Now riding for team Lost Coast MTB

Thats right, I’m on a real bike team now. I’m not talking about a team like Team Dirtbag I’m talking about a full legit bike team with kits, sponsors and free stuff, bro.

Our main sponsors are Lost Coast Brewing and Marin Bikes - beer and bikes. What more can you ask for?

As part of my joining the team I volunteered to redesign and update the team website. So I set up a Wordpress install on my VPS, did ye’ old free theme search, and set up a few widgets. Importing comments from Blogger was pretty easy, as was making sure permalinks remained in the same format so no links out there were broken. On most days I’ll tell you that I hate Wordpress, but this is one of those perfect applications for it. Anyway, the result is here: www.teamlcb.org.

About an hour or so after switching the domain over I noticed something peculiar: the spam comment count increasing with every load of the admin console. Within just a few hours the amount of Spam comments caught by Akismet had surpassed 100. I took a look at the Blogger settings, le sigh, no comment moderation, no word verification and full access to anonymous users. Looks like I had just messed up a ton of spam bot’s days.

Interestingly, Blogger seems to count bots as visitors it’s blogs:

Whereas Wordpress does not. (The blog gets maybe 5-10 legit visits a day…) I’m assuming many of these bots are programmed specifically for Blogger blogs and are probably failing now. The good ones most likely detect Wordpress forms and are still able to submit comments. Load on the server has also visibly increased since the domain was switched.

But it is still pathetically low. Anyway, moral of the story is: comments suck. Also, I need to start training. Part of being on a team is knowing how to ride.