CogBlogged Tagged ‘web bad dog’

I pretty much just delete most twitter friends requests… I already track most of the folks I want to. But after about the 6th or 7th “Xxxxxx is following you” message from the same person, I got a creepy feeling like someone was breathing bad breath down my neck. If I have little patience for blog spam, twitter spam is down there as well: I visited this spam tweeter, but only to block them. What happens? Are you sure you want to block this person? Here’s what blocking means: * You will no longer show up in the blocked person’s list of friends. * Your updates won’t show up on the blocked person’s profile page. * The blocked person will not be able to add you as a friend. Perfect. Go away. And brush your teeth or buy a mint, damnit.

I’ve had a number of months of quiet resignation of the ever constant flow of email spam (now unreadable PDFs of stock offers, still sweet deals to enlarge body parts I am not equipped with, great sounding mortgage offers for homes I don’t own in Florida), not to mention the torrent of blog spam that I watch over the 10 or so blogs and wikis I touch. But a trackback I got today to a link farm, a place designed to only generate internal links to itself (via spam insertion to innocent blogs) is just the kind of smelly roach that fired me up. Al pages on the infernal site are self linking, each one laced with Google AdSense links, in the marginal hopes some fool might click and generate some nano revenue for the roach-a-teers. So a blog post I posted today contained a NMC presentation that had a [...]

I’m sure the old white hairs who pull the strings at Big Business sit back in the leather chairs of the country club, and fondly remember the pre-internet days. Back then, customers had no easy access to information about companies their practices, and they sure could not publish their pesky complaints to a place where millions read them. That has changed, as covered in the March 2007 Wired Issue on Companies who embrace (or abhor) “Radical Transparency”. But still, and I doubt I am the only one, when trying to address a customer service issue with a company, you can feel like their entire structure is meant to frustrate you into just giving up. Of course, this post is headed down the road of my own petty complaint (hey, that’s what blogs are for, right?), a mere molecule dropped into the ocean of customers. I have a mobile phone. In [...]

The expedia jingle (and their annoying 1-800 number) has that annoying… “DOT COMMMMMM” – but I am ready to change it to “dot crap”. I am currently stranded unexpectedly in Chicago as Expedia booked my on a flight that does not exist. I planned travel following the NMC Summer Conference to fly from Indianapolis to Minneapolis via Chicago. Getting from Indy to here was no problem, and was even fun as the airport was full of NMC Conference attendees, so time as spent chatting with Andy, Ruben, Tim, Morgan, plus down the wing Jen and Sam from Maricopa, David from Princeton (on the phone, just like in the NMC 2008 Summer conference preview video), and two guys form USC. It was like another conference session. The hitch was when I got to Chicago for my connection. I had gobs of time, but could not find any listing for my flight. [...]

I’m going to get worried when email spammers finally develop good writing skills. Today, I earned another pile of money, a million pounds courtesy of Microsoft (hey they have gazillions to spare, believable, eh?) Dumb spamming, or How to Spam Like a Moronic Dummy: Use a forged emailed address that is from cox.net? dead giveaway. Dumb. I think Microsoft is a big enough company to use their own email systems Use bad grammar- “The prestigious Microsoft”– why not “The Great and Powerful (ignore the man behind the curtain) Microsoft” More bad grammar. No one uses correct tense, least of all Microsoft? Does this mean they did not use grammar check in Outlook? Dumb. Oh, supply “serial numbers and your drew the luck number” Just grammatically brilliant. Beyond Dumb, Dumb as a doorpost. Suspicious contact info. “Mr Kyle Hitchens” lists his email as kylehitchenss@yahoo.de (c.f. #1 above for email address)– and [...]

I can count on one paw the number of articles I’ve read on Slate. I am definitely thinking this rag is worth it best virtual fish wrapping, and mostly is a waste of web code and server electricity. They are not alone, but lobbing the criticisms at Twitter like in What Are You Doing? The allure of Twitter, the latest Web sensation are as simplistic and thoughtful as catching fish in a barrel with a shotgun. Of course you can dismiss its potential by culling off the easy to find fluff tweets like “listening to Curious George in the background while drinking terroir coffee whose headquarters happen to be 5 minutes away” and “Just recovered from a night of playing WoW.” Yep, that is enough dedicated journalism and thoughtful research. Yep. You could just as easily condemn all journalism but reviewing the best articles from The National Enquirer. You could [...]

This is an old, tired, dog beaten story on this blog, but for the umpteenth time I’ve had to modify some web form that sis et up to collect data, because some script junkie decided to fill the form fields with PPC URLS (links to porn, pills, casinos, the un-holy trinity). It’s all in the hopes that web forms will actually post the content somewhere to a web page, which then improves, in theory, the Google Rank for the spammers slimy client. It must work, as it would not be tried if not. And for the umpteenth umpteenth time, I must wag my paw at Google, since they provide the financial incentive that robs many a blogger and small time web owner of time spent dealing with form spam. This is what I had to do this morning, on a form that does nothing but collect some contact information, and [...]

In the “Blog Spammers Are Getting Trickier” departments, a comments snared today: Hi, What an Idea! Thank you for sharing this posted article for me or for every one, you made a great job for your Blog.Keep it up the good work.. Again thank you very much.. Cheers Regards, Cheska Smith <a href=”http://www.XXXXdeletedSpamSitexxx.com/”>Dog Training Device</a> it’s the approach of almost human saying generic praise. But the lack of specific context foils it, along with the tell tale URL to a marketing web site. And of course, the lovely, grammatically poised… “Keep it up the good work..”

My Twitter IM Buddy just keeled over again: Popularity has a high price.

MediaWiki – love the app, hate the documentation, a term used loosely. Here is a normal set of steps it took to find the answer. What I was looking for was that special MediaWiki URl you need to use to edit the sidebar links of your site. Go to the bookmark I had for MediaWiki Handbook Type in the search box navigation links I get some results but there’s a big red border box warning at the top: Important note: the instructions on this page may be out of date, incorrect, or unnecessary; for most requirements, the FAQ contains the necessary instructions. This page, however, explains some tasks not covered in the FAQ! Follow the link above for FAQ which looks like I am close, a heading of How do I change the contents of the navigation toolbar? But no, there is a fork in the docs, one for MediaWiki [...]