I just finished deleting some quite strange comment spam from around the site. The links pointed to a number of websites on food and Australian beaches but the keywords in every comment were:

ratcatcher unsped angelophany undabbled bingle hawer grader unrestricted

No idea why these key words were chosen. Usually, the logic is apparent but, sometimes, search engine optimization really is a black art.

Until just now, I never realized that the Drupal Search Module only appeared if I was logged in. I ticked some extra boxes under access control and, now, the search box appears when I'm not logged in as well.

I just finished putting a page up to test the Quintura search widget.

The process is quick and straight-forward. You register your site. Quintura crawls it and provides you with a search widget to embed where ever you like. Here is the widget I made for Assorted Wisdom.

It is easy but the results are strange. The initial results from Quintura include li, ul and ol. I admit that these HTML tags are common on the site but I think a search engine should be smart enough to disregard them.

I have started getting up to speed on my recent implementation of Wordpress by deleting the pre-installed blog-roll. Not challenging but you have to start some where.

After a long hiatus, I have returned to Assorted Wisdom to continue playing with technology. Some immediate changes:

• In the time since my last post, YouTube took removed a video I had embedded so I removed the post about it.
• I installed a Wordpress blog. I am curious how it compares to Drupal and MovableType. So the blog has use, I will right a post for every bottle of wine I drink this year. Or, at least, that is the plan.

UPDATE: I just fixed the URL for the wordpress blog.

Yesterday, I tried to set up an Amazon astore and embed the store into the site. Setting up the store was a simple four step process which required no programming knowledge.

You can see my efforts here.

Unfortunately, the functionality seems to be limited to a fixed width so it failed to embed elegantly into my drupal template as you can see here:

That image was taken on a widescreen laptop. On my other laptop, the integration looks even worse. At some point, I will explore using widgets to integrate Amazon more seamlessly into the site but I was disappointed with the final outcome of my experiment.

The Rough Guide rates Alla Madonna as some of the best seafood in Venice. Apparently, Italians don't eat very well. The fish was fresh and well cooked but no better than something from my BBQ.

When I go to restaurant, I want to eat something beyond my personal culinary skill. Alla Madonna fell short of that mark.

The comment spam has returned on a small scale. Three spam comments in three days.

The site has been nearly three weeks without comment spam so I have turned the requirement to preview all comments off. Curious to see if the spam comes back.

I made several improvements to the cookbook directory tonight:

• Added a new cookbook, Jamie's Italy
• Restructured the directory so that each cookbook has its own page
• Created a tag for each cookbook
• Tagged all historic cookbook posts with appropriate tags

I still need to add a link to the cookbook tag to each directory page and develop the cookbook directory content more.