That’s the ratio of a valid comment to a spam comment, this blog receives. I think the spammers are just nuts. Despite the ‘no follow’ parameter set on every blog comment, I’ve have no clue why spammers are still busting this blog. Nothing happens to their comments. I simply delete them. Are they sadistic enough to waste time in churning comments and be happy that I’m wasting time in deleting comments? I don’t think so. Would be great if some mainstream media does an underground story on them.

They say Word Press has excellent spam control stuff. Prabhu suggested this long time back. Now I’m not interested to move to Word Press because I don’t want to do the same mistake I did a couple of years back in moving from Blogger to Movable Type. Though MT offers more than excellent blogging features, their spam control hasn’t met the needs completely.

Also, I’m tad upset with Google for not being aggressive with Blogger. Even the blogger blog, Buzz, sucks big time. Couple of years back, they used to have wonderful editorials on Blogger. Now they have come to a near stop. Did Google do a mistake of buying Blogger? Would Blogger be better-off without Google? Instead of being bothered by these stuff, I only wish they buck up and finish the known issues & feature requests. At least let the world know what they are up to.

I know it was me who jumped in at first to sign-up for Google Adsense, when it was introduced. Two reasons. To earn money from the blog and to also try out how Google Adsense works. Well, I haven’t earned more than what I spend on this blog. More than the hosting charges, its the time that I invest writing which is more precious. I do enjoy the experience of writing. Add to that joy the lots of typos and grammatically perfect sentences that would Wren and Martin, a run for life.

Just that I don’t want to earn money from the targetted ads. Hence I unplugged the Ad scripts from the templates. Adsene has been just outstanding as expected. Maybe I’ll plug back the Ad scripts after a few months. As of not this blog is Ad-Free. Talk about signing up for the Ads myself and taking it out with a dramatic post like this.

To keep the templates trim, the Go Seattle Photoblog is also not plugged out of the templates. I did notice that the flickr script has been running more than the expected time and sometime it’s frustating to see the blog getting loaded after a long time.

I would love to stay with my current hoster, Total Choice Hosting. Two things that make me look for alternatives. One, they adviced the blog is growing and needs to setup a re-seller account worth $20/ mo. Two, No Fantastico option here. Hence, looking out for a domain hoster. Any suggestions ?

The annoying pop-ups in the recent days was due to the statscounter @ webstats4u. From the day, it was plugged here back in 2002, it has clocked 7,21,624 visits until today.

Those days[I'm talking like an oldie here], webstats4u was the only stat counter around just like the yaacs commenting system. Surprisingly Kiruba still hasn’t switched from Yaacs to Blogger’s commenting system. With hardly a bunch of bloggers in Feb 2002, who knew each other well, if one subscribed to a service, the other followed him/her and thats how I subscribed to the nedstatbasic’s stats counter which was recently re-named as webstats4u.

Though the hosters are providing with awstats, this webstats was providing a lot of information, I would like to see from time to time. I’m sorry to see it de-commissioned but then the pop-ups are annoying any time.

Over the weekend, I quietly upgraded the Movable Type 2.6 to it’s newest version, Movable Type 3.2. The idea of moving to blogger is on hold due to the great blogger paradox. The blogger paradox is that it allows posts to be exported out of it’s site but doesn’t have an option to import blog posts from other services. Why wouldn’t google grab a coder from movable type and see if he can code their system to get this import thingy working.

Anyway, the new MT 3.2 has a nice professional interface with lots of useful features and impressive plugins. I am sure this would safeguard my blog from the attacks/abuses like the one happened last week. The only thing missing here is a new template. I am offlate falling in love with the minimalist stylesheet and am customizing it for my own liking. As a test, I tried to customize the minimalist into a good template at the guestblog. This is same as what I did to the blogger template at lazygeekdotblogspotdotcom . Have created few banners with Kamal, Super Star, Surya, Maddy and Aayitha Ezhuthu. Do tell me if you hated it.

P.S - Need a good suggestion to tweak the PHP for getting random banners on the blog everytime its refreshed. I tried to use the mt_rand() of PHP and it never worked for me.

