UNDERDOG of PERFECTION - Page 140 - a blog on technology, music and geek culture from room34

The growing problem of registration spam in WordPress

Now, this is odd.

A few months back I wrote a plug-in for WordPress called RegisTrap. It’s beyond basic, and has one simple purpose: to block registration spam on my WordPress-based website.

Registration spam, for those of you who don’t know, is when a “bot” (a computer program written to seek out and exploit poorly-written web forms to send floods of spam email messages) signs up as a “user” on your site. These “users” can’t really do anything on the site, but they clutter up your database nonetheless.

I had a feeling that RegisTrap was really only going to work reliably if I kept it to myself. And I was right: after submitting it to the official WordPress plug-in repository, it eventually stopped working, as the bots adapted to avoid its “traps.” It might have happened eventually anyway, but I’m sure that the publicity it received from being in the repository, and the hundred or so people who downloaded it (many of whom, I suspect on reflection, were probably bot developers looking to dissect its workings), accelerated its demise.

As I announced here a few days ago, I turned RegisTrap off on my site, and I also turned off registration altogether. But that hasn’t stopped the flood of new bot registrations. There are 14 of them sitting there in my database right now (well, there were before I just deleted them), all added after I turned off the ability to register altogether.

I suppose, since the bots don’t actually visit the site and fill in the form, they just submit the right data directly to the right URL, whether it’s “browsable” or not, it doesn’t even really matter if your site is set up to reject registrations. Still, it’s a bit dismaying that WordPress is processing those registrations even with registration turned off. Apparently it stops at making the registration page inaccessible via links; it doesn’t actually turn off the code that processes registrations. Boo. Perhaps that should be my next plugin: “Stop All Registrations 4 Realz.”

But maybe I won’t call it that.

It’s official: we’re living in the future

I was already feeling like a futuristic 21st century spaceman (pronounced spə-CHĔ-mən) with my iPhone, but this video of “blocks that think” from TED makes it official: we are now living in the future.

The inspirations behind Anagrammatic Pseudonyms

I am the first to admit that I emulate my musical influences. I’m pretty confident that I always manage to fall well on the proper side of plagiarism, but it’s impossible not to emulate the styles of the musicians I admire. In fact, emulating their styles is pretty much the point.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of the artists and songs that influenced me as I created Anagrammatic Pseudonyms just like I’ve done in the past with the album notes I post here.

This time I’ve taken it a step further though: I’ve created an iTunes iMix. You can buy it now on iTunes. Here are the songs:

“Pocket Calculator” by Kraftwerk
“Axel F” by Harold Faltermeyer
“Get Up Offa That Thing” by James Brown
“Let’s Work” by Prince
“White Mountain” by Genesis
“Inertiatic ESP” by The Mars Volta
“Out of Town” by Zero 7
“With Jupiter in Mind” by Joe Satriani
“Nobody’s Fault but Mine” by Led Zeppelin
“Anchor Drops” by Umphrey’s McGee
“Your Most Valuable Possession” by Ben Folds Five
“Hold the Line” by Toto
“We Own the Sky” by M83
“Clocks and Clouds” by National Health
“Down by the Sea” by Men at Work

Note that the songs in this iMix are in the same order as the songs on Anagrammatic Pseudonyms that they influenced (although there’s not a 1-to-1 relationship: some AP songs have more than one representative here — “Candor Stetson” has four — and some have none).

This iMix has a total running time of 73 minutes, which means that it’s a great set to put on a CD if you decide to go buy it (or if you’re as crazy as I am and already have all of these songs in your iTunes library).

Fun with site usage stats

OK, “fun” may be an exaggeration, but it is interesting to look at these stats for room34.com courtesy of Google Analytics.

The usage statistics that are always of the most interest to web designers and developers are the web browser and operating system breakdown among site visitors. “Conventional wisdom” is that Windows makes up about 90-95% of most sites’ users (with Mac OS X making up almost all of the rest), and that among Windows users, Internet Explorer is at about 80-90%, with Firefox making up the bulk of the rest, while on the Mac about 90-95% are using Safari and the rest are on Firefox.

The stats for my site paint a much different picture. Now, granted, I am probably by at least a couple of orders of magnitude the most frequent visitor to my site. I can accept that. So that means Mac OS X/Safari should skew high in the results. But just how high? Let’s take a look.

The following are room34.com stats from the past month, January 19 to February 18.

Web Browsers

Here’s the breakdown of web browser usage among my site’s visitors:

Firefox appears to be winning this war, with Safari close behind and Internet Explorer strong, but decisively in third place. Chrome trails far behind in fourth place, but I get a twisted pleasure from seeing Opera disappearing into irrelevance.

Operating Systems

And now for the operating systems:

Well, how about that? There are enough other people looking at my site that Windows manages to still be the most widely used OS, though its 56% share is far below the roughly 92% share it (supposedly) holds among the general populace of computer users. And what do you know, the iPhone is third! Actually, iPhone and iPod should be identified together, since they run the same OS. I’m not sure why Google breaks them out (but doesn’t break out something much more useful: the different versions of Windows). Look at #7: the Wii! Sweet. Those were not from me. I must confess I’ve never heard of Danger Hiptop, but it’s obviously a mobile OS. Perhaps I should care, at least 0.04% of the time. (That works out to about 2.9 hours a month. Considering the average time on my site is about 3 minutes, one could [carelessly] deduce that Danger Hiptop users like to spend nearly 60 times the average amount of time per visit!)

OS/Browser Combinations

And now, all together:

It’s no surprise that the Windows/IE combination manages to land the top spot, but it is surprising that the combo’s share is less than 29%. I’m a little surprised that Windows/Firefox also edges out Mac/Safari, although I should be glad that I represent, at most, about 1/5 of the visits to my own site. (I’m sure it’s actually only about half that!) Fully 12% of visitors to my site are coming to it on an iPhone or iPod touch. That’s incredible. And almost none of those are me. I guess it’s time to make sure I’ve optimized for that platform! I think this represents a turning point in the viability of mobile browsers, and we web designers and developers had best take notice.

I’ve seen this before

I just finished reading an article in a recent issue of the New Yorker entitled The Ponzi State. It talks about the collapse of the real estate market in Florida, specifically in and around the suburbs of Tampa.

The talk of plotted out but undeveloped (or underdeveloped) subdivisions, with streets and street signs and street lights but no houses, or a few scattered houses surrounded by overgrown empty lots, all struck me as eerily familiar: it sounded just like Salton City, California, a place I’ve blogged about and made music about, visited once a decade ago and learned about in a great documentary called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea.

You see, Salton City was once a speculator’s dream, a boom town that never boomed, a suburban paradise-to-be that never quite managed to happen. In the 1960s a city that would ultimately boast a population of well over 100,000 people was conceived, laid out, and to some extent even built — the streets are there, and in many places even the necessary water, sewer and electrical hookups — but now it’s virtually a ghost town, or at least it would be a ghost town, if it had ever really been a town in the first place.

The Salton Sea is a strange place, a cautionary tale to the rest of us, but few have even heard, much less learned from, its lessons, and it seems now that we’re watching the same story unfold — on a much larger scale — throughout Florida and elsewhere in the wake of the housing bust.