Tracking spam

As I mentioned a while ago, I had been living in cloud cuckoo land with respect to spammers. I naïvely thought that my little microblog was of no interest to spammers. The truth was, I just wasn't being notified of the incoming dross. As a result, I'm afraid I might have got onto some lists as a very soft touch. Now that I am getting notified, I am trying to stomp on spam as soon as I can, and I recently found myself wondering whether the flood was increasing, decreasing or staying the same. To begin with, I wasn't keeping records. About 10 days ago I started to do that, recording the number of spam received per day and also the number of items deleted per say, which is often more because I am still deleting ones that came in while I was blissfully ignorant.

Today, I thought I would use that data to play with sparklines, which many people in the indieweb use to display data. I was inspired most recently by Ton Zylstra and Jeremy Keith, whose code I lifted. That worked fine; you can see the result over there in the sidebar. For now, I'm happy to update by hand once a week or so. At some point, however, I am going to have to go back and try to understand what the code is actually doing. Kevin Marks' article is where I'll start.