blogs.teztech.com

When T3city took over the hosting for abbeyroadontheriver.com, they had a guestbook on their web site. Their old host used what appeared to be a custom guestbook written in Cold Fusion. We don’t support Cold Fusion and I figured I could find something better in PHP, anyway. I found and installed the Purple Yin Guestbook. The PYG script worked well for some time. At some point, though, their guestbook (and guestbooks all over the Internet) got hit by bots (autonomous programs) created by spammers to post in guestbooks. Because the posts were automated, there were many of them. Eventually, abbeyroadontheriver.com’s owner, Gary, called and we discussed the spam problem. I decided to upgrade to the latest version of PYG. This new version supported captcha images. Gary asked to only use one random digit for the captcha image. This stopped the spam right away. Unfortunately, there were a lot of spam entries to clean up, but Gary worked on this as time allowed.

A couple of weeks ago, Gary started having more problems with his guestbook. It was slow and, more importantly, it wasn’t taking new posts. After some digging around, I found out that it was slow because PYG stored all the entries in a simple text file. THis is OK (and maybe ideal) for a guestbook with a few posts. Gary’s guestbook is active and covers several years. Also, there were still a fair number of spam posts that were not visible (Gary’s guestbook is moderated), but still in the text file. Altogether, Gary has over 3000 posts in his guestbook. (more…)

On Thanksgiving day, John Hull and I ran the Atlanta 1/2 Marathon. John lives downtown and his girlfriend was willing to drop us off at Marta at 6am, so I spent the night with John. I had been working like crazy getting ready for the NAR show, so I had not much at all in the month. I managed to keep up John for a few miles, but around mile 3, I told John to go ahead without me. After about 4 miles, I felt pretty darn tired. I managed to keep running to the finish line, but I was not feeling fresh. My time was just under 2 hours for the 13.1 mile course. I finished in 337th place in my age group. Well, at least I got some good training in. Hanging out with John and Kara was fun. By the time we got to Thanksgiving dinner at Laurie’s aunt and uncle’s house, I was ready to eat!

A belated post to cover some rock climbing activities: Saturday, November 4, Jason Young and I drove over to HP40 for the 2nd part of the Triple Crown Bouldering Comp. Jason drove down to my place the night before. We got up around 5pm and drove out to Alabama. I’ve never participated in a rock climbing competition before. I didn’t really plan to participate in this one, but I wanted to hang out with Jason and I also wanted to climb. Spectators had to pay, and they may or may not be allowed to climb. So, I bit the bullet and registered to compete. The competition part of my first competition did not go so well. Basically, I got used all my energy trying one hard problem over and over. That’s not the smart thing to do when your total score is for your 10 best boulder problems. Oh well. It’s not like I could have beat Jason (this year) even with a perfect tick list. The weather was nice. Maybe a bit warm for projects, but nice for somebody like me that doesn’t have any projects at HP40. I got to hang out with Jason and see some old Friends. This coming weekend, on December 2, Jason and I are planning to go to the next part of the Triple Crown at “The Stone Fort”. I’ll try and get some pictures.

ListingsTech got a booth at last weekend’s NAR show in New Orleans. My procrastination actually helped a little here… we got a pretty good both location – a corner in the middle of the trade show floor. I guess somebody canceled. After a frantic week of last minute preperations, Laurie, Robert Clments and myself packed up and drove down early Friday morning. 

The NAR show went well. We were pleased with the good list of sales leads we left with. We spent a lot more hours on the show floor than for a SEC or Exemplar Setup Toolkit trade show. Friday was 3 hours, Saturday and Sunday had 7 hours each and Monday was 5 hours. The long hours were good and bad. For the style of consultative sales we are doing, it worked out well because I had time to spend with each customer. I was talking with sales leads for almost all hours of the show. The bad part was we didn’t have much time to spend in New Orleans. Other than some nice dinners, Laurie didn’t go out at all. Robert and I went out to hear some bands and see a friend of his Saturday night. We were out late. Sunday morning started out rough!

After getting some good response on Saturday, I thought Sunday and Monday for sure would be slow. Saturday was the busiest day, but we got good leads on Sunday and Monday, too. I got a really good lead Monday right as the show was about to close. (more…)