Vanity search fail

Like most bloggers, I have feeds set up to keep track of when people link to me. I logged into WP this evening to fix some formatting in my last post, and on the dashboard I noticed my stats graph had a spike in traffic last week (I don’t usually pay much attention to my stats). I couldn’t see any recent links on the vanity search, I had to use referrer logs to track it down - turns out someone created a TinyURL link to my time machine post:
http://tinyurl.com/29gx75

Obviously it would be a lot harder for Google and Technorati to index those links, and given the rise of TinyURL on twitter they may not even want to. I just thought it was interesting, and possibly something to keep in mind for anyone doing vanity searches.

Incidentally the link was posted to a couple of comment threads, you can see the list on google (skip the artisopensource link, it’s some kind of spam or hack site). I guess I should finish writing that follow up article, the time machine post has overtaken my Firefox iFrame popup post to become the second most popular post on my blog

 

Not much blogging, but plenty of linking

I haven’t had a whole lot I thought was worth posting about, but I have been adding quite a lot to my link blog.  If you want to know the sort of things I’m reading about, subscribe to that.

I don’t know when I’ll have any good stuff to post, I’ve had a few good topic ideas but always when I’m lying in bed and it’s too cold to get up and write it down.  Oh well, one of these days

 

My link blog has arrived

One of the features I’ve really been looking forward to in the new version of FeedDemon is Synchronised News Bins, which can be turned into link blogs.  So now that I’m running the beta, I’ve created Andy’s Link Blog :D

I add to it pretty regularly, like most bloggers there is a ton of stuff that I could post to my main blog but isn’t really important enough to warrant spamming you with it.  Having run this for a week already, I have posts in there dating back 3 weeks and it’s a mix of amusement, tech news and game news.  I hope you enjoy it

 

Attack of the not-so-invalid domain spammers

My apologies if you’re subscribed to my comment feed and see some spam. The latest trick that breaks through akismet’s spam filters is using an invalid URL - the .com portion of the domain is left off, but in many browsers the page will still display thanks to browser (or user) auto-correction. I’m not sure why they bother though, because even if a search engine parsed it I doubt it would be counted as a link to the real site.

I’ll catch them when I can, but spam will probably pile up while I’m asleep. I’ve reported it to akismet so hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

 

Suggestion for improvement to wordpress.com spam filters

Recently comment spam has been spiralling out of control. I get hundreds of them a day, which means that if some poor sucker sets it off (I find trackbacks very easily trigger the filter) I’m unlikely to find them.

I’ve noticed a pattern though. 90% of all spam in my akismet list is either a post full of links, or a post full of URLs using [url] forum tags. A quick and easy solution to my problem would be an extension of an existing option, something that I don’t think would be very hard to do.

Right now, wordpress lets me specify a maximum number of links allowed in a comment before it’s held for moderation. What I propose is a similar filter for “get the hell away from my blog you dirty spammer”. It would be a similar maximum number of links (a default of 5 or 10 should do it) and any triggered comment completely bypasses the akismet admin page, it’s just deleted (like the blacklist).

I tried sending feedback about this, but the support guy told me he wanted it too and I should make a post. Hopefully the admins are listening, I’ll add some extra technorati hooks and see if I get any bites

Technorati Tags: Akismet, Spam, Comment Spam, WordPress

 

Anime fan + $10 DVD sale == empty wallet

A month ago, Madman (huge Anime distributor in Australia) had their 10th birthday sale. All in stock DVDs, including box sets, for $10 a disc plus $4 shipping total. That’s Australian dollars, so a little under $8 US at the current exchange rate. Being a huge Anime fan, I couldn’t resist.

I ended up with 2 series that I’ve been meaning to buy for years, a third that I’ve wanted since it finished last year as well as 2 seasons of another that I know is good. Plus 6 movies.

They arrived today. I uploaded a full size photo, rather than going into details here you’ll have to hit the larger size to read all the titles

My flatmate wanted in on the deal, so he got the first 3 box sets of Kensin. Unfortunately that wouldn’t fit in the main box so they came in a second box.

Nice early Christmas present to myself, and with the Nintendo Wii launching here on Thursday I’ve got enough to keep me occupied for quite a while

 

Going with zooomr

I spent some time in my lunch hour today looking at different photo sites. I have a Flickr account now, but it’s going to sit idle. I’ve decided to use Zooomr instead, for one simple reason - free pro accounts for bloggers which is still available 4 months after they announced it

Not only is their pro account US$5 cheaper than Flickr, it was recently upgraded to 4gb upload bandwidth compared to 2gb on Flickr (which will probably only matter for me in my first month, but still) and when it’s easy to get a free pro account nothing else really compared.

The kicker was my username - Zoomr is new enough that “spyder” was available, and so my Zoomr URL is now http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/spyder

All I’ve uploaded so far is the images one of my older posts in order to qualify for the free account. Over the next week or so I’ll upload the rest of the images that are on this blog and then get on to the photos from Thailand.

The Zooomr interface isn’t quite as “nice” to use as Flickr, but so far the only negative point I can really level at them is their sets - I haven’t seen a way to add a bunch of random images to a set like in Flickr, which offers a drag-and-drop interface for that. There are plenty of options for setting up SmartSets though so this can be worked around fairly easily.

This does mean that I miss out on the rather massive community built up around Flickr, which is mildly annoying. In this case however, I’m going to be cheap and stick with the free account

 

I’m going to cheat a bit

The posts I had left to make about my holiday are long enough that I want to find a decent chunk of time to post them, but for various reasons I haven’t found that in the week I’ve been back.

Meanwhile there are a few posts (such as my next one) that I really wish I could post but I want all of my holiday stuff to be in order. So screw what I said last week, I’m just gonna backdate the holiday ones and put a post up once I’m done for those who don’t use the RSS feed

 

Catching up

I’ve got a lot to catch up on this week. Work, sleep and email are at the top of my list, and thanks to a shorter than anticipated stop in Singapore I have a few holiday blog posts left to write as well. I don’t want to leave them too long, because I have a work-related post that I want to make but I need to finish the others first.

I’ve also decided to partially break my promise to myself that I wouldn’t go back and listen to podcasts that I missed while I was away. When I say partially, I mean just the music podcasts. They’re the only ones I managed to listen to while on holiday, and they reminded me that the awesome podsafe music I hear from them is not something I ever want to miss out on.

I’m glad I did too, because I just finished listening to a very special episode of Accident Hash. That, all by itself, makes the extra time I’m spending to catch up worthwhile. It was followed by the premiere of a track by one of my favourite artists, which I just have to plug because it’s an awesome song.

 

Riding home while drunk is fun

blog posting while drunk?…. sorry, doesn’t compare. Does prove my inner geek isn’t too far gone tho.

Went for my first bike ride in a very long time tonight, ended up at only about 11k of offroad riding before my legs died and we took the main road home. After ~20k we stopped at a corner shop, and through my dad and uncle buying rounds we had about 4 cans of beer each, by which time it was dark (luckily dad brought his front light, ‘cos we only had back lights!). On the way home from there we stopped at the golf driving range and had another, which made the last 15 mins home all that much more fun