The last 7 months I have not been able to spend any time on this blog, which has not just resulted in no updates, but also in an awful lot of spam in the comments (which was not visible as I have to approve commentes anyway). I found over 12.500 spam messages in the comments, of which 11.000 in one article. The bad thing of this was that this large amount of comments killed the performance of my blog, so I had to do something.
The good thing about Pebble (the blog software I use) is that is has a very simple XML file-based structure to store articles and comments, so this was very easy to cleanup. All I had to do was
- Shutdown the blog system (only shutting down the webapp in Glassfish sufficed
- Locate the XML files that were huge
- Edit the large XML file using
vion the command line, removing anything between <comments>…</comments> - Restart the Pebble webapp in Glassfish.
And the spam was removed, which also resolved the performance issue
Now the good news, not being able to post anything does not mean I did not have any spare time to experiment with things so I do have a number of items to complete and document the coming weeks (I’m having some time off now) . Expect some posts frequently during the summer period…