Author Archives: Donncha

Justin Mason posted a message to the ILUG complaining about referer spam on his blog. I replied with a few ideas, and hopefully we’ll get more ideas on that thread. Unfortunately I forgot to include a link to a useful feedster search on the matter but JM will see it here I’m sure.

1. Load up the referering page. If it doesn’t load then ignore the referer (removes private pages on intranets). Check the page for a link to your site, and in particular, checl for the url the refering ‘browser’ visited. If it’s not there, then ignore the referer.
2. Setup a moderation system and manually filter the referers.
3. Only print a referer after they’ve refered more than a couple of visitors. (Only mildly effective however.)
4. Dave Winer at Userland added a robots.txt to his referer log page. It stops
   Google indexing that page. He then notified the world of what he did, and hopefully the spammers got the message.

Tim posts yet another good read on his blog. This time on a subject dear to all of us in one shape or form. Congrats on the new job too Tim!

Horribly busy in work these days. More articles I’ll read when I have time.

1. Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
2. McNealy Weighs In on Linux, Unix, Sun – Compares Linux to Napster – Linux is copyright theft? That’s what SCO would have you believe I suppose.
3. Gadgetopia – ‘nother weblog but with some stuff I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

On another note, I managed to boot my PC at home again. The hardrive died on it just after I got back from Chicago, but I’ve managed to recover most of the files off it. I’m now using an almost 10 year old Quantam 5^1/4” drive. It doesn’t boot unless I add root=/dev/hdb1 to the end of the LILO command line.. *ggrrr* It’ll suffice for WordPress development however!

I’m obviously missing something here, or maybe it’s in the docs but I didn’t read that paragraph. Why do people hoard shares of a particular blog on BlogShares?
Is it to show support for that site? Is it a longterm investment? (that could be one possible answer, if you expect a site to be linked to heavily it’s going to increase in value.)
My blog has a few investors who are in for the long haul. I recently sold all my stock in my blog and made a tidy profit, but if there’s no liquidity, then it’s just paper money (ok, never mind the fact that it’s all virtual money anyway..)
If you check my Blogshares profile you’ll see I have a few shares in davespicks.com. Why do I keep them? Dave’s a nice guy, and gave me shares in his site. Share dealing hasn’t been very liquid though so I’ve held on to them in the belief that someone else will sell and I can buy a few more shares at a cut down price.
Huh. Greed. As simple as that!

Dave wants feedback and reviews from AOL bloggers. No doubt the reviews will come rolling in, but I doubt scripting.com is at the top of the average AOL user’s bookmarks page.

Just heard this on the news! Nothing yet on Google News or News.com. Here’s the story itself.
(Update: Unless you search of course!)

Kevin has compiled notes from the battlefield.