Daniel Mak

PlayThru Anti-Spam

I tried running my blog for a few days without any anti-spam guarding the comments but sadly it got hit by alot of spam. I had no choice but to install Captcha to defend my site from spammers.

Found a new and better way than Captcha, it’s called PlayThru. Instead of making you squint your eyes and type of obscured text that bots cannot scan you play a small little game by picking and placing the correct item in the correct spot. It randomizes like Captcha so it’s different every time. Think of it as a mini game before you hit the submit button. It’s quick and easy and since it’s interactive you’d need an AI bot to figure it out. LOL

Danielmak.net working agian.

I had no idea that my other domain danielmak.net was not point at the right place this entire time.

I have moved away from MXHub web hosting solutions simply because the plan they were offering had too little space for the price I was paying. I’ve read a lot of reviews on Hostgator and they all seem to be good review so I decided to move my site over. Since it offers “Unlimited” Storage, I don’t have to worry about running out of storage.

I also switched domain provider for the .net which was from reghub. The register mxhub uses for their domain over. I had did all the necessary steps for the domain to point to the new DNS site but I forgot to add the domain in cpanel.. =p

All has been fixed and is now working again! ^_^

Host Migration

I’ve been using MXHub for over 6 years now and I found myself running out of space often forcing myself to remove some backup files in order to free up space. I’ve been paying $9.95 a month for their hosting service which provided me 3GBs of storage and 120GB of monthly bandwidth. In today’s age that has gotten pretty expensive. So I’ve been searching for an alternative hosting solution which offered most storage for about the same price if not cheaper yet also providing the uptime service similar if not better than MXHub. I’ve seen a lot of placed like godaddy and 1 and 1 hosting solutions offering cheap hosting solutions but I’ve heard mixed reviews about it and a lot of them seem like they didn’t like the service even though they’ve been with that company for years it would seem.

I’ve stumbled upon netfirm, a Canadian based but it was a tad bit expensive. A few people I know are with HostGator so I decided to try that myself. Now I am slowly migrating my stuff from one server to another. I probably won’t be keeping the other hosting solutions since HostGator offers “Unlimited storage and bandwidth” for 6.95 a month. The only problem is trying to migrate my emails from one server to another. Since I use my email for work I sort of need to keep a record of those emails as I’d rather not lose them. lol

so far danielmak.com has been migrated to the new server. As for the other 2 they shouldn’t be too far behind

Update @ 19:39:
danielmak.ca domain is now pointing to the new server.

Launching a new forum

I am launching a small forum for based around some of my interest. It’s an Anime, Sci-Fi and Gaming forum. I am not expecting it to be a huge success but I am hoping that it will get some activity. It’s powered by phpBB for now as it is probably one of the better free forum software besides the 2 main paid ones, Invision Power Boards and vBulletin.

I will slowly start adding modifications to make the forum more functional and perhaps design a theme for it to make it more unique. But right now I am focusing more on school.

Fixed the domain issue

I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed this before, it’s probably because I’ve been used to entering the domain without the “www” in it.

The problem was when you entered the domain (i.e. www.danielmak.net) the config file had a line that replaced the “www” to a double quote (“) which caused the css not to load properly. I commented out the line and everything was resolved. haha