Jason W Hutchinson.com

've not yet implemented anything in the way of blocking spambots on this site, and recently I got my first taste of comment spam. Luckily it was only one bot and a few comments, which were easily deleted, but after taking a look at my access logs I've noticed that the bot's still there, and has been trying to post to various pages for several days.

In all instances the bot had the same IP, so I toyed with the idea of having my comment posting function check the IP against a database table of known bad IPs, but that seemed a bit overkill for one bad bot. It also wouldn't do much for stolen bandwidth, CPU usage, etc. So I decided to ban the IP entirely in my .htaccess file:

# Block spammers by IP
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from 195.225.177.136
Allow from all

Now if I get a few more bad apples I can just toss their IP in as well. If it gets too large I'll work up an alternative.

Lots of new features added today:

Search

I have a basic search system set up, which recognizes phrases in quotes and space separated key words.

Tags

Each blog can have tags associated with it. Users can click on a tag to see all blogs that use that tag.

Archives

A basic archive setup that lists blogs by month and year.

Credit goes to poeticcode for the formula I used for my tag cloud sizing.

I've completed a blog entry form, and included features for editing and deleting blogs, so it'll be much easier to update. Now that it's easy to post blogs, I can let you know a bit more about who I am and what kind of functions I intend this site to serve.

First, I am a 22 year old web developer named Jason Hutchinson. I live in Southwest Missouri, USA, and I greatly enjoy programming. For several years I've been particularly interested in web development and design, and ASP, HTML, Javascript, and CSS have been my languages of choice. This site marks my first real foray into PHP and MySQL, and at the rate things are going they'll very likely supplant ASP and Access as my preferred web development technologies.

PHP's syntactical similarity with Javascript has made it relatively easy for me to pick up, and development on this site's going much faster than I had expected. Next I'll be adding the usual blog features like tags, archives, trackbacks, and search, as well as a few useful tools for me to use behind the scenes.

I spent a lot of time cleaning up and tweaking the comments system, though most of the changes won't be immediately noticeable. As an administrator I now have the ability to edit and delete comments, which will come in handy if any spam bots find me.

I've decided against using a captcha system, since I did a little research and found that most spammers use just the bots to find a site, then post manually. I'm thinking of working up a blacklist system similar to MT Blacklist, which will search the comment for links to known spammer sites and disallow any comments that do. Another option is a whitelist setup, where I approve a user's email address before their posts can go straight onto the site, but that can discourage comment conversation with new posters. If anyone has any suggestions for a spambot prevention system I'd appreciate it.

It's up and running, is tied to a MySQL database, and now has a comments system built in. Hopefully I won't get slammed by spam bots before I work up a simple captcha.