OK, so that took much less time than I thought it would.

Comments have been broken now for some time—I suspect since the site was moved to another server by my hosting company a few months back. It seems as though an entire PHP file was deleted from my root directory, which doesn’t really make sense to me.

At first I thought I may have accidentally deleted it myself, but the missing file is not in my “trash” folder, though a bunch of other files from over the years are.

I will try to fix it as soon as possible, but I didn’t have a backup, and it’s been so long since I initially coded it, I don’t really remember how it worked. Basically I have to reverse engineer my own web site.

I was getting a little tired of all the spam in my comments, so I added a spam filter which seems to work fairly well. (By which I mean I tested it by reposting a viagra link which got through my original unfiltered comment system, and it rejected the spam. Nice!)

For the curious, I used Akismet through the PHP5 Akismet library. If you try to post spam, you get a nice message asking you to make your comment less like spam. Fairly simple.

In case anyone is wondering why there have not been any posts in a while, I’m busy working on a different website. Once things settle down there, I should have more time to blog. I’ll keep you posted.

It was always part of the plan to allow reader comments on this blog. After being nudged today by my friend Siva, I relented.

I handcoded this blog, so it involved more than flipping a switch. But all in all, it only seems to have taken me about six hours; not bad for an amateur, I think.

I don’t have a challenge-response system in place prevent robots from posting spam, but I imagine I will have to add one eventually. Let’s conduct an experiment to see how long it takes, shall we?