The Dog is Back (Was Our Absence Noted?)… and Barking

Not sure if the net really even noticed, but for the last few days CogDogBlog was been Four Oh Four, off-line, DOA, kaput, flat-lined.

It is almost ironic- on my plane flight out from Phoenix to Austin, a thought floated in my mind that I had not recently showed my gratitude to Audree, a colleague from my Maricopa days, who is not only a brilliant programmer (she coded the Maricopa eportfolio software), but for the last year, she has provided my free web hosting for CogDogBlog on a server she maintains for her outside work.

The irony was that she emailed me that night to let me know my apache web server was unable to handle out of the ridinary requests way out of control, and that it needed to go offline as it was dragging down the other web sites on her server…. and that she was getting out of the hosting business altogether. Apparently there was some nefarious action going on externally, no surprise considering the barrage of porn / pills/ casino comment spam lobbed this blog’s way.

Anyone per chance trying to get to the site might have seen some out of place electronics company’s web site… this is just an artifact of CDB being offline and the DNS falling over to some other one on Audree’s server. We should be widely available in another 24 hours.

I was not mad at all, and took it as my cue to rouse up a web hosting solution.. so taking D’Arcy’s frequent high praises, I set up an account at DreamHost, and like D’Arcy, said, it took minutes to set up the account. Next, I trucked over to GoDaddy to insert a new DNS entry. Then I went back to the old site, and started ftp-ing files from old server to new (Fetch makes this easy, just slide folders from one ftp window to another, server to server). I also used the phpMyAdmin on the old site to export the MySQL database (a 12 Mb blob), eventually ftp-ed to the new site,a nd sucked into the new site’s database via command line mysql.

It’s all there, easy-peasy. Gotta love databases.

Okay, now for some harsh barking, that I will place below the blog front page and RSS feed’s fold line.

This will hardly be the first, nor likely last time I reach for a rant against spammers and those that abuse us small fry web sites with their relentless efforts to insert un-wanted, irrelevent web links to sites with URLs that might make even a lumberjack blush.

I mean, when my comment spam filters catch in the span of 24 hours, 300 attempts to insert some &#^$%-bestiality-^#&&$ porn links, it just seems pointless to even try and hope this will ever change.

So my first lifting of this dog’s leg is on Google, whose empire and mega buck stock riches are built upon the competition for ranking based on web links — provides the dripping raw meat that is the bait of the bottom dwelling scum who do everything they can to infuse links to nasty sites into blogs of school teachers, collectors, non profit organizations, hobbiests, independent web site/bloggers, quilters, retired librarians, farmers, who toss a few of their personal, hard earned bucks at web host companies for a place to try and do some good.

I have never even read anything that suggested Google even acknowledges that they provide the incentive for a whole industry of sleazy profiteers who’s link attacks consume time, energy, and resources of us long tail dwellers. As much as I love Google, I think they are inexcusably shameless for being at the root cause of such rampant abuse of the net.

But even more so, I fail to fathom how the perpetrators of porn / pill / casino link attacks can really foretell a future when they reflect on their life legacy as a petty leach, or that they regale their grandkids about their years of putting porn links onto the web publishing spaces of thousands of individuals.

There’s more invective. I can see a lack of conscious that would even cause a spammer to even consider their future or their impact on innocents they feed from. Here it is… y’all think you are pretty clever in the tricks you use to get your crap on our pages. But that’s puny on the cleverness scale. Nada. It’s chicken shit… no, it is the worms that eat chicken shit… no, it is the bacteria that lives inside the anuses of the worms that eat…

So I dare one of you… to apply your cleverness in foisting porn links on others, to actually apply it to do something virtuous, solve a real problem, aid the work of some NGO, create a tool that can help social relief agencies, support the efforts to seek alternative energy, or run a clever idea that can raise funds for the addressing the human tragedy in Darfur, or … Wow, what a silly, stupid dream, a hallucination… but yet I dare you spam mongers– because I don’t think there is a single one of you cretins smart enough, big enough, even human enough, to rise out of the musty foul slime you slither in, no, you are not smart, clever, intelligent enough to do anything above the sewers you inhabit. I dare one of you to come out, claim your wretched past, and do one small tiny thing that is actually of value to help even one person. You can’t because you are feeble, weak, and can only pursue the lowest of hanging fruit.

None of y’all has the ganas, the chutzpah, the intelligence, the know-how, the sense of humanity to do such a thing. And if there really was one such creature, and you actually did something of value, you would gain such golden, virtuous notoriety that was seen by the world, your personal gains would out scale anything you make now by putting animal sex or poker links on our blogs.

I dare you. But I would bet more than a paycheck that none of you will even dare try. Cause you are just not sharp enough.

Double dare ya.

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