Logging
One of the nice side effects of the efforts towards fortifying my weblog against comment spam and floods, is that I've invested some time into logging of various unusual server conditions. Initially, this was for forensics, but it has proven much more useful than that.
My implementation of nonces is as files with unique file names and a specific life expectancy. The contents of the file turns out to be very handy place to stash debugging information. Enough so, that I'm now issuing nonces for non-security related events, and capturing things like stack tracebacks, environment variables, and CGI parameters.
This morning, I received a trackback from Kent Tegels. Unfortunately, it appears that trackbacks from .Text do not contain excerpts. Pity that. But I checked the spec, and can see no mention of this being required.
I've made a change so that I should be able to handle such requests in the future. If somebody with a .Text weblog could do me a favor and trackback this entry, I'd appreciate it.