For for the last few months automatic bots have been creating hundreds of zombie accounts per day on the TurnKey web site. I'm not sure why they bother. I assume it has something to do with spamming, but they never log in. Besides, spam almost never gets past our content filter (Mollom) and when it does we always nuke it. Zero tolerance.

Brains...

Meanwhile these zombie accounts are polluting my precious database, and that bothers me. Besides, call me prejudiced, but I just hate zombies. You're either alive or you're dead. Pick a side!

A few months ago I was looking for ways to improve the TurnKey web site. I spent a lot of time researching good web site design online by:

1. studying the theory of web site design from such resources as "a list apart".
2. "reverse engineering" the design of existing successful web sites:
   • Good.is online magazine / community
   • The Wordpress blog
   • Techcrunch
   • A List Apart (they're the experts on web site design and usability)

I payed especially close attention to the social aspects of the web sites I was studying as I was interested in improving the social experience on the TurnKey web site as well.

I wanted to improve my understanding of good web design in general. Not just for my work on the TurnKey web site. By then we were discussing our ideas for the TurnKey Hub and it was clear it would come in handy for that as well.

Musings on Lisp by a routinely Pythonic programmer

Last week I did some maintenance on various Python projects I haven't touched in years (literally), and I was surprised by how easy, almost trivial it was to reorient myself and make the necessary changes.

That observation came at the right time because I've been reading up on Lisp dialects for a while now and questioning whether or not I should be programming in Lisp instead. Lisp enthusiasts (converts?) certainly make persuasive arguments, typically advocating Lisp as the one-true-language with near religious zeal.