On several sites I administer, I've had to deal with comment spam. Not just one or two comments, but hundreds. While Jeremy Andrew's Drupal [spam module|http://www.kerneltrap.org/jeremy/drupal/spam/] helps, I've taken the additional step of denying access to these shitheads. Here's how to do the same. # If you haven't already, install Jeremy Andrew's Drupal [spam module|http://www.kerneltrap.org/jeremy/drupal/spam/]\\\\ # After you've been hit, execute the following query: \\{{{\\select distinct hostname from spam_log where entry like '%insert action%'}}}\\ # Select all of the hostnames, then edit your .htaccess file thusly: \\{{{\\\\deny from [hostname from query above]\\\\}}}\\

Drupal travels pretty well -- here's how to do it.

Finally got it to work... phew.

Recently, I've been playing around with Drupal. As a test case, I've converted 99.9% of a certain author's static website on my linux box, and the more I play with it, the more impressed I get.

Setup was pretty easy, and the only real issue I had was figuring Drupal's category system. As opposed to WordPress's intuitive categorization system, Drupal requires you to have at least one "term" in a "vocabulary".

At the moment, I don't have the patience to get "clean urls" working. It's not a failure on Drupal's part. Rather, it's the default Apache 2 configuration on SuSE 9.1 that's the issue. Despite "mod_rewrite" being available, it steadfastly refuses to bend to my will.

The next test will be a "live" deploy to see how well Drupal travels. This entails ftp-ing the stuff up to ciulla.org, backing up the local MySQL database, then restoring it on a hosted db instance. Too bad I can't just gzip it and remotely unzip it on the server side -- although I could fake out the server and deploy it as a .war file...