A good question that many people have asked me lately is, “Where have you been since Dec. 13, 2010?”

A good question that you might have just came up with is, “Where did you come up with Dec 13, 2010?”

For the past half year or so, I’ve been getting better at not abandoning my website for an extended period of time, but I did that for a while starting from December 13, which was the last real blog post of 2010. I have a blog post from December 17 too, but it just had a link to a video I made on YouTube and wasn’t exactly a blog. The thing is, the actual video itself was made far before December 17, but was released on that date because it was a video directly related to an event taking place on that date.

I’ve been extremely busy with academics even before December 13, and to get the highest grades possible, I stopped releasing major updates to my website to focus on my course work. My final exams spanned between December 18th and 22nd, and immediately after my last exam, I came back home and was busy with stuff back here. But enough about my life, time to update you on the status of the website, as the “Site News” title suggests I should.

To make up for the major lack of new content in the past half month or so, I’ve been doing more website work than normal in the past few days since I got home. Whenever I have free time (which is quite often, now), I come up with ideas on either how to improve existing pages, or what new content to add.

For example, for improving existing pages, I have been slowly merging and moving content I used to have on my Resources page to my Articles page. A lot of articles in Resources were short and required the viewing of multiple pages to get the whole picture of what I was talking about. To make it more cohesive, I put all the related articles (such as an article about one topic split into multiple articles) into one page, then moved it from Resources to Articles. I’m down to only a handful of pages left in Re­sources, and hope to completely eliminate the Resources section soon. All URLs pointing to Resources will be automatically redirected to the new corresponding page in the Articles section.

The Articles page itself has gotten some new content in addition to moved content. Although it may not be apparent at first, there will be a handful of new articles in various categories added to the Articles page. The reason it may not seem like it has been updated for a while is because I pre-date time-sensitive articles. Some topic ideas that I came up with a long time ago apply to that time period, and the way in which I would have written the article would have most likely changed if I had known the new information that time discovered. If you’re an avid reader of my articles, you shouldn’t have a problem noticing the new ones. If you’re not, then you shouldn’t be too worried about it, because there are a lot of articles that you haven’t already read anyway.

A section of my website that you might have forgotten about is Five Minutes in My Head, the older version of my blog. Nothing has been added to it since I made my final post on June 24, but there are still a few changes that I have made. First, I (once again) restructured the back-end of the PHP file that runs Five Minutes in My Head, hopefully making it more efficient. I am also in the process of changing the URLs of the images embedded in all the posts. To save bandwidth and disk space on my web server, I have already uploaded all the images used in Five Minutes in My Head to my Picasa Web account with Google. All I have to do now is finish updating the URLs.

My blog will hopefully be getting more posts in the near future. (There will be a new post tomorrow for sure.) It’s difficult to find interesting things to blog about, as there’s usually nothing interesting happening at home, but I’ll be on the look-out of funny stories to share. Once I get back to my apartment and resume courses at university, the regularity of my blog posts will likely return. In the worst-case scenario, I can still talk about the boring things I do for those who care, or do reviews of things I read and watch that day like I used to (if I end up having enough time to read books or watch movies).

As for my video blogs (on YouTube), those have been on hold since November. Making videos takes a lot more time than simply writing a blog post. It also requires more effort, as my facial expressions and body language is visible, making it more personal with the audience. It’s also difficult to find good topics to make videos about, as something that could suffice as a quick post on my written blog does not necessarily make a good video. I have a video planned out that I will be releasing on January 12, 2011.

And finally, the banner advertisement that has been at the bottom of all my blog posts as of lately (and is at the bottom of this Site News post as well) expires today. That means that you have an opportunity to get your advertisement on my website. If you’re interested, feel free to contact me, but keep in mind that I’m very selective about who I accept as advertisers and what the advertisements look like, because these advertisements are more integrated with the content instead of offset in a separte area. I also tend to give priority to my friends who wish to advertise with me. Keep in mind that I do contracts by the number of pages, not by impressions, as once your advertisement is on the page, it is there permanently, even if your website gets shut down or becomes dormant.

As always, feel free to use the Contact Form or any other methods of contact found on my profile page to give me any feedback about this page or my website in general.

After having a commenting form on my old WordPress blog, and after getting more spam comments than legitimate comments, I lost faith in the people that wanted to comment on my content, and after tran­sitioning to the new Parkzer.com on May 15, 2010, I removed commenting entirely.

Shortly after, I started getting instant messages and emails from people that said that they wanted to comment on my blog posts and other articles. When I explained to them why commenting was gone in the first place, they suggested that I implement a system that makes it a lot harder for spammers to successfully get through.

On July 5, 2010, I started adding a Discussion section to some of my blog posts, and added that in order to contribute to the discussion, one must email me directly after acquiring my email address from a CAPTCHA. I knew that this would discourage spammers, as most of them would not go this far simply to spam my website. I even added a note that there was no guarantee any submitted comments would be published on their respective blog posts.

