Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

I was idly checking logs, and noticed that my MT-Blacklist plugin has been a busy little beaver blocking comment spam. Interestingly, although I have about 800 lines of regex's and banned sites, just two lines in the list of blocks seem to be doing the lion's share of the work:

(diet|penis)[\w-_.]*(pills|enlargement)[\w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}

and (imagine the following is all one line)

(levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|
xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}

I have no idea whether this just reflects a particularly active spammer or two this week, or whether it's something more meaningful.

Well, I can see two minor and one major issues already:

Minor Issues

1. my feed updates right away; feedburner introduces a lag of unknown size
2. my feed includes the graphics (e.g. the mars item); feedburner, no doubt for bandwidth reasons, doesn't. But it doesn't tell you it's not there either…

Not-so-minor Issue

1. My feed was 100% of the post; feedburner truncates.

Maybe this won't be a very long experiment.

As promised, I've begun redirecting my RSS feeds to the feedburner versions. Please let me know if you experience any difficulties.