Technology

Technical post.

For several years I have used the free analytics services of SiteMeter. Basically, they allow you to analyse how many hits your website receives, and you can look at things like what country people visit from, what web browser they use. There is nothing sinister about such data – it is freely available to the owner of any and every website you visit – it’s in the server logs.

Sorry everyone

I've just had to delete 280 spam comments, going back only a week or so. MovableType has an excellent junk comment filter - 280 comments got caught and marked as junk, and I only got notified by e-mail of 10 comments that were spam. Still - I have to glance down the junk comment list to make sure I've not deleted a genuine comment.

So, hate to do it, but I've had to go to authenticated-only commenting.

Movable Type (of which this blog is an instance) uses TypeKey for this. All you do is create a TypeKey account. You then sign in and have the option to stay signed in for a fortnight. You're then allowed to comment again. As a bonus, you only have to type your name once.

Sorry about that - I'll look into introducing some human-only security feature to weed out the spambots, then I should be able to go allow anonymous comments again.