What I’ve been up to.

Work Misc

I haven’t been blogging much lately, as you can see. I’ve mostly been busy with the system programming side of my job. Here’s a brief list of the things I’ve done:

  • Added LDAP server accounts for all students registered for Fall

  • For all faculty and staff ccounts migrated so far, added some LDAP attributes that we missed in the migration (this is why the Account Lookup and Password Change feature didn’t work for some of you; hopefully this is all fixed now, but if it isn’t, please tell the Service Request Desk!)

  • Worked on a procedure so that our Oracle web/database applications can talk to the LDAP database and easily use it for logins. (this means that more web applications that used to require their own logins will soon work with your email password, which is also now your network password.)

  • Worked on a system to help us re-code our website. I’ll talk moreabout that later, but it’s a huge job! Once it’s done, though, it should make it easier for everyoen to create web pages with the WOU design.

I’ll try to come up with a more easily digestible explanation of some of this next week. Especially LDAP, since that’s becoming so important to my job lately. Hmmm, I should note that down as a possible FAQ topic for when I start sending those again….

More on trackback spam

Blogging

I’m getting tired of all this trackback spam I’ve been getting; it’s averaged about sixty a week, usually in one or two big chunks. I’ve tried banning an IP address or two; let’s see if that helps.

How do I ban an IP address, you might ask? Well, it’s pretty easy.

Here’s how it works: first, of course, you need to know the IP address you want to ban. Then on your blog admin page, click on Configuration. Near the upper right of that page, you should see an “IP Banning” link. Click it and you will see a simple form with one input. Enter the IP address to ban and click the Add button; you should then see the newly banned IP address in a list below the form.
If you realize you’ve made a mistake or you want to un-ban the address for any other reason, go to that list and click the checkbox next to the address(es) you want to un-ban. Then click the Delete button below to delete the address(es) from your ban list.
When an address is banned, no computer using that address can leave a comment or a trackback ping. This isn’t foolproof, of course; there are ways for someone to get a new IP. If they are on a large ISP such as AOL, it may well be just a matter of signing off, waiting a few minutes, then signing on again.
For more about IP addresses, check out Wikipedia’s entry.

New Blogs at WOU

Blogging

We’ve had lots of people start blogs since I last posted a list of new ones, and four of them have made at least two entries so far.

Here they are:

Dale Goodell’s Blog – Dale used to work for Library and Media Services, and now works with UCS on library-related projects.
Joan Guralnick – Joan is a UCS tech support manager and Monmouth resident.
Laura Dunn’s Blog – Laura is a recent graduate of WOU. (Congratulations!)
Mike Soukup’s Blog – Mike is a UCS Banner programmer.

If you want your blog mentioned here, just make at least two entries in it! If you want me to say anything specific about you, please email me.

Busy again

Work Misc

Wow. It’s hard to remember to post here sometimes. I had a really busy week last week; mostly working on the new database system for the website.

On Friday, I came in for a meeting about the University Self-study that we need to do as part of our regular re-accreditation process. I’m one of the UCS representatives in the self-study group, and I expect I’ll have more to say about that later, but at the moment I need to get back to programming; I have some system administration scripts that need to be done by the end of the week.

TrackBack spam

Blogging

Well, it looks like that nofollow plugin to defeat comment spam is effective; now I’m getting TrackBack spam instead.

I want to allow TrackBack pings, so I can see if any other blogs are linking to my blog; but man, there was some disgusting looking spam in those TrackBacks. Since each TrackBack creates a link on my blog to the blog that supposedly mentioned my post, TrackBack spammers can create links to their spam sites by sending TrackBack pings. This is really annoying, and to my knowledge there’s no way to stop it, at least not yet.

Luckily, on your blog control panel, you can view and delete TrackBacks; just click the “TRACKBACKS” button in the left-side toolbar.

By the way, I’m going to be off campus tomorrow, Thursday the 28th, but will be back in on Friday, normally my day off.

Busy day

Work Misc

Today was a day for catching up with a lot of things that fell through the cracks while I was up to the eyeballs in programming. Apologies to the people who waited for things; I will start getting to the quick requests a little more quickly.

Part of what I was working on, and just finished before the weekend, was a fix for all the students who had their files migrated and had their public_html websites stop working. All of those sites should be up and running again.

Anyway, it’s late and I need to get going, so I’ll sign off now.

Woo-hoo!

Work Misc

I finally got the automated blog creation script going. This means we’ll be able to set up blogs in bulk for the whole incoming Freshman class, and any other group we want; also, it means Paul will be able to create individual blogs more quickly.

I just had to share that. :-}

More new blogs at WOU

Blogging

I haven’t been posting these for a couple of weeks, so there’s a bunch to catch up on!

By the way, I am working on a public page to list the blogs on our server. A question for anyone who is paying attention; should I automatically include everyone, or only include people who don’t ask to be removed, or only include people who specifically say it’s OK to be listed? Or any other ideas?