I've re-enabled writeback (comments) now using Akismet to filter comment and trackback spam.

Listening to the this WEEK in TECH podcast I heared John Dvorak talk about a fix for blog comment spam. The fix discovered by Marc Perkel at ctyme.com uses the Apache rewrite engine to check the validity of the referer field:

< location /blog/wp-comments-newpost.php >
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^.*dvorak.org/.*
RewriteRule ^.* http://www.ctyme.com/comment-spam.html
< /location >

That might work for a while, but it shouldn't take comment spammers long to fake the referer field as they do for referer spam.

I'm tracking the geographic origin of visitors to lispmeister.com using gvisit and Google Maps. The results are amazing!

I've updated the RSS feed for this site to conform to RSS 2.0. Again thanks to Kozo Avo for creating and maintaining the graffitti theme for Blosxom.

Richard Claxton reported that the RSS feed for lispmeister.com is broken. I'll have a look at it over the weekend. The ATOM feed seems to work.

I removed the two mystack.com stacks showing lispmeister.com and Common Lisp references from the left hand column. Something seems broken on their side.

PubSub's LinkRanks provides an interesting perspective of the relative popularity of lispmeister.com in the blog-sphere:

• lispmeister.com ranks 7709
• lemonodor.com ranks 2848
• paulgraham.com ranks 334
• boingboing.net ranks 19

Not bad for an obscure Lisp related blog.

I switched to using Google to provide searching for this blog. Give it a try!

I've switched to static rendering to ease the load on the server. Please let me know if anything breaks.

Writebacks/Comments are disabled for a while until I find a new solution to the comment spam problem. I'm tired of cleaning the pages every day. Please email any comments and I'll add them manually.

We are working on the final revision of Successful Lisp and it will be in print soon.

I met with Conrad Barsky while he was in Frankfurt. He's a very bright guy and we had lot's of fun talking about Lisp and programming in general. He'll move to New York soon.

I'll be attending the lisp-hh [1] [2] meeting on 28th of November. Hope to meet Edi Weitz there. We'll be discussing a new book project.

We experienced some server problems since noon yesterday. The blog is working again, but I'm not sure if the problem is really fixed.