I rarely use my browser to look at my own blog while I’m at work, mainly because I use Windows Live Writer.

I did see it today though…

 This is definitely not how the theme is supposed to look, so if you’re seeing this please give me a shout, ok?

I feel like some of my recent posts have had a recurring theme:  BUSYNESS.  I remember back when I started this blog in February, I was doing a post every couple of days.  I’d like to get back to that, I really would.  :-) 

I think for the first time as an IT guy, I’m actually feeling overwhelmed by everything that’s going on JUST in IT.  It looks good and functional on the surface, and we don’t have helpdesk tickets piling up or anything, but there are a lot of maintenance items to take care of right now.

I’m gonna split up the week’s goings-on into different posts, just to cut back on size.

I thought it might be nice to mellow out DaveMast.net a little, so as of tonight, the site has a new theme on it.  I’m liking it, and I hope you do too.

I’ve been getting hit up with a fair amount of spam lately on the blog.  The Akismet spam filter plugin has done a pretty good job of handling the majority of comment and link spam, but every couple of days I have to come in and manually delete a comment that made it through the filter.

I was browsing through my reader the other day when I came across an interesting plugin called Spam Karma 2.  Here’s a description of it as written by Ajay on the Weblog Tools Collection blog.

Description:
Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters.

How it works:

SK2 comes feature packed with everything you need to keep your blog spam free. It includes a whole arsenal of filters that incoming comment has to go through. Each of these filters assigns a score called karma. Comments which end up with a negative karma are flagged as spam.

Some of the inbuilt filters include javascript payload, link count, page load time (stopwatch), post age and blacklists.

There are also “sub-plugins” available for Spam Karma.  I went ahead and installed the two that Ajay tried out:  An Akismet plugin that allows Spam Karma to detect anything that’s on the Akismet list, and the Moderate plugin, which respects the moderation settings you have set up in your Discussion Options.

Sounds like a solid deal, eh?  I’ve got Spam Karma installed now, so I’ll be interested to see how it operates over the next couple of weeks.  I’ll post an update later on.

I’ve heard some pretty good things about Windows Live Writer, so I thought I would give it a try to see how capable it was.

After downloading it onto my laptop and tinkering with it for a few minutes, I was quite impressed with how it detected my Wordpress blog and made adjustments to the text format.  So far so good.

I decided to give it a go and write a post on virtualizing one of our domain controllers (which happened earlier this week).  I started working on the post last night, and finished it this morning.  However, I don’t have an internet connection at the new place yet, so I saved it as a draft (just as I had done the previous night), packed up my laptop and drove to the office to make the post.  I had a couple things to do anyway… don’t go thinkin’ I drove to work just to make a blog post.

I opened my laptop, connected to the network, opened up Live Writer, and…. um…WHERE’S MY DRAFT AT?

My post had seemingly disappeared.  It wasn’t in Live Writer’s drafts folder, and even the “Recent Documents” folder was showing that the shortcut was bad.  I understand that this is beta software, but at the same I was seriously unhappy at the prospect of having to retype the whole post. 

Fortunately, I was able to dig it up.  A file search across the hard drive revealed that the post was still present, although it had been moved to a different location.  Why?  Who knows.. I’m just glad I didn’t lose an hour’s worth of work.

Well, here it is.  Today I moved my blog from its wordpress.com host to BlueHost.com.  The blog itself is still a WordPress blog, which made it pretty nice when it came time to move the data.  I don’t know much about other blogging platforms, but I know I was very pleased to see that WordPress imported everything from my other site except the blogroll.  On the other hand, I was a little bummed that WordPress didn’t import my blogroll.  Ah well, I was going to put it on a separate page anyway.

Will the visual style change immediately?  I don’t know.  I’ve been looking at a LOT of other themes, but I really haven’t landed on one that I like enough to pull me away from the Regulus theme I’m on right now.

I’ve got some neat stuff to post later, but I need to get some sleep for tomorrow.