Blog Software Update
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008This has been scheduled for quite some time, but today I finally got around to updating the software on this blog, including removing spam from the database (12,000+ comments). Now I have effectively blocked new spam attacks. Seems it was also actively being exploited to put hidden links to various sites in the posts — what a complete waste of time. I hopefully put an end to that now, at least for a while.
Yes, I know I should do this more regularly to avoid such problems, but I’m lazy when it comes to this. Not least because the process for updating the blog software is rather involved. It means I have to make a complete backup of the files and database, and create a patch with the customizations I’ve made against the old version. Then installing the new version, upgrading the database, fixing any problems caused by the upgrade, and then re-implementing the old customizations in the new version by inspecting the patch created earlier. Of course this task gets easier the more often it is done, so I should probably be doing it more often in the future.