Update [05th Oct] - Updated the Guest Blog with the random images script. Thanks a ton to Saravanan for writing the entire script of random images. Works like a cutie. Keep refreshing and see the images change randomly. Do tell me if it looks cool.

So if you thought the suspension of account was because I stopped paying the hosting bills, I wasn’t. The account was suspended without my knowledge. Yesterday morning, when I clicked laygeek.com bookmark even before brushing my teeth, I saw the account suspended message. So what did I do? Went over and brushed my teeth. Very funny.

I logged a ticket and the friends at TCH replied that the abuse department is looking into it as they suspected some Movable Type & comments abuse. I had no clue of the abuse so I was assuming all the ‘junk’ that was written is long gone. Much to the wrath of the abuser, the blog content a.k.a junk is all back. Anyway, its not worth blowing into a big issue. But if only the data was also gone, I would have been angered.

The reply from the TCH friends is soothing and they kind of say that the blog is being fetched more than enough times a day that it deserves a dedicated server. FYi, A dedicated server costs $79 a month !! I am not sure if dedicated server would be an immediate solution but I know that I lodge the blog content on blogger and Google would take care of it. So I’m looking to go back to Blogger and this is the probably the fourth time that I’m ranting on the moveback to Blogger. Until such day, there is a choice to upgrade Movable Type 2.61 to the free version of Movable Type 3.

Though it took the hosting company some time, I’m happy that they got things back in shape. Thanks. I am still pursuing to get more details on the ‘abuse’. But then things are back and so cool. Here’s the reply that I got from the hosters.

Your account is back online.

At some point in the near future you may need to consider a fully dedicated server. As your account grows more and more, it consumes more and more resources. As in the case of your site, your blog is growing fast and this is great. However, with success sometimes comes costs.

For now we will do our best to continue to serve your site.

I am very sorry for the way this ticket was handled. Several of our technicians are off this week with vacation time and sick leave, so we are a tad short staffed.

If there is anything I can do to help you transition into a dedicated server, please let me know.

Romba Nandri guys for writing-in, sending snapshots of suspended blog page, commenting on someone else’s blog about this blog’s status and g-talking with me on the death of a blog. Prabhu even offered space to write until the blog is back. Didn’t want to do show that philim. I am sure no one would be starving if the blog was down for a day. And ofcourse, it was like a compulsory vacation.

If an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

More from the interesting Infinite Monkey Theorem and ofcourse The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator. Any interesting analogies to blogs, appreciated.

As soon as blogger announces the import of posts from other blogging tools option, I’m moving the blog here or back to it’s own place. Whatever be it, the templates are now changed and ready to take over.

I’ve sent a couple of mails to blogger team asking for the release dates. No answers as of yet. Seems like it is their feature request No.1.

I only wish, I can get back to my early blogging days. Raw, naive and unfettered.

The flow of spam comments keep increasing even I keep a blacklist and also make sure the ones that escape blacklist filter gets deleted. This takes a good half hour during weekends. To cut this maintenance time, I finally decided to cut the HTML in comments which would discourage spammers from leaving a comment. I’ve done that and am happy the last few days spam comments have reduced by half.

The recent fad is to move to WordPress and many known bloggers have moved out of MT and Blogger. I am contemplating to do this but the only thing that stops me from doing are these spammers. The spam issues that I’m facing with MT wouldn’t be resolved with WP too and hence moving out would re-energise me psychologically but would leave me doing the same blog maintenance during weekends. As rambled before, one thing that I want to do is to switch back to blogger. I’ve even written emails to the blogger team asking them to include the import entries option in blogger. They seem to be doing everything else except this. They even have AJAX technology for their commenting system but an import from other blogging tool is yet to be fixed. Huh !!

My instinct says that google in the coming year, might hugely invest in Blogger and would probably come-up with a tool like Picasa which can be downloaded to the client machine and run blogs from there. If they could pad a host of other utilities by studying the competing blogging products, blogger will continue to be the most successful blogging tool.

P.S - I’ve also tweaked my commenting system in the blog. The comments which were appearing old-to-new for the last few weeks, will continue to appear new-to-old in descending order as such.