Pet Hatchery and spam

http://www.pethatchery.co.uk is one of our new sites.

The hatchery was live two days when it was hit by a Ukrainian auto-spammer. He got IP-blocked but hasn't taken the hint - he's still visiting every minute even though all he can see of the site is a 403 refuse page.

So after 24 hours, in which serving the fail pages was still using up our bandwidth, we decided we could put him on silent blocking. On the other hand this is a hatchery and meant to get views...

His fail page now has dragon eggs on it. Merry Christmas!

More coding work

After the furor over users who found lenses on squidoo about how to make pipe bombs (more here) I'm stepping back from lenses to work on other projects for a few days.

The hatchery code is nearly there. Magistream is pretty much complete and I've thrown it out for an open test.

DragonCave is proving trickier, as "check all" options aren't going to be as simple as I thought. The Javascript doesn't like picking up the checkbox, due to the PHP array code linked to it, so I'm looking at work arounds. Multiple pages for the hatchery are still in development - the database can handle it but the PHP doesn't want to.

I've also had a tester ask what happens if bandwidth starts getting expensive. Well, that's when adverts start appearing in footers. Sorry, but I'm not paying to hatch other people's creatures!

Otherwise I've got several blogs, a set of articles and an ebook to update, so it isn't as if I'm not busy.

Update - 10:37. Dragon Cave: Fixed check all, added a "find by scroll", added images, and still need to fix that dratted pagination!

And all of this without counting the 5,000 words I feel I owe Nano.

More coding

Some more writing done, although Nano looks like it's turning into a set of linked short stories more than a novel. Trying to code and write at the same time is really cutting into my time.

The hatchery now has a manual "remove creatures" option for both magistream and Dragon Cave, and a check for Dragon Cave's little trees. There are a few changes under the hood to give it a few more automatic admin features (validation mostly), and I have a very long list of changes and nice-to-haves to add in from my testers.

I also need to add a thank you page for them - without them it would not be at a point where I could add it to my lenses...

Coding a hatchery

Not much writing done today. Instead I was polishing up some work on a hatchery for the Magistream and Dragon Cave lenses. It's in alpha, but you can put creatures in and click on them, which means it can be used.

There are a few things to work on, like integration with lenses which will probably be handled with RSS, and badges/banners etc. Then there are advanced features, an emergency room, manually removing creatures before they are adult etc.

Still it's halfway working so hopefully I'll have some tests on the way shortly.