Jeff Hoy, American

A writer on a for profit blog full of advertising complaining about a for profit web site being … full of advertising…

On top of that, Office Web Apps’ landing page usually sticks an ugly ad in the lower-right corner, one you’re probably used to seeing on the sites of newspapers that have lost touch with their advertisers, blogs hungry for monetization, and other hey-whatever ad sections. It’s less than appealing, especially when the design seems to blend into the beige-ish focus of Live.com’s design. (Note that you can change your Live.com theme, but the ad doesn’t ever go away).

You could read the rest of the article if you want… but there’s nothing really to see there, kinda lame.

I’m blogging for Big Squid R/C!  I have a real audience!  So go there for all the R/C news you used to find here.  Not to worry though, I’ll still be blogging here about all the other stupid junk that I usually blog about.

Comment spam is one of the hazards of running open comments on any blog or website.  I’ve dealt with nearly 5,000 spam comments on my blog, and I don’t have nearly the traffic of any of the huge blogs out there.  But recently my comment spam stopped dead because of four easy to use WordPress plugins and a configuration change or two.

Akismet – This is a spam filtering plugin, it comes with the default WordPress installation, you just need to activate it and sign up for a WordPress.com account to get your API key to start using it.  Akistmet’s not going to stop the spam, but what it will do is identify comments that come from common spam sources.  It will segregate those comments and you can then review them later to make sure there weren’t any comments labeled as spam erroneously.  (Plugin Directory link: Akismet)

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – You’re starting to see these everywhere.  It’s a small image with a series of letters and numbers that you have to type in to confirm that you are a human.  These work on the principle that a human would be able to read the image, while a computer (spam bot) would not. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam is a simple to use plugin, usually all you have to do is install and activate it and it starts working out of the box.  Some people may need to make a small change to their theme to get it working but most downloadable themes are already setup to use it.  (Plugin Directory link: SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam)

TTC User Registration Bot Detector – Some spam bots try to get around non-open comment systems by signing up for an account at your blog and then using that account to post comments.  The TTC User Registration Bot Detector checks every computer that tries to register an account on your website against the list of known spammers at Spamhaus.  It also logs all registrations so if you see one IP address trying to register multiple accounts you can put it in your own blacklist to keep it from trying again.  (Plugin Directory link: TTC User Registration Bot Detector)

WP-Ban – Sometimes, no matter how hard they try, the plugins above still let through a spam message every now and then.  WP-Ban lets you ban computers from accessing your WordPress site based on their IP address, domain name, web site referrer, or user agent (browser type, bot type, etc.).  When a banned computer tries to access your site, they are given an error message, which you can customize, telling them they have been banned.  It prevents them from accessing every page on your site, including directly going to the wp-comments.php page which is the only place most spam bots go on your site.  (Plugin Directory link: WP-Ban)

Those are the plugins I use to keep spam out of my comments now.  There’s a couple other configuration changes you can make to your WordPress installation to assist those plugins as well.

Under the Discussion Settings you have three options that you can set to moderate spam.  The first one is to hold a comment in moderation if it contains more than a certain number of website URLs in it.  I currently have that set to two, which I believe is the default setting.  The next box down will hold comments in moderation if they contain certain words, URLs, or IPs.  You can specify words that are commonly used in spam messages on your site.  The WordPress.org documentation Wiki includes a list of spam words that you can copy and paste into this box.  Comments that are held in moderation are not considered spam until you mark them as such.  Every time a comment is held in moderation you should get an email asking you what you want to do with that comment.  The next box below that is the words blacklist box.  This list bypasses comment moderation and automatically marks any comment containing the words in the list as spam.  I consider this one to be a little more dangerous to use, so I don’t really use it.  But if you wish to, you could again use the list of spam words from the WordPress documentation wiki.

I’ve been running this combination of plugins and settings for a week now and I went from about 15 spams per day on average down to zero.  If you have a self-hosted WordPress installation and are struggling with spam then you might want to give this a try.

I’ve decided to move my site over to PowWeb.com. The transition is going to be less than smooth, unfortunately, as I had to completely reinstall WordPress from scratch and import my articles.  For some reason my SQL database transfer didn’t work.  Some of the images aren’t going to be working right off the bat, but I will have them fixed soon.  I may also go back and purge some of the more pointless posts from the site as I am going to try to focus more on one or two subjects rather than the shotgun blast of stuff I used to post.

