CogBlogged from ‘November, 2003’

Zoom-zoom. More power for those looking for learning objects or instructional resources. MERLOT’s Federated Search allows you to enter keywords (say “cell mitosis”) and with one click conduct a search of MERLOT, Australia’s )EdNA Online, and the Science Math resources of SMETE. Actually the EdNA folks had demo-ed this first at the MERLOT 2003 conference last August. That is a lot of search power for you. Now if only the search results were savable as a URL… or federated RSS… or free wine… <tiphat>tip of the blog hat to Brian Lamb for mentioning this recently</tiphat>

More detective work with analysis of web server logs with AWstats shows that poor spammers are unable to find their links on my web site. Alas! What is a roach to do! Does that mean that they will target me next? No luck, as they are blocked at the door by the MTBlacklist army boot. Does this mean that they are looking for the fruits of their spam roach labor? Too bad, no signs here…

I was recently looking for a package to implement a discussion board for a group project, and luckily came across phpBB :: Creating Communities. phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customisable open-source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites. It indeed is powerful, slick, fast, and a snap to set up. You need a server that supports PHP (although you do not need any PHP knowledge to run this) and one of the databases listed above (just about any web host offering PHP liekly offers mySQL). The one bit I stumbled on was it seemed a named database needed to be created first for the configuration script to run. [...]

The euphoria of stomping out blog spam cockroaches may be short-lived. Mark Pilgrim lays out the depressing, sobering truth on weblog spam [dive into mark]. Mark sez the good times will last last than a month… And then the spammers will strike back. They’ll complain to your ISP that you’re spamming, and your ISP will kick you off without so much as a by-your-leave. They’ll hire lawyers and bring you down with bogus DMCA injunctions. They’ll own a million Windows boxes and direct them all at your server. They’ll find your social security number and steal your identify and ruin you personally. It’s all been done. It’s all been done before, and it was completely all-consuming, and it still didn’t work. Spammers register dozens of new domains each day; you can’t possibly keep up with them. They’re bigger and smarter and faster than you. It’s an arms race, and you’ll [...]

Now that I have an analysis tool for my server, I am digging up all kinds of neat findings. From the referer logs (links from outside to specific web pages on my site), came one from MGMT110 Class Projects / blogs At Earlham College, in Indiana. This site is in an “Information Technology and Society” course lists the group projects and individual student webllogs. It appears the students had to create web sites based on current issues ranging from “SPAM”, “Pirivacy”, “Digital Music”, etc. This project page uses our RSS2JS script to dyanmically display the 2 latest posts to each project group (well that makes 8 hits on that script per page load). Interesting that in this class, each student creates their own MovableType blog and then serves up the project pages from within there– the blogs are used to document the development of different phases of the project. The [...]

I was thinking about David Carter-Tod’s recent note on how his RSS parsing script service was getting heavy hits, you success and all of its burdens. I began getting curious on how often our RSS2JS script was being used (and I know that the page needs some re-design and chunking), since it runs on the same server as our MovableType blogs. A few weeks back I had flushed the cache directory (long story) and found remnants of several hundred feeds. But I has overdue on installing a web access log analyzer (that is the log from the web server a “web log”, not a “webblog”, confusing?) A colleague had recently showed me the amazing (and free) open source AWstats and with not too much trouble got it up and running. It is a slick system and provides enough stats and graphs to keep you busy for a long while. Well, [...]

Boston University prof Michael Feldman offers up 10 Things I Bet You Didn’t Know About Google. After #1 (some numbers, stats) follow 9 types of things Google can do besides just keyword web searches (<tiphat>tip of the blog hat to Scripting News</tiphat>). Nothing was tremendous news to this dog, but it is a helpful reminder to others that Goolge offers country specific searches, language translations, math, phone books (Prof Mike forgot the map functions), numerical conversions, and more. This page might have gone one step further by actually providing the links that perform the Google query. For example, #5: Do you know Google can help you find vital supplies like Pizza and Taxis? Try searching for taxi 02215.’ÄÝ Or pizza 02215.’ÄÝ Or your own zip code.’ÄÝ Experiment and see if you can find other key words. Those could have easily been hyperlinked: http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza+02215 gets you Prof Miike’s nearest pie joint, [...]

I found it interesting that the May 2003 Melbourne Digital Arts and Culture Conference (melbourneDAC) created a web site for the conference using MovableType (some links seem to go to non MT pages)- an interesting use of weblogs beyond “cat diaries”. But beyond that, as was noted at Kairosnews was that all of the presented papers are available online (PDFs). Sadly, this practice is rare at professional conferences, where so much effort goes into printing those bulky volumes that get tossed or dumped on a shelf after the show. As noted: I was stunned to find the papers of the MelbourneDAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, all online. There are really some incredible articles here; this must have been one heck of a conference. I’ve printed out most of the papers (it’s well over 200 pages) and hope to gain some insight into game theory by reading [...]

Adam Kalsey provides the rallying cry to in his Comment Spam Manifesto. Also check out Adam’s story of nailing a blog spam roach where it hurts. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. Youˆ‚ve picked a fight with us and itˆ‚s a fight you cannot win… Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated. Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the products you are advertising know of [...]

D’Arcy recently exalted MT Spamkiller with proofs from his blog how the spam cockroaches were being blocked. I had not peeked at my MovableType activity log in a while, and was overwhelmed at the number of comment spams that were stopped by Jay Allen’s MTBlacklist plug-in. I shudder at the thought of doing the manual deletion I did just a few weeks ago. I can hear an entire army of soliders smashing their heels down on the comment spam cockroaches.