I just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress. This version has much better spam blocking for comments and trackbacks. However, it has a new templating engine which I haven’t had time to adapt to my site template yet. So, I’ll be going with the out of the box theme for a while (which I like, actually) until I have time to tweak it.
Laura Lemay has posted a nice review of tactics you can use to combat referrer spam. This is the type of spam where the evil spammers try to get their clients’ URLs into your web traffic reports. They particularly target sites which use scripts that display referrers to individual pages right on the page. Unfortunately, I’ve used such things in the past so I’m on the target list quite often. Really vile domain names get posted to my logs and make it more difficult to get useful info from my site statistics. I’m going to look at how I can implement some of the stuff in Laura’s post this weekend.
From the Register: Interview with a link spammer. Thanks to guys like this I have to leave my comments moderated and clean up my wiki on a regular basis.
Here is a nice guide to comment spam and how to fight it, provided by Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type.
Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam:
This document describes how malicious or unwanted comments (‘comment spam’) affect weblogs, the techniques spammers use to abuse weblogs, and the tactics that can be used to prevent and defend against these attacks. Also included is a review of the strengths and weaknesses of each tactic, instructions for implementing them on your weblog and ones which we recommend for the best protection.
Kevin Holland and Lucia Lodato are blogging prior to their presentation Blogging for Associations which will be held at the ASAE Great Ideas conference in Orlando this December. Lots of good stuff on the blog so far. I hope they both keep writing here after the session is over!
Kevin and Lucia both work for the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, which is one of the first associations that I am aware of that publishes an official organization blog (ACCA Buzz).
I’ve written several articles on weblogs for various publications over the past few years. Each and every one of them has changed ‘weblog’ into ‘Web log’ per some style guide rule during the editing process, over my objections. This always gets my goat for some reason. It’s weblog, people!
On a related note, I came across this page on how you can cite a weblog entry in MLA style.
I’m writing this entry using Ecto, a little OS X program for managing and posting to a weblog via a rich text interface that runs on your desktop (or laptop, in my case). Pretty slick so far. I’ve tried a few of these over the years but have never stuck with one very long. We’ll see how I do with this one.
One thing it has that I can definitely use is the ability to write an entry when I have no connectivity and then post it later when I can get online. That will be useful. And I just used the auto create a link using the url in the clip board buffer. Excellent.
Spotted via Deane’s review on Gadgetopia.
Gunnar Langemark has pointed out a new company that provides a hosted Drupal service: Bryght From the site:
Bryght is our Drupal hosted service that enables anyone from individuals to businesses and organizations to easily build and maintain a dynamic website with an online community.
I’ve used Drupal for a couple small project groups. It is a great collaborative tool if you can keep everything html based (document management tends to be a bit weak). This service should make it feasible for a much wider array of people to easily take advantage of Drupal.
A Minneapolis blogger got in on the ASAE event blogging, although in a way that I bet the conference organizers didn’t anticipate:
Ooooh, my freakin’ ears. What am I talking about? The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE, I linked their site because that name just sounds too made up), that’s what. They are having a ‘little’ conference outside my apartment. By little I mean they have about four city blocks barricaded and they are all eating, drinking, and networking their heads off. Oh, one other thing. Pretend that you could marry the music of 90’s adult contemporary with smooth jazz; ahh soothing right? Well then imagine a female-male lead singing duo on crack belting out ‘today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites’ (They just did a bone-chilling rendition of Outkast’s Hey Ya). Yeah, and according to the conference itinerary I’ve got a couple more hours to go. Where’s my damn earplugs? Ugh.
That is a pretty accurate description of the party that was thrown Saturday night to open up the meeting. And that easy listening band was truly horrendous.
I came across the post by searching Technorati on Tuesday morning. My plan was to demonstrate the site during a presentation I was doing that afternoon and talk about how associations should start using it to monitor how the blogging world is covering their issues and organizations. What a perfect example! If it’s any consolation, anonymous Minneapolis law student, the attendees in the session seemed to agree that the band was pretty bad.
I also talked about what kind of PR damage that entry could have done if it had been picked up by the local media. Hell, Technorati has a CNN advisory gig so it might go national. OK, that was a pretty low risk, but it could happen. The media seem to love blog-related stories these days.
In the session, I suggested that buying the blogger in question a free dinner or giving him some noise-canceling headphones might be a nice gesture to apologize for interupting his evening and could help turn the story into a postive if it did get picked up. That would have been money well spent to avert a more negative story and at the least would be the right thing to do. Of course, that requires keeping up with what is going on in the blogging world via tools such as Technorati.
In any case, thanks for sharing your neighborhood with us and for giving me a great example for the session I spoke in.
Off to Minneapolis tomorrow for ASAE’s annual meeting. So far I have heard of 5 blogs that will be written from the meeting.
C. David Gammel, CAE 