Movin' On Up

Three hundred and six straws have broken the proverbial camel's back.

On Friday morning, a Belarussian spambot posted spammy comments to 306 of 351 entries on my blog, CKL's HotSheet. This has happened in the past, but never on this scale. Enough is enough. Time to make it stop.

I had been using Greymatter, which stores its data in flat files, so it was easy to remove the spammy content with a Perl script. Fixing the meta-data was not so easy, since GM's web admin interface only supports deleting one comment at a time. I wasn't going to do that 306 times. No freaking way.

But I did remove the spam itself, so that's taken care of. And now, to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future, I'm moving the HotSheet to Blogger.com. I've been using it for a while now to serve The Richter Scales Blog, and it's nice; lots of features that GM doesn't have, including the most important-- restricting comment posting to registered users. Plus I get a shiny new XML feed! What's not to like?

It does mean that I now have multiple older strata of archived HotSheet posts in different layouts, but that's no big deal. Besides, it'll be nice to keep those around so that, in fifty years, I can pull them up in my neuro-holographic memory cortex and be amazed that I was ever such a lazy writer.

Welcome to the future.