If you’re building web sites or applications, and you’re not using memcached yet, you should be. Hogan showed me memcache a while back, and I literally implemented it the same day. Even if your site isn’t high traffic it hopefully will be in the future. When that time comes you’re going to wish you had made some better architecture choices. Don’t make not having used memcached one of them. memcached has allowed me to do things that would be completely impractical without it. Just recently I re-implemented a caching system using memcache, and I the system can handle several orders of magnitude more traffic. Not only that, but the code was actually cleaner and simpler. memcached’s automatic expiration of unused cache objects is superb for caching dynamic content.

So, like SEO Blackhat said: if you’re not using memcached yet, don’t wait until you need it or get around to it. Do it fucking now.

DaveN brought up a good point on Strikepoint today. Akismet should really have a local whitelist that you can set to whitelist people to comment or trackback. Here’s a quick 15-minute hack. Let me know if its ok and I’ll polish it a bit.

Download - Updated 12/3

This allows you to add trusted domains or email addresses that you wanto to bypass Akismet. This does not mean they will be auto-approved, but they will bypass Akismet. This method is not perfect and can easily be spoofed. It does, however, prevent the annoyance of having to dig through the Akismet spam folder to approve someone who is always marked as spam.

You can put in a domain to match the poster’s URL or an email address.

ie:

shoemoney.com
david@dellanave.com

That would whitelist any email@shoemoney.com, as well as any author URL of shoemoney.com, OR an email address of david@dellanave.com.

As commented below, this is trivial to spoof. However, since your whitelist is unknown to the public, it would be difficult or time consuming for a spammer to analyze which “magic words” allow it to bypass Akismet.

A few weeks ago I noticed that some scripts I was playing with weren’t actually using tor even though I was proxy’ing through privoxy. Turns out that when you apt-get install tor/privoxy (at least on stable, ok) it doesn’t actually enable tor via privoxy. The fix is a simple addition to:

/etc/privoxy/config:

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .