes, isolation and other unpleasant withdrawal symptoms best I can…

This site has been a bit unstable lately, I apologise if (over the last couple of days) you’ve arrived to a blank page or it’s timed out on loading.

The Prattle has always had a fairly high amount of comment spam thrown at it, but as I loathe having anything which might deter genuine readers commenting, up to now I’ve mainly dealt with that via the Akismet anti-comment spam plugin.

Unfortunately, the burst rate of spam per second has become so high, that the connections my host’s server has had to make to Askimet’s server has put an incredible strain on the server load, often slowing it right down to the point where it is unable to respond to any other requests. To all intents and purposes, the spam rate becomes a Denial of Service attack.

Fortunately, my host has been very understanding and patient, but obviously it’s a situation that can’t continue. Each time the server has to be reset, it takes down other websites, email services… all because of my little blog. So, I’ve (well, actually my techie husband, Akra) had to make some changes which hopefully won’t affect you, but you should know about them in case they do.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand this list, I will explain the implications afterwards.

• The Bad Behavior plugin has been installed. This detects malicious automated software and prevents it connecting to the site before Akismet even kicks in. This reduced server load significantly, but not enough in our case.
• Around twenty of the worst offenders have had their IP address blocked from commenting. Obviously, this can only be a temporary measure until they change their IP addresses again, but was a handy sticking plaster while we sorted the rest out.
• Akra has written some clever code that detects any automated commenters (i.e. people who haven’t physically sat here at the site and typed their comment in and pressed “Submit”). For those that are interested, this involves using constantly changing hidden form fields.

The net effect (hopefully) is that you shouldn’t notice any difference whatsoever, except that the site may just run a little bit quicker for you. We’ve been very careful to make the chances of a false positive minimal. If you never commented here before, then your first comment will still have to be approved, but I’m fairly quick at that most days. Other users should notice no difference.

However, there is a tiny chance that one of the IP addresses banned may be a proxy server or some other randomly allocated genuine IP address. So please, if you have any problems at all adding comments, could you email me at Pewari AT may DOT be so I can get it sorted out as swiftly as possible? I would also appreciate you adding a quick test comment to the bottom of this post – even if you normally lurk. Thank you.

The good news is, that after months of clearing out thousands of comments from Akismet purgatory daily, this morning I have only three.

Something’s working.