Blogging

Comment spam is a pest. This site, running 4 different installations of WordPress, is protected by Aksimet, which daily catches a few hundred automated spam comments. I just couldn’t make do without that kind of protection. Now, project Honeypot, otherwhise known for their somewhat unorthodox ways of tracking IP-addresses involved in classic mail spam, has decided to take action against blog comment spammers as well.

Conventional wisdom about comment spammers is that they are from China, Russia and Korea, but on Project Honeypot’s stats over recently caught spambot IP addresses (as shown on the right), I see more IP addresses located in the US. But then again, conventional wisdom is seldom completely wrong. USA tops the list of active comment spammer IP’s, but closely followed by Korea, Russia, Japan and China. All according to Project Honeypot’s main stats.

Today I received the following mail from them, and I think it sounds excellent. This page already has a few of my very first Quicklinks. Hidden to human users, but quite visible to comment spam bots.

Dear Nikke Lindqvist:

Tuesday is day two of the Five Days of Project Honey Pot Announcements.
Yesterday we announced QuickLinks which allow even more people to help
with the Project. Today we are announcing that Project Honey Pot has
begun tracking a new kind of online beastie: Comment Spammers.

If you’re not aware, comment spammers crept up from the depths in the
last few years. They are robots are running around the internet leaving
their comments on feed back forms, blogs, and forums. The purpose is not
only to drive traffic to the sites when people visiting the forums click
the links, but also to increase search engine rank by increasing the
number of back links to their site.

To learn more about how we’re tracking comment spammers, please visit:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/5days_tuesday.php

We turned the system on only a little over a week ago and already have
caught more than 600 unique IPs engaged in comment spamming. We expect
that number will dramatically increase over time. If you haven’t done so
already, install a honey pot or add a QuickLink to help trap comment
spammers. If you’ve already installed a honey pot there’s nothing you
need to do. The form traps necessary to catch comment spammers are
likely already being delivered to your honey pot. Login to your account
and check out your Dashboard to see what comment spammers you’ve helped
catch.

As always, if you’re prefer not to get these updates, simply login to
your Project Honey Pot account and switch off notification emails under
the settings tab. Stay tuned for our big mid-week announcement tomorrow.
Until then, make sure to let your blogging friends know there’s a new
way to track comment spammers and we need their help!

The Project Honey Pot Team

=============================
Project Honey Pot
c/o Unspam Technologies, Inc.
1901 Prospector Avenue, Suite 200
Park City, UT 84060

I must, to my shame, admit that it was quite some time since I last gave Project Honepot any attention whatsoever. I had even forgot about this site’s active honeypot, located at www.lindqvist.com/scripts/pleasedliable.php

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It’s amazing to se the massive support that the international blogosphere is giving to freedom of speech in general and Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer in particular these days. Kareem Amer, or Abd al-Karim Nabil Sulayman is a 22-year old law student from Alexandria, who, like many other bloggers, has expressed his thoughts on everyday life, politics and the world he sees around him in his Blogspot blog.

However, most of us aren’t as brave as Kareem. We live in counties where freedom of speech is a natural thing, as expressed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). In Egypt expressing any views on the government, your university, or the prime minister is a prave thing to do.

I fully support the two campaigns and petitions for his immediate release.

I don’t care what Kareem’s views are. I only defend his rights to express them. I don’t know Kareem, but I have a feeling I would like him. I tend to do that, when people have the guts to express their oppinions - whatever those oppinons are.

I see it as every blogger’s duty to run to Kareem’s defence. If we don’t raise hell when one of us gets into trouble for doing what we all do, who will do it for us if and when we get into trouble?

Repressive regimes, such as the Egyptian, tend to scare of their critics now and again by setting examples. And four years in prison for saying that you thinks that your university is run as a terror regime and that Ahmed Nazif, the Egyptian prime minister acts as a farao? That’s a pretty strong message to every potential blogger to just shut up.

But I don’t think the Egyptian regime has counted in the international blogosphere. We are, quite able to send just a strong a message. A message of support for free speech. Kareem’s blog, has never been more popular. Even I have tried to read it, even though I don’t read arabic (and the translation tools are as useless as ever). It is getting more links than ever from everywhere, and I don’t think Blogger will ever shut it down after all the attention it is getting. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m slowly but surely moving old content from the KitSiPub published version of this site into my blogs. Stuff written in English, with an interest for a broader public than swedes will go here, to Nikke’s Index, while texts written in Swedish will end up in the Swedish blog (Nikke Index).

Simple enough. But I also have to figure out what to do with the really old articles, discussing old websites that don’t even exist any more… I just found one text from 2002 discussing the ping services at Blogdex, Popdex and DayPop… How many remember Blogdex today? Is it interesting enough to keep? My sentimental side tells me to save it, my historian-within agrees.

So what about the old Bush jokes? Are they interesting enough to keep.

Decisions, decisions…

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In November 2007 i moved most of the old Swedish content on Nikke’s Index into a WordPress blog called Nikke Index. Before that, I boneheadedly refused to refer to my site as a blog. It was a “personal site”, nothing else. But after installing blogs for a few clients, i though it was about time I opened up the site for some social interaction. And I’ve been in love ever since. Most of the features in KitSiPub, my very own CMS suddenly felt very outdated.

This is somewhat the confessions of a Johnny-come-lately blogger. At times it’s almost as being born again.

I haven’t changed my posting habits what so ever (except for refraining from writing in English for a while). But still I’ve gained a lot of new readers. At least readers that I know of, and readers that never would have reacted with mail, that now post comments, and place links that I probably never would have found before. At least not as quickly as when they’r reported via the Technorati ping service.

And now, today when WordPress 2.1 was released, I realised it’s about time I opened up a separate platform for blogging in English again.

Two languages - two blogs

Just like before, I won’t keep two language versions of the same content. I’ll stick with writing in English when an international audicence could find some interest in what I’m writing, and stick to Swedish when writing about striktly Swedish affairs.

I’ll also move some, but probably now all, old content into the blog. I’ll start out with moving stuff that hasn’t grown stale and still attracts some interest. And I’ll love to see some comments on all the old scam reports and fake lottery winning notifications I’ve published throughout the years…

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I must admit I wasn’t aware of this previously, but apparently even a website should be built in regard of the ancient FENG SHUI rules. And actually, reading through this page at www.newmediastudies.com/fengshui.htm sounds rather obvious. I think, I will have to make one or two changes around here tonight. Just read this:

“LIGHT AND COLOUR
Bright, clean pages will bring good ch’i. Darkly coloured pages, or (even worse) pages with dingy colour combinations, are bad.

Bold use of colour is good, and stimulates the flow of ch’i. White and blue, representing air and water, are good colours, although any imaginative use of bold colour should be positive. Insignificant bits of colour, or wishy-washy colour combinations, will not be effective. Graphics should be clear and well-defined. The messy dithering of colours that occurs with JPEG compression is bad feng shui.”

So, in order to bring my visitors good ch’i, some changes have to come here. Besides. It’s easyer for me to re-build this site than to re-decorate my home…

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This site is regularly scanned by Google. In fact, I have a much better rating on Google than I deserve. How is that? It’s no great secret really. Recently it mostly has to do with the fact that I am listed on sites like Daypop, Blogdex and the new Popdex (which, by the way, looks remarkably much like Blogdex).

Read the rest of this entry »

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