The old theme has been around since before WordPress 1.0, I’ve kept it together by hacking it occassionally. Finally I needed a reliable and modern theme. So welcome to “fresh”.

Let me know if anything has broken.

None have got through to any public pages or done anything useful. But I’ve had about 12,000 unique bots visit in March alone. This became too much to ignore, plus it was making my logs a mess and interfering with my writing on this site. Everytime I went to blog on wealth creation I’d be reminded that “Something had to be done”â„¢.

Anyway I’ve done something about it. The most hit page is an old, no longer existing page from years ago. So it now contains a bot-trap. While setting it up the earlier version of the script caught 38 badly behaved bots in one hour. That’s 38 bots which did not bother to read the standard robots.txt file that almost every website has.

Slowly I’ll implement the bot-trap on all the pages of the site. Should any reader accidently find it and get themselves banned, there is even an automatic unban option for humans.

Thanks to Daniel M. Webb on whose Bot-trap I’ve based my work.

Update 335 IP addresses have been banned in the first week of the bot trap. The beauty of this system is if any of them are dynamic IP addresses that are subsequently legitimately reused, those visitors can automatically get themselves unbanned.

Then I can resume my meanderings.

I’ve retired most of Dreamspinner’s trading diary as it was a favourite target for these spammers. Folks I hope you never buy anything as a result of an unsolicited bulk email. ‘Tis because of the 0.001% of recipients that do buy their junk that we are buried under their refuse today.

Funnily enough I deleted 8,000 spam emails and 5,000 virus emails from a client mail server today. They had 200 mild false positives – nothing earth shattering to have missed.
I no longer feel angry about email spam as my tools are now so good that I actually scan my Junk mail folder daily in case of false positives. I get very few.

Our regular design will return shortly.

That’s fantastic news as the new features look exciting. However the template system changes are non-trivial. After breaking it, I found these WordPress Upgrading 1.2 to 1.5 Instructions which got everything working properly again. It is a bit tricky – it isn’t obvious that you take your existing 1.2 files, edit them separately and put them into the template structure. Also the header in the style.css file is essential for it to work.

Please comment or email if something is broken. If you don’t know our email address try blog at this domain.

Let us know if anything broke in the move.

Well most of those concerns have been dealt with in one way or another so I should resume blogging with news shortly.

Comments are not fully restored yet (and may never be).

But at least we’re operational again.

Please advise of anything strange

Given the improvements to WordPress I’m going to redo the design from the ground up so in the meantime I’ve used the simple_sky style by Chris M of http://aphotolog.com. Thanks Chris it looks great.

Let me know if something isn’t working. For now there is not calender. Hopefully it will be back soon.

Update I’m just finished the design at 1:43am Tuesday 17 February 2004. Let me know if anything broke.

Some September statics
16.6% of the page-view traffic comes from search engines. Nearly 20% of that search engine traffic is from Tony Robbins searchers. Another 15% of that traffice is looking for Steve Navra, NavraInvest Ltd or Chris Batten.

There are over 100 IP addresses which have visited the site at least 5 times in September.

So please comment below if you are willing to help promote the blog (especially if you don’t know how) or have suggestions. You can start with a vote for my site at blizg. You can also rate the blog on bloghop (see the menu-bar links on the right).

After many false starts and misadventures I believe I’ve set things up so bad bots will get themselves automatically banned. If I have broken anything please let me know.

For those of you who are intersted I grabbed ccisecirity.php from and implemented as scaled-down version of IP banning via .htaccess

It’s kinda cool.

If anyone with a static IP address and a nameserver would like to swap secondary (or tertiary) nameserver duties let us know via email at paulz@wealthesteem.org.

It should be fixed now. As usual let us know if there is a problem.