Wriphe.com: The Blog 2024

Spambot posts are typically banal comments designed to innocuously seed url links to search engines and unaware humans. The latest attempt here at Wriphe.com, however, I thought clever enough to deserve a spotlight:

The next time I learn a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I imply, I know it was my choice to learn, however I truly thought youd have one thing interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you possibly can fix in the event you werent too busy looking for attention.

In the future we'll all be trolled by hyper-critical, incredibly insightful spambots. Happy Valentine's Day!

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Right here, at the outset of 2014, I would like to take this opportunity to clarify what this blog is.

Once upon a time, this blog served as a way to update my friends and family about the little things I have been up to. However, these days my father is still surprised every time I tell him I have a blog, I no longer have a brother, and I see my friends so rarely that we have plenty to talk about.

Therefore, the blog posts at Wriphe.com are now almost exclusively about entertaining myself and keeping a diary of my experiences. I know that I've been posting increasingly about the movies I'm watching (which I can't imagine anyone in the world really caring about) and how much my favorite football teams suck. Don't expect this change. My football teams aren't getting any better.

Walter is entertained by movies, video games, super heroes, football, comic books, dogs (especially poodles), runaway capitalism, stupid people, and many, many other entirely pointless things. Those things are what this blog is about, and that's as close to a mission statement as this blog is ever going to get.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to take my poodles for a walk. It's cold outside, but they don't care. Like blogging, some things need doing even if you don't want to do them.

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I just wrote something here that I decided was sappy. As a general rule, I don't care to post things on this blog that I can't twist into something humorous or satirical. Therefore, I deleted it and no one will ever read that post.

The clock is still ticking on 2013, but it seems I've already run out of things to say.

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In the past month, I've started receiving more and more spam through the Wriphe.com Contact form. I can't believe that a real person is actually taking the time to email little old me with spam for payday loans, 150mg tablets of viagra, and cheap generic levitra, so that's got to be an automated bot.

(What this spam is selling says a lot about who must be responding to it, don'tcha think? People who make bad financial decisions with limp dicks. Cause or effect?)

I've added a simple math problem to the contact form to try to screen out bots. I suspect that bots are better at math than most of the people I know, so we'll see how long that fix lasts.

I've also begun having friends tell me that they are having trouble with the site's captchas, preferring to email me or text me about blog posts rather than leave comments here. The captchas were last revised in January 2012, so maybe they've become a little outdated. To test that theory, I've changed the captchas associated with the comments fields effective immediately.

No matter how these comment and contact captcha changes turn out, I might have to revise them all to make it even harder for the bots. There must be some tipping point where the forms' difficulty of use discourages using the forms for their intended purpose. Just something else you can blame on the Internet: making it harder for people to communicate with one another since 1993.

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You may or may not have noticed, but for the past few months, the server hosting Wriphe.com has been somewhat erratic. Sometimes the server is slow, and sometimes it doesn't respond at all.

I've re-written scripts and optimized databases. I've upgraded software, rendering engines, and even server hardware. Nothing has helped much.

Just be aware, I'm still working on the problem.

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My mother thinks this blog should be nothing but poodle comics. My friends think it should contain more embarrassing pictures of Walter. I think I should probably talk more about comic books and football. But what does the public want from Wriphe.com?

To settle this argument, let's look at the keywords that drew people to Wriphe.com in the past 12 months. The top five keyword queries, seriously, were

gay Batman
Rock Hudson
men in spandex
Batman gay
spandex man

Without question the three biggest category searches that brought people from Google to Wriphe.com in 2012 can be summarized as "men in spandex," "are Batman and Robin gay," and, in a distant third place, "is Mio safe to drink?" In fact, if you Google "spandex man," my image from August 15, 2005 comes first in the Google image results.

Really, I don't know if that says more about my blog content or about what people are looking for on the internet. Whatever the case, I'm sure that this post isn't helping.

Does this make me look fat?

Comments (2) | Leave a Comment | Tags: adventures in photoshop analytics google spandex wriphe.com

I've barely spoken to most of my friends since September and my brother is no longer speaking to me. So I've finally been driven to Facebook.

Before you declare that this news marks the end of the world we were all expecting, be aware that I created an RSS feed for Wriphe.com last January as a test for Boosterrific.com. Since I don't really have any other reason for its existence, I'm working on having that feed automatically exported to Facebook, where I figure it can't hurt to build a stronger presence in support of the work I've been doing through Cellbloc Studios in recent months. (It won't necessarily help, either; this is something of a "let's see what sticks" scenario.)

Rest assured, I'll still be posting here at Wriphe.com in 2013, but those of you who use Facebook might be able to read some of my posts over there, if I ever get this working. I'll let you know how it goes.

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It's been a bad week. It started with cable and internet outages. Then Zipper was put down. My new drivers license has the worst photo in history. Kelley's bulldog Big Mac died. I got a stomach bug. And Wriphe.com has now run into some technical problems that has had it down most of the past 48 hours. All of these things have one thing in common: I chose not to go to the UGA football game last Saturday. I will not make that mistake again!

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I made a bunch of images to be used to the left of the new site logo, but I was never able to work them into a format that satisfied me. Since it would be a shame to have them go to waste (and because I promised myself that I would include more of my "artwork" on the blog this year), here they are:

Discarded 2012 site logo