Hindsight being 20-20 I should have started this transition a long time ago instead of waiting until the last-minute.

My photography site hasn’t made a transition yet because it suffered from the same problem.  It’s just going to disappear down the memory hole for the time being.

Oh, and my album of the year award goes to Coalesce’s Ox.  If you’re a head-banging metalcore junkie, give it a shot, you might like it.  Immortal’s All Shall Fall is a close second.

I’ve been using Go Daddy hosting for about four years.  In that time they have added new features, increased disk storage, and upped the bandwidth limit on my account.  All of that free of charge, there have been no fee increases.  I haven’t had any downtime and no loss of data.  Go Daddy runs a very tight ship seemingly.

If you’ve been wanting to get your own blog, or move to an independent blogging platform, then I highly recommend Go Daddy.  And what’s better for you is that they are now having a .COM domain sale.  Go now to get your own .com domain for only $7.49.

I’ve been involved in creating web sites for over a decade now.  In that time I’ve learned quite a bit about webhosting technology and business.  There are literally thousands upon thousands of webhosting companies all over the world.  Everything from your huge mega hosts like GoDaddy and RackSpace to your small, local hosts like Farmers Telephone Company populate this diverse business.  The choices are complicated even further by the fact that every hosting company offers different features, equipment, and tools.  You could spend weeks searching google, looking for a webhost.  You’re in luck though, as some enterprising people have decided to make finding a webhost much easier.

One great place to find yourself a good webhost for your new blog, family, or business site is at Web Hosting Geeks.  Web Hosting Geeks has information on a ton of different companies and each one has been reviewed and rated by users.  They also break their list down into categories like Windows Hosting, Ecommerce Hosting, and Blog Hosting to make picking the right host for you even easier.

In addition to the listings and reviews there is also a webhosting blog with a lot of useful information.  In particular, check out their category for web site CMSs.  They have many posts about content management systems, including a very good Joomla vs. WordPress post, to help you decide which cms is best for you.

So, if you are ever in the need for web site hosting for your new web site, go check out Web Hosting Geeks.

…don’t care about this any more.

I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut.

It’s only a week into the new year and one of my predictions for 2009 is already coming true.  I’m bored with blogging.

Scott Bourne over at TWIP posted on brand loyalty and the reasons behind it.  I would slightly disagree on terminology with him, what he’s talking about is beyond brand loyalty.  It’s personal identification, meaning, people get so attached to a brand name or product that they think they’re as much a part of it as it is of them.  It’s not loyalty, they feel they ARE the product and any insult directed at the product is directed at them.  Some parts of the web refer to it as fanboyism.  If somebody introduces themselves as a “Canon shooter” and they’re not getting a check from Canon for saying it then that is a person who’s self is completely ingrained in the product.  It usually comes from spending a lot of money on said product and the self-doubt that usually comes with it.  Scott goes on to make a lot of points about that and the fear that drives it.  He’s pretty much right on.

Brand loyalty though is usually something along the lines of “Well, I owned this Dodge pickup for 20 years and it’s held up great, but it’s time for a new truck.  I think I’ll get another Dodge.”  That’s brand loyalty, not fanboyism.

Fanboyism certainly isn’t limited to photography gear.  I see it all the time in my other hobbies.  You have Losi drivers, Associated drivers, Traxxas drivers and they’ll have knock-down, drag-out arguments over which company makes the best monster truck or 1/10th scale stadium truck or whatever.  Don’t even get me started on the video game scene.  Fanboyism is taken to new heights in the video games.

I don’t really understand where it all comes from.  If you bought something, spent a lot of money on it, then just enjoy it.  Just remember that if you spend $1500 – $3000 on a camera body, you’re going to have a great camera no matter what brand you go with.  Who cares what somebody else takes pictures with, or plays video games on, or drives.  If you’re spending all your time arguing over who’s whatsits is better then you’re not out there spending time on the hobby you say you love.

Now that’s not to say that there can’t be a little ball-busting here and there over these things, I tease my dad sometimes because his Digital Rebel XS is so much smaller than my 5D, not that that really makes any kind of difference.  But if you’re sending people death threats about this stuff, like Scott says he’s received, then you need to chill out.  You should consider giving up the hobby, take up something that doesn’t get you so worked up.  Maybe try checking yourself into the psych ward and watching the grass grow for a while.