Since the explosion in the world of blogging over the last few years one of the biggest problems has become comment spam. This is when somebody automatically (or perhaps even by hand) adds some lame comment to your blog which is actually promoting their website. A good proportion (at least in my experience) is promoting online prescription drugs. The kind that we all used to get emails about before the days of Gmail.
Many things have been tried such as Google’s support of the <a rel=”nofollow”> tag and the use of a CAPTCHA to prove you are human.
A few months back I installed Akismet. It is a product from WordPress themselves and you require an API key from them to enable it on your blog but it is such an amazing tool. Because it interfaces with the Akismet website it is constantly updated and you don’t need to update spam “definitions” like you would do with a virus checker or other such application.
Any spam it blocks is sent back to the Aksimet database to enable it to learn and update itself to help others. You don’t need to maintain your own “blacklist” of spammers and in my experience it is very, very effective. You can pick out false positives or any missed spam and this gets reported back to Akismet so it can be updated and improved. According to the website “Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.”
According to Akismet 4,853 comments have been detected as spam on this blog alone. You can also see how Akismet is performing world wide. From their website:
- 1,781,113,909 spams caught so far
- 2,964,756 so far today
- 95% of all comments are spam
So if you are suffering from the problem of blog spam and you use WordPress then give it a try.
Google has added some new webmaster tools to its sitemaps console. The first gives you information on Googlebot’s activity on your site. It lists number of pages crawled per day, number of kilobytes downloaded each day and the average time spent downloading a page. Click the thumbnail to see a larger view. You can see that this site has few pages but it is growing a little each day.
The next new feature allows you to take control of how often Googlebot crawls your site. Googlebot places some load on your server and you can set the crawl rate to “slower” to reduce this load or if your pages change less often and don’t need crawling as frequently. If Google think your site can handle the bandwidth and Googlebot has the ability to crawl your site faster then the “faster” option becomes available. This increases how often the bot visits your site.
There are also a couple of additional features. The first is the ability to opt in to Google Image Labeler. This allows people to label the images on your website. The final addition is a URL count in the sitemaps tab. This tells you how many of your sitemap URLs Googlebot is crawling.
I came across this article today that shows you how to hide a file inside a jpeg image using WinRar. It’s very cool but you can’t use it for top secret stuff as the information is stored in plain text and the large file size of the image looks a bit suspicious. However, if you want to keep something secret this is a good way of doing it.
 First of all create your jpeg picture and your text file that you want to hide. I have a picture of Frank Lampard and a text file containing some secrets I never want anybody to see. Create a rar archive containing the files you want to hide.
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 Open up the Windows Command Prompt. Navigate to the folder where your files are stored and type:
'copy /b lampard.jpg + secret.rar football.jpg' where lampard.jpg is the original picture, secret.rar is the file to be hidden, and football.jpg is the file which contains both.
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 Open up the newly created jpeg image to see if it displays the original image. Then open it with WinRar and look at the files contained inside. There you have it. Your secret text file is hidden inside an innocent looking jpeg.
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Take a look at the original article for more details.
Google has launched a service called “Google Docs and Spreadsheets” (they have kept away from “Google Office” for some reason. Maybe we will see this when new services are added). It’s not really new but is a merger of Writely and Google Spreadsheets.
It places a lot of emphasis on collaboration and you can share your documents and spreadsheets and allow other people to edit them. Each file is given a unique URL that you can send to firends and colleagues. People who you invite to collaborate can also invite other people to collaborateand you can alter this on a file-by-file basis.
The interface is consistent between both applications for people who had problems with Writely. I also like the feature where you can send an email which is then converted into a document. I don’t know whether this was already a feature with Writely but I really like it.
A few days ago Google launched Google Code Search. If you haven’t heard of it yet it allows you to search publicly available source code in many different programming languages. You can also search using regular expressions. You can also do some cool things with it such as find acronyms
It all sounds great but in the days since it launched I have been reading a lot of stories about the possible misuse of it. The main worry seems to be the potential to locate bugs in software and exploit them. There is also the potential to track down passwords and look at propriatery source code that should not have been made available according to this NetworkWorld article, although they didn’t point out any specific examples.
I did come across this article containing a good list of dark and dangerous things to find. Some of my favourites include:
Read the full article to see them all. There are some really good ones there.
