Technology —
The DreamHost “777″ promotion is dead. Up until about a week ago, DreamHost offered $0.77/month hosting as something of a promotional stunt to the first 777 folks to sign up. The quota’s been met.
If you’re still looking for a good deal, try the promo code 88ISGREAT. You can find other codes on the net, but this one is just about the best.
Time for a deal.
My website has been hosted with DreamHost for over three years now, and I really couldn’t be happier. I highly recommend their service. Now, in addition to giving kudos to this web host, I’m happy to give you a $90 discount for signing up. Use the promo code: DEAL90
After you sign up, you can create your own promo code, publicize it on your blog or website, and make a little cash for yourself!
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TrackBack spam just got worse. Today is August 6th, 2005, and the spammers just upgraded. TrackBack spamming is a big deal again.
First things first. If you’re a MT user, it’s high time you installed SpamLookup. This is the best plugin I’ve ever seen for Movable Type; without exagerration, it adds probably 25% extra functionality onto the application. “Plugin” really doesn’t do SpamLookup justice; it’s more of an upgrade.
With SpamLookup, you can effectively fight the New School TrackBack spammers. It provides a wordlist filter, IP/hostname blacklist lookups, proxy checking, hyperlink limits, and IP block matching. This is your swiss army knife for fighting TB spam. Note: You’ll need a recent version of Movable Type to have TrackBacks moderated, otherwise they can only be blocked.
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Over the past few days, I’ve gotten hit with a couple of nasty TrackBack spams. It’s not overwhelming (yet), but I think the spammers are up to something new.
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Lately, I’ve noticed three frustrating things about email addresses in web forms. All originate in ignorance on the part of the web designer. Time for a clue, folks.
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My recent move from underscores to hyphens in filenames has caused me a couple of unexpected headaches, but it’s also taught me some interesting things about Apache’s mod_rewrite. I’ve been buried in .htaccess for hours lately, playing detective to strange behavior on my site. My most recent discovery involves the limitations of Apache’s implementation of regular expressions in mod_rewrite. I think the developers were trying to prevent wannabes like me from screwing up their own sites and consuming server resources, but it’s caused me some frustration.
Referrer (or referer) spam has become a serious problem in the blogosphere. We need an intelligent way to eliminate this growing nuisance. I’ve thought about and researched this for the past few days, and below I offer a proposal for a technological solution to this problem. It requires programming, and I am not a programmer, so I welcome suggestions, corrections, and improvements to this proposal.
I hope that this blog entry can serve as something of a starting point for information about referrer spam as well as a sandbox for exchanging ideas about methods of curbing or eliminating it.