Please post comments here for testing. Do you like this site? Does it offer you with a good and daily does of blogging? Do you find yourself coming here often to search for stuff? Do you like the search feature? Please refrain from using common spam words since you WILL be automatically blacklisted and will not be allowed to comment again unless you contact me directly and ask me to remove you manually. This post will be used for comment testing all weekend. Thanks for your help!

I have been trying to read through some of the things people are saying about WordPress and Spam in the blogosphere and it seems that spambots are picking up posts RIGHT after they get posted even if the blog is very very new. The simple conclusion that I have drawn from this is that the spammers are picking up the links to new posts from….wait for it….the sites that your blog pings (among other things I’m sure). If you have a brand spanking new blog, have already gotten your first spam attack, turn off your pinger and see if the spam attacks reduce in propensity. If they do, I sure would like to know, though I am not sure how to stop this from happening and continue to ping. Any thoughts?

Via: kpont

What Makes A Great Weblog? from UrbanMainframe.com: Peoples’ perceptions of what makes a good weblog are very interesting to read especially if you disagree with some of them. Here Jonathan claims that weblogs are not about Standards Compliance, Accessibility, Tables (or the lack thereof), design, posting frequency or features. Contrary to his claims, I would say that all of the above are quite important though to a varying degree. His examples of simply designed, good blogs says to me that he is comparing simplicity of aesthetics with complication in a design. A design can be as simple as just text on a page, and still be a very elegant and semantic page that is well designed. Tables are yucky unless their use is extremely well justified. Period. Posting frequency is important. A stale blog, is a slow blog which creates a snowball effect. You post less, less people visit your […]

Can there be any such thing without the fear of poison and/or interception from spammers? I fear not but would like to at least take a look at the possibility. A simple method of doing this would be to provide a feed of spam words from every blog. Provide a page inside your blogging tool that allows a user to add “Spam Word Sharing” sites and then update manually when needed. The recipient blog will grab the feed, check for time updated, and if new words are found, add them to its own list of words. The inherent problem of this distributed method is that spammers will be able to look at the list and then modify the information they use in their spams. The upside of this method is that spammers cannot POSSIBLY look at the spam words of each and every blog unless they write some sort of […]

Someone from somewhere posted a REAL and valuable comment with a bunch of spam words, ended up getting automatically blacklisted and my CSPAM plugin ended up blacklisting the WHOLE organization. CSPAM’s false positive was a biggie! I apologize for the inconvenience and this episode has made me even more aware of the weaknesses of a completely automatic spam prevention system. But we shall press on.

If you have been using the CSPAM plugin in the Alpha stages and are happy with the performance and the protection, please feel free to tell other people about it and send them my way (have them email me). There is a major overhaul of this plugin in the works which will increase throughput and performance. The problem at this moment is the sheer amount of information that I am collecting about spam and spammers. A lot of it seems redundant but if someone is interested in access to this information, please let me know.

I am sure that I am going to eat these words as soon as I write them, but I am not buying. Literally, I am not buying an iPod so I can Podcast! Sure I can make any such device work with enclosure supported weblog feeds and sure WordPress supports enclosures now. I know that I can add casts to this weblog using WordPress 1.3 and I can do a bunch of cool stuff with the Windows Podcasting application that I am writing. But do we really want to *listen* to one person rambling on? What are your podcasting experiences? Do you like to listen to a single voice ramble on? I would think that a Podcast that you can download to your device and listen to (say in your car) would make you feel a closer bond with the person you are listening to. While on the subject, how […]

Since there is not much going on in the blogosphere besides comment spam, I thought I would bring out an age old topic that always portends a lot of exciting discourse. I have had the opportunity to name a few. The first was Mindful Musings. I did spend a lot of time thinking about that one. I wanted to express my frustrations, fears, anger, loathe, rant as well as my joy, pleasure and satisfaction in my blog. I wanted to be creative and artsy. I wanted people to remember the name long after they had left my blog. Since I did not have the money to buy a domain, I never did search to make sure it was available. I just made sure it sounded catchy to me. For Weblogtoolscollection.com, I had wanted to start a blog about blogging tools and did some reasearch on the names available. At first […]