Chris Meller

I knew what’d happened as soon as I started up Outlook this morning and saw that it was downloading message x out of 600 off my main blog account.

Last night, between 1:34am and 3:34am (EST) I was the target of an insanely large comment spamming spree.

During this two hour window, I received over 400 SPAM comment submissions, all from the same IP address: 71.104.45.2. Thank you Verizon!

Fortunately for me, I’m running the Akismet plugin. After 45 comments got through, Akismet caught on and started blocking all the rest as they came in, preventing them from ever making it to the post itself. Cue the 369 messages sitting in my Akismet management pane.

Groovy!

For the first time in quite a while, I got to write some PHP for an actual work-related project. We’re receiving some address-correction data (you know, zip+4 here, wrong city spelling there, that kind of thing) back from the guys who actually mail out all the checks for claims we pay, and I wrote a quick batch of PHP functions to import, parse, and load these corrections into the database.

It’s certainly not the prettiest app ever, but it’s quick and gets the job done. What more can you ask?

Alright, I’m still planning (hoping?) to design my own theme for Wordpress… I’ve got quite a few ideas, but as always, they don’t really seem to fit together. I just pick out “oh, I like how they did that” and “gee, that’s really cool” and “wow, I should put that on my site!” from various places, and none of the independently great ideas work together.

So, after the success of our “Wasted Weekend” poll (hey, that’s catchy… I may have to make it a regular thing…), I thought I’d open up the floor again and see what you guys thought about themes.

Everybody has certain things they like and dislike from the webpages they visit regularly, and it’s foolish for me to think I’ll ever be able to please all these personal opinions. Still, I’d like a little 3rd party (and 4th and 5th and 6th…) advice.

What are some of your favorite aspects of a theme / design? Not just Wordpress or blog related, but in general over the entire web. Do you like navigation on the top or left? What kind of colors schemes - light or dark? Do you love blue as much as I do? Any other website design pet peeves you think all designs ever should abide by?

If you don’t have anything right off that you know of, just keep this in the back of your mind today while you surf around on company time, and let me know what your favorite parts of the sites you visited today are later tonight…

Just consider this a useability study… before the product has been created…

I still don’t have anything in particular I feel like blogging about, so I thought we’d mix it up a little.

What are your plans for this weekend? Anything special? Same old routine? Share your boring plans with us so we can feel a little better about our own pathetic lives!

Welp, I can’t believe it’s actually December already, can you? Seems like just yesterday I was checking out hot chicks in skimpy clothing during the July heat. Where does the time go…?

I know I’ve been quiet this week. I think I got a little burned out after throwing myself into coding and working and school so much the past few weeks, so just hang in there until I get my spirit back.

Oh, and I hope everybody had a happy turkey day! Gobble gobble gobble!