I know its been a bit quiet here lately, I’ve been very busy with a number of things. The MyHelpDesk work that I mentioned last week has been started but not finished yet. Hopefully I’ll get back to that within the next couple of months. Work looks to be very busy for the next few months, which doesn’t leave much time for side projects like fixing MyHelpDesk.
However, next week should see a far number of posts to the blog, because I’m off to Linux.Conf.Au 2004. Something I’ve been looking forward to for a fair while now.
I’ve now upgraded to MT 2.65, and SixApart have released a new template to produce Atom Feeds. So this blog now has one!.
I decided to follow Jeremy’s lead and add an RSS feed for comments. After all, RevJim just made it so easy, it was hard not to.
XML Comments Feed
Enjoy!
The BBC (found via Slashdot) tackles block spam.
I feel quite upset by this, and angrier with the spammers and their lack of respect for the principles of online co-operation than I have been for years.
Which pretty much sums up how I feel about the issue. Various means of disguising outbound links from comments, so that the spammers don’t get the PageRank boost, have been discussed. But at the end of the day, I don’t care whether the spammer gets PageRank or not. I don’t want my personal blog polluted with spam, I just don’t want this crap on my blog at all!
MT-Jay Allen has release MT-Blacklist which is, in his words, “A Movable Type plugin to eradicate comment and trackback spam”. Looks promising! I’ll try it out when I’ve got a minute.
I read Jeremy’s post last week on Comment Spam, and figured I was glad I didn’t seem to have that problem. I’ve had the odd 1 or 2 comment spams in the past, nothing too serious, but over the weekend two crawlers seem to have gotten to my site, and between them posted 41 spam comments acros several pages. The most prolific was a comment promoting Viagra, with links to a web site. The other was a subtler type of thing which just said “Good Post” or “Nice Post” with a link to a web site. The former is just blatently abusing my site for promotional purposes. Presumably the latter is trying to boost their own pagerank by posting on my site.
Simon is building a URL blacklist, to help prevent this sort of thing.
One of Jeremy’s commenters suggested that the email from MT when comeone comments should include a “Delete this Comment” URL, which is an excellent idea.
A few people have come up with different ways of stopping this, but it’d be nice if the MT people were able to adress this as part of a future version of MT.
Update (20/1/04): Ironically, I’ve had to close comments on this post because it seems to get spammed more than most.
I’ve been running Ads from Google’s AdSense program on this site for a month now. Its been an interesting experiment. The thing that amazed me was just how many clickthoughs I’ve been getting. Despite serving an average of only 233 ads per day over the last month I’ve had 187 clickthroughs (6 per day on average).
The ads don’t seem to be bringing any more traffic (traffic for August was slightly down on July), which is to be exprected, and running Google ads doesn’t seem to give you a higher pagerank either (still not on the first 4 pages of a search for “Jim”). The ads seem pretty relevant to the content on my pages though which is nice.
So despite a very quiet month of blogging, the ads have netted me a total of $62.64 or about $1.90 / day which is more than I expected.
I’ve added Google Ads to my site. Those reading this through aggregators won’t notice a difference, but those visiting the site in a browser will see the ads on the right hand edge of the page.
I don’t know whether they’ll be there forever. The main reason I did it was because I’m curious to see how it all works. I’m not goiung to ask you to click on them to support me or anything like that, nor do I intend to change what I write because they’re there either.
If you have any feelings one way or the other about the ads, I’d be interested to hear what you have to say… Just leave a comment on this post.
Matt Haughey has an excelent article on using MT as a lightweight CMS.
I’ve spent the past year and a half playing with the possibilities in Movable Type (MT), through my personal and client sites. Like all weblog management tools, MT is basically just a lightweight content manager, but it’s power is in its flexibility.
I pitched one of our clients on the same thing a while back, so its good to see I’m not alone here! Brad Choate also has further suggestions for static content.
Anyhow, I wanted to share a tidbit in that vein. Ive just set this up recently, and I’m in the process of moving the rest of my static content to use it.
The ThirdEye explains how they’d go about implementing a Bayesian Aggregator.
