Quantum Leap Year

We’re not really sure what happened. This week the Lollards went back in time to 2007 allegedly trying to rescue Tanya. Tanya herself called FT Towers yesterday asking for an explanation. I didn’t have one and then something strange happened last night…

While I was tackling a technical glitch on our servers that was failing to admit the existence of the 29th of February, I got an alarming call from Tanya that was suddenly cut off by what sounded like… no it couldn’t have been… Anyway, we haven’t heard back from her yet, but will keep you posted.

Update
There is something happening in our archive feature (below). Freaky Trigger has never had any posts from 1981 before. Could it be that Tanya Headon has come unstuck in time??

Later update
We’ll be keeping an eye on Tanya’s I Hate 1981 diary for new posts

Silvah Bullet – “20 Seconds To Comply”

Robocop-themed UK rap hit (it almost went top 10!)

Verdict:7.1 (17 votes, sd 1.2)

Vampire Weekend
Better than “Some Foals”. Andy Kershaw probably LOVES them too.

DUDES! L O S T! Season 4!
OMGZZZ I am so hyped!!!!1eleven and YOU are wrong for thinking it’s anything but amazing

Sex Drums Rock n Rave
Awful artwork, terrible title. A compilation of the rocked-up dance scene (do not call it by its name). A high hit rate for a compo, and some of the tracks are storming. Amazon

Sorry about the technical problems we’re having

I have no idea what might be causing it. My current theory is that a bit of the Apache server has gone mental (perhaps mod_rewrite) but it could be something in our WordPress setup too.

For now, I have reverted FT to a primitive form of URL which seems to be less problematic.

Popular is on http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?cat=2 for example.

immediate update
OH GOOD GRIEF. not even that seems to work properly (the ?cat= thing). But you can at least click on individual posts reliably. please?

update 2
I’ve reverted to the proper URLs. it really does feel like apache (it’s not rewrite, something weirder). i’ve found that refreshing eventually forces the right page to appear (sometimes 1 refresh, sometimes several tries) so something is going wrong either between supplying the URL to PHP, or in sending the correct request back. god knows.

if this does turn out to be wordpress oddness i will feel right foolish.

update 3
LOOKS LIKE WE’RE BACK IN ACTION! There may be badness cached around the internets, but fresh requests are coming out ok right now (12:40pm)

Vote Saxon
“Finally we can usher in a new age of prosperity, no more artificial politicians pretending to be someone they’re not!”

icanhascheezburger.com lolcats with tags for your convenience, all categorised and everything in a blog-a-day.

Admin: listen up, all comment crew

I was hoping that the lovely Akismet filter (200,000 spam caught and rising) would be updated to have an option to never mark logged-in user’s comments as spam. No such luck, so i’ve had a go myself. I tried posting blatant spam logged in and it worked ok, and it failed when logged out as a double-check, so the signs are good. (And it continues to trap all the usual spam.)

It’s risky stuff fiddling with such a good spam filter and v difficult to test and troubleshoot – so let me know about any problems you find here. And if your comments are being ignored please use the Freakytrigger e-mail link (bottom of the sidebar there) to let us know.

My worry is that the spambots will work out how to automatically make an account. (Then I might have to add a captcha to that process *wince*)

Another great FT milestone: 100,000 spam

About the same time we passed 5000 comments*, so 20 out of 21 comments are spam**. Nice. Many many thanks to akismet.com and the “Worst Offenders” plugin.

Free fun FT fact: we are now mobile phone friendly (looks like this)

(*RIP the comments lost in the great haloscan massacre)

(**The real proportion is even worse because the 100,000 is comments since we went WP in, er July??, and comments have been accumulating on Popular for some time prior to that, using Blogger comments)