Hagrin.com

Recently, due to a few spam messgaes I would get every once in a while (no more than 5 a day with most days receiving no spam messages), I finally decided to install the Akismet here to curtail even the slightest amounts of spam to make managing Hagrin.com even easier. What has happened since can only be described as the exact opposite of my intent as spam has increased, bot registration has increased and it has increased over 1000%.

First, let me provide you with some metrics. As stated before, on Hagrin.com's worst day, I would receive about 5 spam messages, but most days saw no comment activity. Since installing the Akismet module 1.5 days ago, I have seen 65 new spam messages and almost as many bot registrations. While Akismet is definitely filtering out spam properly, the amount of spam traffic has increased at an alarming rate while site traffic hasn't increased at all. Now, I'm not exactly sure what this can be contributed to, but the timing of the module installation and the corresponding spam increase is undeniable. I'm going to continue to monitor the situation and maybe even disable the Akismet module to see if there is a spam drop off, but would like to hear from someone else who may have experienced this "problem".

In a quick bit of site news, I finally completed my migration to Drupal 5. Not only did I have to update my old 4.x installation, but I also had to get rid of the old Hagrin.com pages that existed on the "fugly" black and orange template. While all the content has been transferred over, many items remain in terms of enhancing the user experience at Hagrin.com. It's been a 4 year process in the making and I'm still nowhere near done as I'm constantly brainstorming new ideas, taking on outside projects and getting wrapped up in my full-time job. However, with this migration finally complete, I do see bigger and better things coming from this domain.

So, if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see added or improved, leave me a comment and let me know.

Full Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and Disclaimers are currently in active development and subject to change.

The following information depicts the rules and guidelines in which users of Hagrin.com should act and their expectations for this web site. Please read through this documentation carefully as this page clearly defines the rights, rules, expectations and terms of service for Hagrin.com.

External Links
Within Hagrin.com, various external links may be present to sites that are not owned nor affiliated with Hagrin.com, and therefore are not controlled nor influenced by the owners of Hagrin.com. We do not necessarily admonish or support the privacy practices of these sites, and cannot be held responsible for neither the content, nor their privacy practices. You are urged to be careful when clicking on external URLs.

Hagrin.com Security
Hagrin.com is hosted on a web server monitored and supported by CI Host. Please bear in mind that the owners of Hagrin.com, nor CI Host, cannot guarantee under all circumstances that loss, misuse, unauthorised access or alteration to data will never occur. Therefore, neither party will not be held responsible should any of the aforementioned occur.

If you need to contact the people responsible for Hagrin.com, try one of the following:

Email: hagrin at gmail dot com
IM: Google Talk: hagrin at gmail dot com
(links written out to avoid automated webcrawlers)

Please provide the reason for contacting me in the Subject of the email as I use rules to appropriately label certain Hagrin.com related issues. I check my gmail almost real-time between having Gmail open in my broswer, the Gmail notifier from Google Talk and the Blackberry Mobile Gmail application so email or GTalk are the best methods of contact. I rarely use AIM anymore or ICQ so if you have that old contact information, you probably won't reach me.

Well, I have to say that I am highly impressed with my Blackberry's ability to post new content to my new Drupal CMS. The Drupal developers should be commended for creating a highly functional, yet easy to use mobile interface.

The most impressive functionality has to be the taxonomy dropdowns. I was skeptical that they would work on my Blackberry, but after selecting the dropdown you are prompted with a "Change Option" choice. After selecting that option, you are then technically navigating only the dropdown options. In order to allow users the ability to select multiple dropdown values, checkboxes appear to the left of each value. This functionality really demonstrates how SELECT tags are actually rendered separately from the rest of the page's HTML (you may have noticed this when your dropdowns rendered on top of DHTML menus.

So, my first mobile blog post seems to be a success (although I just noticed that posting markup might prove difficult if not impossible). Once I get the redesign completely done, expect more mobile posts in order to utilize my commute time.

Due to time restrictions and wanting to be able to focus on actually creating content, I have decided to ditch the custom made CMS (to my sadness) and made the switch to Drupal. You'll notice over the upcoming weeks that I will be tweaking the design and the layout and then hopefully getting some additional writers to add content here.

Up next I have:

• Create categories/tags and apply them to all the posts
• Fix the dates on all the posts
• Figure out a way to redirect all the old links to the new content
• Add my "articles" to the site as well
• Fix links on the side and customize the navigation
• Apply a nicer looking theme or create my own

Obviously, this is a pretty huge list so hopefully I will be able to get it all done within a month or so. Any suggestions, let me know.

I've also installed the Hagrin.com Photo Album today. I will be working on configuring it, but I finally got rid of yet another "dead link" on the front page. You can view the Hagrin.com Photo Album here.

I wrote a really quick book review on Stealing the Network - How to Own a Continent which is a fictional conspiracy that is carried out with non-fictional tools and practices. You can read my review here. Also, if you are looking to purchase this title, you can buy the book by clicking the link below:

I have created a process to upload a list of all the music albums I currently own. I will be working on making the page a little more user friendly, but for now, the complete list of albums can be found here. In addition, I quickly changed all the top, bottom, left and right side navigation to PHP includes for more efficient site maintenance (and good programming/scripting obviously). If anyone has any questions, let me know.

First Drupal Post... just making sure this all works!