chris's blog

And halloween is over for another year.

It's sad - there's such a big lead up, and most people only have their decorations up on Halloween afternoon. I miss the US where everyone's autumn decorations were up for a couple of weeks. Although with the heat in Australia, a carved pumpkin really wouldnt last that long.

We had lots of lollies left, as we're in a quiet street, with only 3 houses putting up decorations. We got told we had the second-best decorations (the teens had put up the decorations this year).

A success was when I caught the bus to work in the morning, and two dads were talking behind me. They said they would go up and down two of the busiest streets in my suburb, and then they named my street!

We had a full-sized ghoul on the front door, that screamed out 'help me help me' in a really annoying voice, if you made a loud noise. For the first few trick-or-treaters, the kids scared the dogs, who started barking, and triggered the ghoul. It was noisy.

Please feel welcome to upload photos to the site, or onto the Facebook page.

And start planning for next year.

cheers

I've had a few people submit info through the contact form, saying they'd like to add their street and suburb.

But then they forgot to tell me the street and suburb!

If this is you, could you send the info again so I can add it for you?

Some of my outgoing emails are not getting through, but I'm happily adding any events when all the details are provided.

Got a lovely new full-sized spooky figure for the front door that screams out 'heelllpp me' when you make a loud noise.

Hopefully it won't scare away the littlies.

happy halloween!

And the countdown begins.

I've cleared out my front garden, ready for a graveyard. Amongst the herbs.

Bought a bottle of All Hallows wine - although whether I wait until All Hallows before opening it is debatable.

Finally moved hosting companies, to the lovely rackservers.com.au, so we should be nice and fast this year.

Opened up the forums again, although they were getting hit by spammers pretty hard.

We were also getting hit by comment spam, so I've done two things: comments won't display until they've been manually approved, and I'll also login and check the site each day.

The site is still free, just register to add your event.

I added two new member levels - spooks and ghostbusters, both still free.

Spooks have all the originally planned access - to create events, craft, recipes, photos, blog and forum posts.

Ghostbusters are for deleting any spam I've missed - they can delete comments and forum posts if they contain spam.

So if you've have some cool halloween tips or just wanted to hang out in the forum, have another go.

cheers, and happy halloween.

hi everyone,

sorry for the downtime over the weekend.

the company hosting the site had a major problem and everyone's sites were down. If you want to read more, there's a thread at http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1776729. 

Hard to believe, but the hosting company  didn't even update their twitter or facebook or status page for 3 days to let people know what was wrong!

I'll be changing hosting companies on Tuesday to a much more reliable  company.

At least I had time to garden over the weekend, instead of spending it backing up all my sites as planned, so I could clear an area for my halloween decorations.

cheers and howls

Chris

fine. so you want to create and verify 50 accounts each day and post 50 spam articles each day.

thanks a lot.

I've now had to change the user system so that every attempt to create a new user, now needs approval.

and if that doesn't work, then eventually i'll have to turn off the registration, and rely on the contact form for people to ask for registration.

sigh - why do they do it?

all the existing users are fine, but basically anyone who joined the site after halloween has now been deleted. we'll see how things go next year.

sorry guys! but i like to keep the junk out of here, and it was really taking too long to delete each day.

happy halloween!

A big newspaper asked me today if we had a decorated house or somebody who wanted to be interviewed.

Has anyone finished decorating yet?

We're running a bit late - had the flu on the weekend, and both my son and his dad broke their ankle this week.

Drop me a line through the contact form if you're interested, and I'll forward the details to the paper later tonight.

http://www.fantasypumpkins.com/carving-the-deathstar.htm

http://failblog.org/2010/10/26/epic-fail-photos-pumpkin-sign-fail/

http://failblog.org/2010/10/24/epic-fail-photos-halloween-picture-fail/

Also relaxing reading failbook.failblog.org

Logged on 5 times today, and each time there was new spam.  Apparently from the US this time, so it's kind of hard to ban the whole US, without affecting Google.

So I created a new super user level called "spooks".

Only Spooks can write to the forum now, so if you're a real halloween person, and would like to take part in the forum, drop me a line on the contact form, and I'll bump you up a level.

Sigh, the things we have to do.

1 week left until halloween.

I think that's a good time to start letting decorations out.

We spent all day Saturday cutting the lawn and trimming the hedges, so kids would have a clear path to the front door. Racing the afternoon thunderstorm.

Then I came down with the flu on Sunday, so couldn't put up our decorations in the rain.

But when the kids took the dogs for a walk in the afternoon, they said the other really keen halloween family had their decorations out now, so the competition is on.

I think I'll start with the graveyard....

Gotta wonder why people spam. Especially when they had to manually sign up, confirm their email address, get past a maths sum, and then post their content, with another maths sum to do.

I've blocked India and China, as good old Google Analytics told me thats'  where most of them were coming from. But there was more spam last night, and based on the numbers, I'd have to assume they were in the US.

Here's a look at some of the spam I deleted last night....

Spamming really isn't a Christian thing to do. Or were they unlucky and paid an unscrupulous SEO.....