The only problem was, not only did this discourage spammers, this also discouraged the people that wanted to leave good discussion-based comments. Finally, earlier today, I decided to give everyone an­other chance and made a comment form that can be used universally on my website. I wrote the sub­mission form myself in PHP, adding particular ways to catch spammers and make sure known spammers can’t use the form.

Like every new thing that I release, this Contact form is currently in public testing mode. I will be scanning through the comments I receive and find out ways spammers and spam bots are getting through, then add ways to block those smarter spammers. One thing that you’ll notice in this contact form that’s different than many other blog commenting forms is the abundance of text fields. Most blog commenting forms only have three fields: name, email address, and comment. Mine has far more: name, email address, subject, and message to be filled out by the user; IP address, date and time, and refer­ring page automatically filled out.

Depending on how this turns out, I’ll most likely post an update to how the commenting form ended up, and how well it’s working. Check back on the news page, and I’ll update the date next to this article if it has been updated at all.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

It’s been four months since I implemented the commenting and contact form system on my website, and I think it’s time for an update on how it’s going.

I’ve managed to make a contact form good enough that I’ve had almost no spammers, even without a CAPTCHA image verification system. I think simply adding a “Subject” field threw off the spamming bots enough for them to not be able to submit my form – not including a subject gives an error on a sub­mission attempt, and the only way to know the form didn’t submit is to read the error message that’s written on the page, which I’m assuming most bots are unable to do.

If you’re interested in knowing why, the Subject field is so important in this case because it makes my custom form deviate from a standard form. Most spamming bots are built to seek out contact or comment pages and inject their preprogrammed and predefined data into the form. A majority of comment pages have a space for name, email, and comment. My form also has a space for name, email, and comment, but also has a required Subject field. Because most comment forms don’t have subject lines, the spam bots are not preprogrammed with data to inject into a subject line when they encounter one. The bot is then unable to continue any further, and gets an error when trying to submit. The error is still a confirmation page – a page confirming failure. The bot doesn’t know the difference between a confirmation of success or a confirmation of failure, and moves on assuming the form submitted properly.

The spam bot programmers that are intelligent enough to have their bots inject random data (such as “zkrfsjxmyzc” and “CefxkBXZEetnrX”) into all fields managed to get through my filtration system a few times until I found out a way to combat that as well. Not long after the release of my form, I added a new field called “Spam Check.” This field is meant to be left blank (as denoted by the words “Leave blank” next to the field). A bot that injects data into all fields just so the form will submit is out of luck now, because putting in any data in the Spam Check field will cause it to reject the form.

Overall, I’m satisfied with how the form and the results turned out. Although I’ve rejected many com­ments from real people because they were stupidly written or trolling, I’ve also accepted many comments that now appear on various areas of my website. I’ve also responded to many one-on-one messages through email that were initiated with the contact form.

Like always, feel free to use the contact form to provide me with any feedback on this article, or about anything in general.

http://parkzer.com/contact

After changing my main domain name from Parkzer.co.cc to Parkzer.com, I decided to redesign my web­site’s layout as well. After building the basic design, I started spreading the news of my new website layout around and asked for people to suggest improvements. I got a handful of ideas, and started building a list.

The following list shows the ideas I received and the things I still have left to do:

• Find a better color than vomit yellow for the links. (What about vomit purple? Just kidding)
• Fix .htaccess forwarding for the other domains. (Someone help me with this, it won’t work)
• Turn all the external links into graphic advertisements, and get rid of the external links section.
• Pre-resize the advertisement images instead of resizing on-the-fly.
• Copy the advertisement images onto this server to reduce the number of outside connections.
• Get rid of the animations on the advertisements in the sidebar, they’re annoying.
• Change the navigation button container to make it seem more fitting. (Changed buttons instead)
• Add more background colors so the same background appears twice consecutively less often.
• Create two more columns at the bottom and move all social networking stuff down there.
• Add a watermarked Twitter bird to the top right corner of the Latest Tweets box.
• Split the newest pages section to newest blog posts and newest content.
• Extend the number of items in each ‘Newest’ box to ten.
• Make a dynamic subheader for FMiMHv2 and LOLWTF, similar to the one already on the RS pages.
• Make the Justin White advertisement open the page in a new tab instead of this one.
• Increase the opacity of the text on the yellow navigation buttons. (No longer applies)
• Get rid of the empty white box at the bottom.
• Automatically import non-linked tweets from Twitter instead of adding them manually. (Too hard)
• Fix the Misc. Resources -> Spyware Protect 2009 page’s formatting.
• Create a ‘The Best of the Best’ page that has the funniest and most popular blog articles.
• Make the Home navigation button link to / instead of /index.
• Change the color scheme of the navigation buttons to be more consistent.
• Put in lightning the background for the ‘Newest’ boxes. (Tried, looks random and not very good)
• Replace the word ‘Twitter’ with the logo in the Latest Tweets box. (Tried, looks out of place)
• Link the word Blog in the ‘Newest Blog Entries’ box to the blog archive page.
• Compress the navigation button images. (Done, they went from ≈20 KB each to ≈2 KB each.)

Let me know if you have a suggestion to add to the list.

Come back later to check on my progress.