Still More Friday Night Musings

Having stuck it to the man yesterday by refusing to fill up my petrol tank despite it being less than half full, I'm now faced with trying to find a petrol station which: a) has fuel and; b) doesn't have idiots queueing round the block, as my fuel gauge is now down to the red. I'm hoping that things will have calmed down by tomorrow, although, despite an announcement from Unite that would be no strikes by fuel tanker drivers over Easter, the morons were still going mad filling up their cars at the few filling stations in Crapchester that still had fuel after yesterday's madness. It's all left me feeling exhausted. That and the constant bot attacks on The Sleaze that I had to spend part of yesterday evening dealing with - these attacks are part of web-wide attempts to exploit a security weakness in a popular image sizing plug in used on many Wordpress sites. Despite the fact that I don't use this plug in, the attacks keep coming. Whilst they can't actually harm the site, at times they become so intense that they threaten to swamp the server and also make the site seem sluggish and unresponsive to genuine visitors. Another side effect is that they render the server logs useless as a measure of genuine traffic, as they become inflated with these bots' visits.

Whilst this latest wave of attacks seems to have subsided, I'm now seriously considering using a service like Cloudflare to try and neutralise the effects of any future attacks. A lot of site owners who have used it seem to have had positive results and it is free, so it's worth a try. Apart from trialling Cloudflare (or something similar), I'm hoping to make some more progress on the next Sleazecast this weekend. I had hoped to get this one up before the end of March, but I've had a lot of distractions, so early April is more realistic. I've almost finished editing a couple of the inserts and hope to get the final one recorded tomorrow. Then it is just a case of recording my spoken bits and putting it all together. I'm also aiming for a more manageable running time of 30-35 minutes this time. The other thing I'm hoping to do is finish the story I was writing for The Sleaze which was originally slated for last week, but which instead I decided to hold over for next week. The reasons for this are simple - my output rate, both here and on The Sleaze, has been significantly higher than usual since last year's switch to the new format. However, it has had no effect on traffic, so I've decided to ease up a bit, particularly in view of the impending Easter holidays, when I'll be taking some time off work. So, there you have it, another rambling Friday night round up! Enjoy the weekend folks!