I shut the comment down yesterday. Today, I woke up to two more spam comments claiming to be two of my regular posters. I thought that I shut it down correctly, but then I realized that the “disallow comment” setting is not retroactive.

I found this post, which helped me deal with this issue. In short, you have to run a very simple SQL query against your WordPress wp_posts table:

UPDATE wp_posts p SET comment_status = ‘closed’,
ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’

With that done, I’m going to leave comments open on my latest posts, and manually close them after a week or so. My next task is to find a way to do this automatically . If you have any suggestions on how to accomplish this, I’d appreciate it.

To you spammers: My most frequent commentators are my friends and family. I know the email addresses that they use. I look at every single comment that hits this blog. Please stop trying to pose as them - you are wasting your time.

Edit: I was getting ready to implement the solutions provided by Doug and Joe. Then I saw one of the comments made by someone posting as Tito:

I would recommend the Comment Timeout Plug in. Or the core solution.

I can’t believe I overlooked WordPress’ built-in function. I enabled it, and it seems to be working.

The spammers have been using a dirty trick lately - they are posting comments under the names of my most frequent commentators.

It is bad enough that I have had well over 130,000 spam comments hit my blog, but this is a new low. I will be closing all comments across the site in an attempt to get them to focus their attention elsewhere. This is only temporary; I love hearing from all of you, but since the frequency of new posts is so low I don’t think this will hurt the blog too much.

When I open them up again, I’ll let you know.

I’ve decided to leave comments open on my latest posts, and close all of the older ones.

This last month was a difficult one.

Nadia left for Afghanistan at the beginning of the month. While I’m thankful that I’ve been able to talk to her on a regular basis via email and over the phone, I still miss her very much. This place is too quiet without her. There are so many things, big and little, that I miss.

(If you are interested in sending anything her way, please let me know and I’ll give you her contact info).

Three days after she left I got laid off. I didn’t see it coming (I’m not sure anyone does). I’ve been on the job hunt since. Colorado Springs isn’t very friendly to PHP web developers, so the pickings are pretty slim. I’ve considered moving to the Denver/Boulder area (about 90 miles from the Springs) in hopes of landing a job there.

Unfortunately, the combination of these two events is causing me to throw a series of pity parties for myself. This jobless thing would be easier to deal with if Nadia were here. Having a job would help with being so lonely. The few friends I’ve made here have either moved away, deployed, or were at the old job. For lack of a better term: this situation sucks.

Luckily, all of June wasn’t bad.

My neighbors have been pretty awesome. They fed me the first few days after Nadia left (I think they think that I don’t know how to cook). I’ve also met with the Family Readiness Group (Army spouses) a couple of times. This little bit of face-to-face human contact is helpful.

I play on Xbox LIVE more than I used to. There I game with some of Nadia’s family and some friends. Doing something that I enjoy is certainly stress-relieving.

I built my first computer the day she left. A home theater PC, to be exact. I planned it this way thinking that keeping myself busy that day would absorb the blow of her departure (that plan didn’t work). However, in the month since I built it, it has kept me busy with the troubleshooting and new functionality and all. At least it keeps me occupied.

Of course, I’m looking for a job. I put together willdiaz.com as a single-page site to host my resume and offer ways for potential employers to contact me. I’ve redone my resume twice, gone on one interview, I have another one scheduled for next week and have spoken to many recruiters and potential clients for my fledgling freelance career.

I would like to take a moment and say something to all recruiters and hiring managers out there: if someone is not a good fit for your organization’s needs, please have the courtesy to tell that once-potential employee. It is incredibly unprofessional to suddenly cut off communication with them. Sadly, this has happened to me a few times, and it is crushing to my morale (and to anyone else’s, I’m sure).

I wrote my first amateur video game review! That was a neat experience, playing a game solely to critique it. The lucky game was Terminator Salvation, and you can read it over at buttonmashing.com.

Following Danny’s death, there was a gigantic legal mess surrounding his car, which I cosigned with him on a few years ago. It was an eight-month ordeal to sort out, but it is now done! Thanks to my dad for spending many long hours at the DMV on a few occasions to make this happen.

I think that’s about it.

In short, my month started off really rough, and I’m trying to fight all of those naturally-occurring negative feelings.