Bloggy Stuff
The header graphic and the Why Now? at the bottom are links to the main page if you go wandering around the site. The links in the text and on the sidebar open in a new window. It’s a brute force approach necessitated by the way the site is structured and changes in the HTML language.
This is a handy piece of code:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”5; URL=https://whynow.dumka.us/”>
If you stick this in with the other META tags at the top of the page it transfers the viewer automatically to a different location. If you go to my old Blogger site, after 5 seconds you will come here. Not everyone notices when you move, so it’s always nice to leave a forwarding address. Don’t forget to change the URL to your new site.
HaloScan has some great spam software, because I had a few trolls, but no spam at the old site. Now I’m having to deal with it. I have no idea what these people think posting in comments will do for them. You don’t see it because of the way commenting works in WordPress, but they are relentless.
12 comments
Where are you? do you know anyone in CD 15 ? (Indian River, Brevard, Osceola, and a bit of Polk. see district map http://www.bowman2006.com/) … A terrific potential candidate needs help getting on the ballot. May I tell you about him?
Or go see http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/9/18155/67481
Thanks
sam
Sam, I’m up on the Panhandle, Okaloosa county, CD-1.
Back when I was blogging, some ass had coded a ‘bot that searched out Greymatter blogs which had the commenting facility enabled, and spammed them without mercy. That’s why I felt compelled to disable Greymatter commenting and move to Haloscan myself. In the year or so that I used Haloscan I got maybe three comment spams. They’re really good about blocking out the ‘bots and other automated comment and trackback spams.
I have no idea what these people think posting in comments will do for them.
If the comments contain hyperlinks, if those comments show up in the blog, and if you’ve not taken steps to prevent Google and other search spiders from crawling your site, then those hyperlinks in the spam comments help goose the spammer’s website rankings in search engines like Google. The Greymatter developers were looking at working with a (I think) Google sponsored meta tag that would, in effect, prevent the Google spider from counting links from blog comments.
I actually had one comment spammer whose spams scolded me about how blog comments were ruining search engine optimization, and how I should just link to his sites so he wouldn’t be forced to spam my comments. Go figure.
I have a ‘bot crawling through my archives leaving comments on old posts. I have banned it, but I marked it a spammer before that so the the WordPress anti-spam software could register the jerk.
Anything with more than two links is automatically kicked into moderation, but after the first post people aren’t generally moderated. The links never made it to comments, so it does them no good.
I’m going to “no follow” things after everything quiets down, and reconstruct my missing month in the archives when I have time.
I would hope that people understand that I certainly don’t recommend what I did for everyone. Blogger could be great if they would just spend some money on design and hardware. I don’t understand why they don’t have another level of service that you could pay for to guarantee reliability.
See, this is why I love Movable Type. They have a combination of SpamLookUp and MT Blacklist (a new plugin now makes Blacklist work with MT 3.2). Combined, I hardly have to worry about spam. If I do get a bunch, the interface allows me to deal with 20 at a time. However, I rarely even get that much spam anymore.
All of those tools are available and I use them, but HaloScan did it for me. I can mark as spam a couple of dozen posts at a time with a single keystroke, or delete them the same way, but I didn’t even see them before.
I have gotten a few bounced by complaining to Blogger and TypePad about spammers using their sites, but now I let the filters take over.
I don’t like to censor anything, but they haven’t offered anything that I think people would be interested in buying.
And if anyone *wonders why* I am still to techie-dweebie to take on an alternate site from Blogger (fooey) – still so much to learn and understand to keep a good site and prevent the trash from building up and clogging yer page.
But I DO LIKE the new page an look.
😀
I use Haloscan because I was getting those annoying spam posts. I’m not popular enough to have trolls. *sniff*
Karen, it get easier all the time, but there is still too much “assumed knowledge” in the system. I haven’t said anything about creating a .htaccess file and changing file permissions, because that really is geeky and was really annoying when it came up out of no where when I made what I thought was a minor change. You really shouldn’t have to do that.
LK, exactly how long would a troll last at your place? You want one to play with, and don’t deny it. They swing by, read the comments and leave. I would send Luke or Golden Boy over but you would be cruel and destroy them.
If you just take the hammer away from LK, they might live long enough to actually escape. See, they’re like ants, until one makes it back, they don’t have a trail for others to follow back.
I would be nice to them. I swear!
*crosses fingers behind back and glares at Rook*
Right, and Army of Mom would also play nice, right?