Last week, we updated a little application responsible for capturing form submissions. One of the growing problems was spam; Overtime the application was less able to determine what was spam. As noted below:

In the week prior to the update:

• Approved: 703
• Denied: 8
• 1.15% marked as spam

One year ago:

• Approved: 1738
• Denied: 188
• 9.76% marked as spam

All submissions before last week:

• Approved: 65540
• Denied: 8955
• 12.02% marked as spam

To help combat this, we turned to Akismet, an external service that is passionate about eradicating spam. This adjustment allows our application to focus on its primary purpose: capturing and reporting form submissions.

In the last week:

• Approved: 481
• Denied: 674
• 41.65% marked as spam

A dramatic change, but one that we are hoping has had a positive impact on those who are responsible for reviewing the form submissions.

“Try and leave this world a little better than you found it.” — Robert Baden-Powell

I started at Notre Dame almost one year ago (May 18th, 2009). I came from a small company of 10 or so employees.  Over the past 4 years, I have been part of a developer community that had its origins in the very office I now occupy.  This regional developer community provided an excellent forum for discussing the projects each of us were working on.  It was during the early days of these meetings when AgencyND’s Conductor CMS took form.  Conductor’s purpose was to help the then WebGroup take a good chunk of the tedium out of making websites; Ultimately, the WebGroup needed to produce more and more sites for different entities of the university.

And as with anything made by the hands of humankind, Conductor has needed attention to keep it operating smoothly.  This attention has come in many forms: keeping the underlying framework up to date, improving the existing functionality, and adding completely new functionality (just to name a few).  And with these updates comes a better discovery of what Conductor actually is.

To wax philosophical for a bit, I’ll say that even now we are discovering what Conductor actually is, and we will continually be in the process of discovery. It isn’t that we don’t have a plan and a direction for Conductor, but we are working at bringing an idea, lets call it the Platonic Form, to fruition.  So we bring our mental tools to this archaeological thought delve, and work to exhume the real Conductor.  We chisel and brush away the debris, working deliberately to advance the usefulness, usability and value of Conductor, as well as advance the usefulness, usability and value of the websites generated in Conductor.

I inherited and assumed responsibility for the development and maintenance of Conductor.  Within its code there are three types of ideas ideas fully realized, other ideas waiting to come out, and still others that are frayed from the inevitable drift that occurs when a software product matures.  As steward of this product, I do my best to make sure that what is being added to Conductor improves its overall health. This may mean adding a new feature that has been requested by our ever growing user base; Or it may mean dutifully updating the underlying framework to fix any performance or security issues; Sometimes this means repairing a cracked or broken window.

So I do the best I can and each day try to leave the software a little better than the day before.