Blog CookBook

There are several reports of hackers launching a very "charming" site that offers an alternative version of the wordpress code (ie. you really do not want their version!)

The site appears to be offline at present, but you can read more about it on CrunchGear

Moral of the story - be careful what you type into your address bar!

Comment spam is one of those problems that isn't likely to disappear anytime soon.

It's a pity, but it's just one of those things you have to deal with.

So how can you deal with it?

The most obvious methods would be to configure and use plugins like Akismet or TypePad Antispam.

Both systems are available for most of the common blogging platforms and can even be used with other web based software such as VBulletin.

Unfortunately neither system is perfect.

In some cases you will find that you still get a lot of junk that makes its way into your moderation queue or worse still, valid comments get marked as spam and you simply don't see them.

If your blog is under constant attack by automated comment spam bots two things can easily happen:

1. Your site can become sluggish, as the amount of traffic hitting the comment form will have a negative impact
2. You will still have to check the suspected spam queue, so if it's particularly large you will probably overlook valid comments

Other methods that people like to employ involve checking the UserAgent of the commenter ie. checking to see if it is really a human or not. Of course that also adds to the overhead.

One method that I've found extremely helpful is to simply close comments on entries after a certain period has elapsed. So instead of leaving comments on posts open indefinitely I might choose to close them 30, 60 or 120 days later. It may not be ideal, but it certainly helps mitigate the nasty side-effects of spammers.

What do you do?

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The SixApart team's long awaited open source project has finally launched.

More news as it becomes available

Darren Rowse mentioned a very interesting online tool for FeedBurner users the other day - Feed Analysis

While FeedBurner's internal reporting can give you your basic subscriber data the Feed Analysis tool does some interesting things with it, such as showing how many new subscribers you've gained during a month, which days are your weakest / strongest and how many subscriber you might end up with.

If you've got 5 minutes to spare it's fun to play with it!

Once upon a time, when the web was a nicer place, trackbacks seemed to serve a useful purpose.

They're described as:

a framework for peer-to-peer communication and notifications between web sites. The central idea behind TrackBack is the idea of a TrackBack ping, a request saying, essentially, "resource A is related/linked to resource B." A TrackBack "resource" is represented by a TrackBack Ping URL, which is just a standard URI.

Using TrackBack, sites can communicate about related resources. For example, if Weblogger A wishes to notify Weblogger B that he has written something interesting/related/shocking, A sends a TrackBack ping to B. This accomplishes two things:

1. Weblogger B can automatically list all sites that have referenced a particular post on his site, allowing visitors to his site to read all related posts around the web, including Weblogger A's.
2. The ping provides a firm, explicit link between his entry and yours, as opposed to an implicit link (like a referrer log) that depends upon outside action (someone clicking on the link). (From the technical spec)

Unfortunately the level of "noise" these days renders trackbacks all but useless.

At any given time I have over two thousand unpublished trackbacks that have been automatically marked as spam.
If I actually get a valid trackback I'm probably going to delete it accidentally since it would be completely lost in the noise.

It's a pity. It would be nice to be able to use trackbacks to see what other people were saying or to let them know what you were saying about them, but at this stage it has become so abused that the only sane option seems to be disabling them completely.

What are other people doing?

Are you allowing trackbacks? (as opposed to pingbacks - which is a different implementation)

If your blog accepts comments then you need to manage them properly.

What do I mean?

At the most basic comment management means actually moderating the comments so that they get published in a timely fashion.

If you don't publish the comments quickly enough you will upset / annoy people or they'll simply lose interest.