Due to a recent uptick in spam comments (I've had to delete literally several this week!) I decided to dust off my dormant JavaScript-based hashcash implementation and drop it into the comments system as an added anti-spam measure.

As some of you are aware, my comment system did not support non-ASCII characters. This is not because I am unaware that there exists a world outside of the United States. No, it's simply that I could never force the horrible combination of Python and MySQL to cooperate when it came to non-ASCII characters. I struggled with it for a long time, and finally gave up. Well, I'm happy to say that I have finally solved the problem and my blog now supports Unicode comments!

This is my first post with my new blog system. Eventually I hope to get my old blog posts moved over, but for now you can access the old blog at its old address.