I’ll be at a ministers’ retreat until Wednesday, and as far as I know I won’t have Internet access at the retreat site. I’ll still be writing each day, but it looks like I won’t be able to post anything until late Wednesday. See you then! We do have internet access here — no wifi, but a good fast ethernet connection.

According to a comment to this blog entry on Mat Mullenweg’s blog (he’s the guy who is the founding developer of WordPress), it looks like spammers or other evil types could use RSS feeds to deliver “nasty payloads” to your computer. Even a blog written by someone you know and trust could be hijacked to deliver bad stuff to your computer via RSS. While this hasn’t been documented yet (that I know of), it looks like it’s only a matter of time.

The main entry is also worth reading:– spammers are finding out ways to hack into blogs to insert invisible content. This serves as yet another reminder to keep our blogging software current — and to have clean back-up files of key data and files, just in case we do get infected.

Another huge attack of comment spam — my spam filters caught 72 messages in the past eight hours. I tried to review them all (some were pretty disgusting), but there may have been one or two legitimate comments that I deleted by mistake. If so, I hope you will post your comment again.

Our service provider lost a server, and it took almost 24 hours for everything to get back to normal. If you posted a comment during the last 24 hours, and it has not yet appeared on the blog, it probably got lost in the disruption of service — I hope you’ll take the time to post it again.

While I was upgrading to WordPress 2.0.4 today, I finally fixed a few minor problems on the blog — most notably, the links just below the header now work properly. I also did some maintenance on the main Web site, including a tweak in the style sheet. If you run into any problems either here or on the main site, be sure to let me know about it via email (danrharper AT aol DOT com) — thanks!

In other site news, traffic on the site continued to climb slowly over the summer, with well over 2,000 unique IP addresses visiting in both July and August. I believe much of the increase is due the blog’s listing on the new Daily Scribe network of religious blogs. Daily Scribe is a nice collection of blogs written by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, etc. — worth checking out if you haven’t already done so.

I just spent half an hour cleaning up after a serious comment spam attack. Unfortunately, that means I’m going to have to leave the comments form turned off for a couple of days while I try to track down a security patch for this problem. If you have a comment, please send it to me via email and I will post it for you.

One hour later

I have now installed two spam plug-ins for my blog software, the highly-recommended “Akismet” and “Bad Behavior.” (I should have installed these months ago, but my spam volume has been so low that I just didn’t bother.) So I am going to re-open the comments, and hope these two plug-ins solve the problem.

Doing a little construction today, so don’t be surprised if things look funny or different over the next few hours. Cheers, Dan

Shawn Anthony of the blog LoFi Tribe and a leadership collective have officially launched a portal for religious blogs this week called The Daily Scribe. The Scribe aims to feature well-written religion blogs from a variety of religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and more. The Scribe features short excerpts of every post from each member blog — if an excerpt catches your interest, you can follow the link to read the full post. Soon to come: a podcast featuring several religion bloggers discussing a single topic. (Full disclosure: my blog is one of the member blogs on Scribe.)

The Scribe also features one blog each week. This week, it’s Jonny Baker’s blog — I’ve been reading and admiring Baker’s online writings about alternative worship for some years, and was pleased to discover he now has a blog. I’m hoping the the Scribe will lead me to more pleasant discoveries in the world of religious blogging.

Daily Scribe still adding blogs, but so far I see a definite bias towards a liberal religious attitude — members of the leadership collective are affiliated with the Religious Society of Friends, the Unite Church of Christ, emergent Christianity, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. All in all, if you’re interested in liberal religion, this is a site worth taking a look at.

Yesterday’s post was on guerilla marketing. No, really, it was — go back and check it to make sure.

Someone named “David” wrote the following as a comment to that post on marketing:

Hey, just found your blog. Wondering why you are a unitarian when many of your stances directly contradict the bible that you claim to base most of your teachings and doctrine on?

I’m not looking for an arguement, but more want to understand your reasoning and present to you why I don’t agree….

What on earth does that comment have to do with the post? I was talking about marketing, not about the Bible. I was talking about how to get people to notice your church, not about what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.

In my opinion, it’s plain common courtesy to write comments that show you have at least read the post (and/or earlier comments on the post). Conversely, it’s just plain rude to try to further your own agenda by posting comments that have nothing to do with the related post.

In this case, it’s clear from “David’s” remarks that he hasn’t even read anything on this blog — which makes his rudeness even more pronounced.

Got that, “David”? Enough said.