The Knitting Fiend

 

Wearing my Ray-bans
I like to stroll by sailboats,
pretend I own one.

 

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My friends and I got together and looked at old knitting magazines. We all laughed as we passed around this picture!

Then magazine fell into the hands of the woman who brought it to the party. She said, “Hey, I knit that sweater for my husband!” We laughed more.

Oh, we weren’t laughing at the sweater, which is beautiful. Mixing simple 1×1 rib, a few rows of garter stitch, what’s to laugh at?

No, we were laughing at the cool late 70s sunglasses, the hand on hip pose, the carefully groomed hair kept in place with plenty of hair spray, and the natty cuffs on the trousers. Yes, this is how Crockett and Tubbs would have dressed if Miami Vice¹ had been filmed in the Chicago.
 

From Bucilla Men Vol 21 1978

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On the home front

I’ve finally gotten around to updating my forum software for The Knitting Fiend Forum.

The forum had been running pretty well, with a nice list of participants. But then… It was overrun by spammers! Well, when it was first over run by spammers, SMF (who writes the software) was just starting to write new versions of the software but the release date was scheduled several months in the future. So, I had to wait. Well, the future arrived, but I’m afraid I was diverted and didn’t notice the new release was available.

Meanwhile, I had about 30 “subscribers” a day but it was 99% spam. It was way to difficult to check each one and identify the 1 real subscriber out of 100, so, I let the whole thing slide. (Ok… I’m a bad forum hostess.)

Yesterday, I discovered the newest version of the forum software has quite a few spam control features was available. And by quite a few, I mean, there are now 5 levels of spam control in series! I installed it.

So, if anyone wants to start posting at The Knitting Fiend Forum, feel free to do so. And let your friends know it’s back so people can start answering each other’s questions. I’ll be checking daily and answering what I can, so there will be at least one person answering!

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1. Yes, I know Miami Vice ran during the 80s.

Knitters on "The Knitlist" have been asking for "the best" dickey pattern. Now, I have no idea what makes "the best" dickey. Is best the easiest? The most comfortable? The cutest? The one that uses my left over yarn? Who knows?

Since I always design things to include the features I like, I think my pattern is "the best". I wrote the a generator to create directions for this dickey long ago. That pattern permits people to do a fair amount of customization. I've decided to eliminate some choices, and post a second version of the pattern here.

For this pattern, the trim will be 3/4" deep. Period. You don't get to choose. There is no back neck shaping; the front neck depth will be a value I consider reasonable for your choice of neck width. I made a choice that causes the neck shaping to end just before the shoulder shaping starts. It should be deep enough for comfort, but simple to knit.

I let you pick:

• depth of the collar. You could make it 1" deep to have a simple crew neck dickey that keeps your chest warm, or you could make it 6" deep and fold over for a real turtleneck. Mine is 3" deep.
• the shoulder width. I advise making this slightly narrower than your actual shoulder width. You don't want the shoulders drooping down into your sleeves. I choose mine by measuring a the shoulder width on a blouse, but you can also look up shoulder widths using my children's size table, adult size tables.
• the back length: You want these deep enough to stay tucked in. I made mine 8" deep.
• the front length. I like the front of my dickey to be rather long and I made the front of mine longer than the back. I wear these instead of scarves, and I like my chest to stay warm; I made mine 9" deep.
• Stitch and row gauge. You can create directions in any gauge. However, if your gauge gets much to large, the shoulders may not have any stitches. In that case, the directions won't make sense. I expect you to be smart enough to read ahead and figure this out.
• I assume you knit in stockinette.

I think this is a fairly nice pattern for advanced beginners. You can practice dividing for a neck, picking up stitches, knitting stockinette, and knitting 2 x 2 rib. I'm assuming you know how to knit all those stitches, but if you don't, then ask in comments.

Now, if you want to create your pattern,

(more...)

I was surfing the political blogs, and I noticed this caution at next to comments at Ampersand’s Alas a blog.

NOTE: Due to a deluge of spam, comments using the words POKER or HOLDEM or VIAGRA or PHENTERMINE will be automatically deleted. Please be careful to avoid these words!

Everyone hates comment spam and uses different methods to minimize it. Alas a Blog evidently uses Wordpress’s default spam filtering to automatically delete comments containing “bad words” — like “poker”. I suspect Amp is listing only a few words he autodeletes. After all, the full list of “bad words” runs from “Adipex” to “Zyban”.

My blog runs on Wordpress, so I could use that method too. But, I don’t. I moderate comments containing those words, but I don’t auto delete them. That lets me permit human visitors to enter what they want– but I do reserve the right to delete comments.

Still, I do a lot of other things that prevent spam. It’s just that in my case, I try to do things to recognize and turn back spam bots so they never get far enough to leave comments containing these terms.

My front line of spam control is a set of .htaccess files. I can use these because my site runs on an Apache server. I install some at the top of my site directory, and others in certain sub-folders. For the benefit of others, here’s the chunk of the .htaccess file I use to keep a huge number of poker, pharmaceutical and porn spammers out of my site. This is bit of code is contained in the .htaccess file installed at the top of my site:

.htaccess

Do I do other things?

My full htaccess file also includes a list of bad user agents. But, I’m finding very little spam is blocked by that list. The current banes of my existence are referrer and trackback spam. The portion of the htaccess file I provide above weeds out lots of bad referrers.

I also run Referrer Karma which eliminates the referrer spam not caught by my htaccess file. I like ReferrerKarma, but I need to caution users that it seems to identify many web based email referrers and a number of craft forums as spam. If you use Referrer Karma, be sure to learn how to find the Spam Karma logs and black list table. Check regularly to make sure good referrers haven’t been blacklisted; if they have, add these urls to your SpamKarma whitelist.txt file. Also, for reasons I will explain in a future article, be sure to add your own site and the address of whatever host you visit when examining your site statistics.

But, there’s more! I also run Bad Behavior; it does a wonderful job eliminating most trackback spam. HashCash does a wonderful job preventing spammers from entering comments (but use with caution if you are concerned about preventing comments from blind persons. )

Is there a risk to using htaccess? Yes. If there is a typo in your file, your entire site will not load. I created a directory containing one page to test .htaccess files after editing. I load the new .htacess file to that folder, and check whether the page loads. If the new htaccess file passes that test, I load the edited file to the top directory of my site.

Of course, there is another risk. Some URLs containing the word “poker” may actually be knitting sites directing knitters here. I might lose traffic.

I’m not going to worry about that risk.