Somusing

Spam has gotten so obnoxious, intrusive, and time-consuming. Especially if you're the domain contact and postmaster at a large number of domains. And even with spam filtering.

But then every once in a while, the infinite number of spam monkeys strikes paydirt, and I receive a spam with a subject like "Better Life, whirligig mullet", and I don't even have to open the email because my life is better already thanks to the deep beauty of their word-art.

Ah, pink quivering meat product.

So I talked Erin into signing up for an Amazon Associates account and adding salted links to the reviews on this blog. We'll see if anyone follows the links and wittingly or unwittingly sends some Amazon credit our way. My guess is it will take a long time before it amounts to anything, if ever.

It also remains to be seen how we feel about profiteering (however meagerly) from what was never intended to be anything but personal musings. But we're giving it a try, and we'd be happy to have a little subsidy of our reading and listening purchases.

In any case, we both still highly recommend that you borrow or buy books etc. from a friend or a local bookstore where possible. Amazon has its merits, but it can't replace the knowledgeable and personable help at a bookstore or a good friend's personal library!

Updated 31 May 2011: I'm just finishing up removing all of the Amazon affiliate links so we can use a certain free spam filter that Jon found. The spammers have been crazy persistent lately, and we've never made anything with the affiliate links, so it seemed like the best thing to do.

Thanks, Jon, for getting this up and working again. You must really love me to give me this delightful distraction from what I'm supposed to be doing. In the next couple of days I'll try to fill in the books and movies and some music from the last few months. For now, the baby is crying and demands attention.

It's been almost 5 months since I killed Erin's still nascent blog while trying to upgrade the Typo blog software. She has patiently waited for me to fix it.

Now it's back, running on Ruby on Rails 1.1 with the latest Typo from the Subversion repository, backed by PostgreSQL. And finally on a publicly-accessible webserver instead of the Rails development webserver (WEBrick). Getting FastCGI to work from lighttpd was a lot easier than from Apache. Though I hear that the Rails community is leaning away from FastCGI nowadays in favor of Mongrel. Sounds like a good idea, but a change to consider some other time.

Typo's data model had changed somewhat, so I created a new blog from scratch and brought over the important data (categories and articles) manually via pg_dump and a little SQL wrangling.

Sorry for the delay and the lost momentum, Erin. And thanks to Johannes Evelein for showing me that revivified is a word that people actually use. :)