Not really, but I liked the title. Then again, I’ve seen many a newbie “web master” say the same thing whenever they look at their logs…
I appears that I’m getting a lot more traffic when it comes to Blog indexing services. For instance:
bloglines.com (never heard of ‘em) indexed me the other day. While looking at their website, I was reminded of just starting a dynamic, php based, website that was going to be paid for by advertising. That was around the bubble and everyone was doing it, but bloglines doesn’t have that professional crisp touch to it. Oh, and if the site admin actually see’s this - no one cares about the weather anymore. Thats why I have a weather plugin for FireFox…
There are a few others that have indexed me as well, but I’m not sure about ibizconsole.net… I’m getting the spam vibe from them.
Speaking of spam, just a quick note and plugin alert… Spam Karma 2 is the one of the best anti-spam plugins I’ve ever seen. This plugin has kept the spam reaching the visitors of this blog to a bare minimum. On top of that, I haven’t customized anything about Spam Karma 2, and it’s catching nearly every single spam message. Out of the messages that make it through, I’ve only gotten a few by some smaller Google Adsense related spammers that literally write their own spam comment instead of using a bot.
Spam caught stats (based on % received)
Drugs (prescription): 35%
Sex (adult sites): 50%
Other (adsense related and such): 5%
Now, there is another thing that I have to mention. I run a fingerprint with all of my stories through a specific plugin. My fingerprint isn’t all that bad and lets users know where the story came from. I also did a search on my domain name. I came across some things that irked me, surprised me and even made me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside.
The irk:
Unfortunately, there are sites on the internet that steal content. Some flat out do it, some do it in a round about sort of way, but it still annoys me. Some just grab all the story titles and have links back, others may grab entire stories that have Tags that they grab off their RSS feeder.
The biggest offender keeps a running “blog” on their website of all of my posts, and I’m sure many other blogs as well. It’s my content, my writing, but its on their website. While I’d love to disable RSS, thats where most of the traffic comes in from (my feed), so I can’t. Although I’ve heard that the WordPress Ella will allow for me to work around this.
One other irk was that I actually got fooled by a URL (URI) that had my URL listed - it looked like a blog, had a little bit of my content, but when I clicked on it, I was suddenly the victim of Link Spam. Staring at 2 boobs, my jaw dropped open and my wife laughed at me for actually getting tricked. While I see this crap in my referrers list all the time, I had never seen a site use an RSS feed to grab content to specifically attempt to grab search engine traffic - tricky bastards.
The Surprises:
James McGovern, a recent commenter turned out to be a published author. I had no clue (no offense James) but I’ve been under a rock for the last few years.
Isabel Wang also mentioned me - ok, I actually knew about this one when it happened and that really made me feel good.
I’ll put this one more towards funny: I’m in every single PHP Manual Files (ie: languages) for the getimagesize() function…
The warm and fuzzy:
James McGovern actually recommended that Matt Asay (SocialText) take a look at my site over an article. Now granted, I think it was more for a chance at a smack down, but hey, it’s all good.
Now, for some news. I’m working on 3 major articles right now, which is why there hasn’t been a lot of original content lately. Those 3 are: Alfresco vs SharePoint, Part 2 (Now a 4 Part Series of posts) - A company review of Rent A Coder (this one may take a little longer than I originally expected) & a story on Making Fully Transportable SQL Queries.
I’ll get around to publishing the first of the three soon.
