After almost four months of working at home, I finally trekked back into the wonderful world of retail. I had my first day of work today–It was only orientation so I didn’t do too much. Right now I’m only working part time for the time being, but I am still looking around for another full time job. I’m actually waiting on Cingular to get back to me, and I believe I might have snagged a job with this time this time around.
I finally managed to get atourworst.org back to normality. It ended up being the resolving IP address that was causing the horrendous load time (it was close to 40+ seconds for me!). I was also having issues with spam bots hitting up my site every minute, and not being blocked by akismet. But now the IP issue has been fixed, and MySQL configurations have been tweaked to accommodate the site’s usage.
Thanks Bubs, Mari, and Jack for your suggestions on spam protection. I had actually installed Bad Behavior just after I posted that entry, which was actually starting to reduce the amount of comment spam. I also installed Comment Timeout which is set to close comments that are older then 60 days or haven’t had a legitimate comment on them in 35 days. I realize that it’ll inconvenience people that want to leave a comment on them if they find them through searching or other ways, but hopefully they’ll contact me if it’s that important.
So far it’s worked wonders as I haven’t had any spam problems (yesterday I had about 350+ “approved” spam comments make it through) since Bad Bahavior has stopped 414 access attempts since yesterday, and akismet has managed to catch 88 comments just from yesterday alone.
Things should be running along smoothly now! With all that done and done with my first day of work, I’m just waiting for Mark to stop by and then we’re heading to his friend Crystal’s apartment to play some Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360.
Edit at 4/29/07 @ 1:08am — A few hours ago I ended up getting a call for another interview on Monday. I would love to have this job because it would put me back on the path with computers and its peripherals. It’s for a Tiger Direct store in my area. The best part about the phone call? He was highly impressed with my application. Ahem, I’ll take a bow now, thanks.
Aw, sorry to hear you got attacked by spam. 🙁 But yay that it’s better now! 😀 I did notice the slow load time from before. That is just a ton of spam…wow…
Hope you had fun with Guitar Hero! I’ve yet to try out that game but I really wanna!
Good work Jordan, it’s always good to see prosperous websites climb back on their feet again
Glad Bad Behavior is working for you 🙂
Congrats on all the potential jobs! I was actually thinking about trying comment timeout, but was worried for the same reasons as you. How does it work?
PS: thanks for the shout out 😉
Hope you get the Job you want, it is hard to find a job that makes you happy, oooooo Guitar Hero sounds like fun, I will have to get it.
Melissa, you should really play the game as soon as you can get your hands on it. It’s really fun and an awesome way to pass the time if you’ve got a free night. Makes nice for hanging out, drinking, and relaxing. 😛
Thanks Bubs, I’m definitely glad it’s working too. I was nearly shitting a brick with the amount of spam comments that were getting through (which has honestly never happened before!)
Jack, you’re welcome for that shout out 😉 Basically what comment timeout does is it gives you the ability to have comments close on entries after a certain amount of days. If you check out that link, it’ll give a little better explanation.