Automated Spam - and why it’s wrong
There’s a nice article on nowsell.com relating to the art of blog spamming - basically a marketing company who have realised that posting links all over other peoples websites is going too far…
now if I didn’t have to do a ton of stuff to keep the rest of them at bay my life would be a lot easier. There’s been times I’ve wanted to close this blog down just because keeping on top of the spam was impossible.
Some more new anti-spam stuff behind the scenes now seems to be working, and I’ve had no comment or trackback spam get through the traps recently - so public commenting has been reopened, and so far is being kept clean by the traps…
Love Songs and the Robots of Zirgon B
From Google Videos, a brilliant love song (as it’s St Dwynwen’s Day)!
From this mornings news
Filed under: General, In The News, Science & Technology, Themeparks
Nothing here really worth a full post on it’s own, but here’s a few interesting stories…
Disney Buys Pixar
It was only a matter of time really, with Pixar’s multi-picture deal with Disney ending, and the characters from the films Toy Story and Monsters Inc being such big draws at the Themeparks…
77% of Google users don’t realise it’s tracking them
Yes, the majority of people who use Google (myself included) didn’t realise it was recording the details of their searches…
Jarhead
Simply excellent, a film that neither glorifies war, nor presents an anti-war message - a film that simply tells the story of Desert Shield/Storm through the eyes of one small group of Marines.
The story goes from basic training through to the burning oilfields, with some very telling moments, and to me, really captured the emotions, monotony, lonliness and itchiness for action that the young marines experienced.
A film that I’m glad I saw.
Ooh-Rah
Pocket Opera
Opera have recently released the first public beta of their web browser for the Pocket PC (only 2003 editions) - something those of us who use a browser on our PDA’s have been waiting for - a practical alternative to PocketIE…
So is it any good…
Well, you can tell it’s a beta - the installer gave me a warning that it wasn’t compatible with my device - it is!
Now, it’s a beta - there are plenty of bugs (e.g. Landscape mode doesn’t work on my device) however even now it renders pages better than pocketIE - for example, the European Coaster Club website renders fairly well on Opera:
However nice as it is, it needs to get a few bugs fixed before it’s a usable browser, but this is certainly a product to keep a very close eye on.
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/winmobileppc/
AntiSpam War (again)
I think I’ve found a way to stop most of the automated comment spam - so I’ve re-enabled comments for non-logged in users!
You still need to log in to access the details on “2lbs a week” - but comments on the main blog are open again.
Hopefully I won’t have to close this again anytime soon (if I do, I’ll probably be migrating the site to WordPress - which seems better at stopping spam!)
Oakwood’s Construction
A new website has sprung up to follow the construction of the new Eurofighter coaster at Oakwood (widely believed to be called “Speed”)
This site along should be worth keeping an eye one.
However, http://www.oakwoodfusion.co.uk/ are using the same photos, but with their headache inducing “green on green” colour scheme, I can’t recommend visiting without a couple of paracetamol available…
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