Category: Websites

Talking Daleks

I found a wonderful source of these seven-inch tall little mechanical terrors in the United States in the form of Who North America.

Available in a number of colors based on various appearences over the last 40 years in the BBC’s Doctor Who television series, the Talking Dalek makes a great gift for any fan.

Fully articulate, with spinning head and movable eye stalk, plunger arm and weapon, the Dalek is sturdy enough for a little exterminating science-fiction play on your desk. The real magic, however, begins once you insert three AAA batteries (not included, of course) and press the cleverly hidding button on the front. A sound chip inside shouts out perfect little reproductions of well-known Dalekisms in a great mechanical voice while the ear bulbs flash just like on the show.

Who North America has some of the best prices for such merchandise here in the States, with the Talking Daleks coming in at $29.95 for most models, well below the average $40-50 most other collector sites are asking.

UPDATE: Fighting Blog Spam

Tom Raftery actually has a more recent entry up than the one I linked to previously.

In this updated comment he notes that he’s been able to drop the use of the Spam Karma plugin and rely strictly on a custom .htaccess file which he provides instructions for and a link to, a list of additional words for your WP blacklist and Dr. Dave’s Referrer Karma.

The advantage to this approach is that on top of the increase in site performance due to the elimination that the comment processing Spam Karma was responsible for, you’re blocking access to spammers much earlier in their access to your site.

Fighting Blog Spam at the Server Level

Tom Raftery has an interesting blog entry on how use your web server’s .htaccess configuration file to help reduce the amount of comment and referrer spam your WordPress journal receives.

While Tom uses the excellent WordPress plugin Spam Karma to protect his page and provide information to assist in his spam monitoring, his advice on how to use your server’s own filtering features will work with most web sites, regardless of content.

The developer of Spam Karma also has another tool called Ref Karma that works along similar lines and can be used to protect most websites with a spot of PHP scripting.

None of the advice above is overly complicated, but does involve some experience with scripting and server configuration, so be prepared to do a little background reading if this is new to you.