Category Archives: Blogging

Blog vs. Audioblog

Try comparing this blog entry with the audioblog that I mentioned yesterday. Same event, different media, different impressions. Thanks Wil!

Addendum: Perhaps I should expand on why I think this is interesting. Some people have claimed that audioblogs are a waste of time because of their many “disadvantages” compared to the written word. Yes, the written word is more compact, can be composed with simpler equipment, and generally allows for more thoughtful, precise description of events and feelings. On the other hand, recordings of speech can convey immediacy, informality, intensity and emotion in a very real way. Wil presented two different versions of the same event. Which is better? Which is more powerful? I think they give different aspects of the same event. I find both compelling.

Gathering Statistics for Your Weblog

Visits to brainwagon.orgI have to thank Russell Beattie for writing about StatCounter.com, the service that he uses to monitor his website. In the days immediately after the Apple Keynote, his website showed a significant bump in traffic. Neat. I decided to give it a whirl (for the level of traffic that I use it for, it is free, and presents no annoying ads or popups for my readers). I’m only a week into using it, but it’s really very helpful, and now it’s part of my daily “web maintenance” routine. It filters out spiders like Google and leaves you with raw counts on numbers of visitors, where they came from, and what search terms they may have used to find your website. All it requires is the addition of a small chunk of JavaScript to your webpage, and no muss, no fuss, you can access your account on statcounter.com and find out just how few actual readers you actually have. 🙂

One small thing that could be improved is that it doesn’t do any monitoring of RSS feeds, so I can’t use it to monitor who is downloading my podcasts or reading brainwagon just on an aggregator. The reason is of course that even if you put JavaScript in the feed, no aggregator would know what to do with it. It would be nice to have an all-inclusive solution to monitoring downloads, but that would almost certainly require direct access to the Apache log files.

Incidently, I have no interest in this company other than as a satisfied customer. Give it a try if you like.

Google Blog on Preventing Blog Spam

Google Blog

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

I’ll update my web templates shortly.

Lisa William’s on Blogging Policies

Lisa Williams has a terrific article on the policies and ethics which surround blogging. I’m actually most concerned with the actions of employers: the word of people being fired for the contents of their blogs frankly fills me with a bit of sadness and dread. What will the world be like if this powerful new technology for human communication is stifled by fear over your employer’s response to whatever you might write? Previously one’s employer had relatively little control over what one said, it would seem to me tragic if that freedom was lost on the verge of a communications revolution.

This seems like a good topic for a future podcast. Check out Lisa’s article though: really good stuff.

How bad is referer spam?

While exploring the depth of my ridiculous referer spam issue, I ran the following simple
query:

mysql> select count(*) as cnt , baseDomain from referer_visitlog where to_days(now()) - 
to_days(visitTime) = 0 group by baseDomain order by cnt desc limit 10 ;
+-----+--------------------------+
| cnt | baseDomain               |
+-----+--------------------------+
| 682 | chikaliresortmalawi.com  |
| 682 | champvilleclub.com       |
| 682 | ceyloncurry.com          |
| 682 | cbmwyo.org               |
| 289 | brittandersondesigns.com |
| 243 | clevelandfyi.com         |
|  50 | google.com               |
|  16 | google.co.uk             |
|   8 | xopy.com                 |
|   6 | search.yahoo.com         |
+-----+--------------------------+
10 rows in set (1.16 sec)

It’s kind of depressing to find just how many people work that hard to try to spam my silly little site.

Addendum: It seems that virtually all my referer spam comes from four distinct IP addresses. They are now in my blacklist. We shall see how long this holds.

Fighting Referer Spam

In the last couple of days, I’ve been targetted by referer spam bots. These dorks access pages on a weblog repeatedly in an attempt to get their referer tag listed on your home page. I’ve been trying to figure out how to combat this behavior, and can see two different ways of dealing with it:

  • Ping the referer back, and make sure it does link to my site. Probably slow and not scaleable, particularly in the situation I have with asymmetric bandwidth.
  • Blacklist sites which generate bursts of referer traffic. If we get lots of referers to a particular url in a short period of time, put them in a database of blacklisted sites and keep them from ever appearing in the referer list.

The second seems easy, but I must admit: the query to find such lists seems difficult to write. I’ll continue to think it over, but does anyone have any suggestions?

Christmas Colors!

Well, I scribbled up a new logo image on some scratch paper, scanned it, colored and touched it up with The Gimp, and did some minor tweaks to my CSS files, all to help ring in the holiday system season. I keep meaning to fix the huge amount of blank space at the top of my blog, but haven’t quite got it sorted out yet. Enjoy!

Minor website improvements…

I downloaded the most recent release of ChaitGear Powerpack, a set of WordPress Plugins that you include support for the referer list and an Amazon Wishlist. I ended up having to recompile mod_php4 and install a couple of php modules, but now all seems to work.

I put up the wishlist mainly as a lark, but if in the last twelve months you have

  1. Come into vast sums of money…
  2. Have already bought presents for all your loved ones…
  3. Enjoyed either my weblog or podcasts…

then perhaps you might wish to select one of the items to send my way. It’s a sure fire way to get me to plug your website and link it in the next year! 🙂