Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category

Ever since I rebuilt my website with WordPress and imported my blog from blogspot I’ve kept an eye on my server error logs.  I like to make sure people who arrive here from the old blog or from other links end up where they were looking to go. While I’ve redirects that catch almost all of the possible routes in I want to be sure and checking the error logs gives me a way to spot any I’ve missed.

I just went through last months logs.  Of the around 250 error pages served there was a rather annonymous blog page that needed redirection setting up for.  It accounted for 5 of the hits.  10 were typos or calls to deleted pages. 60 were bots trying crude hack attacks on the site trying known vulnerabilities in a variety of software. That left around 170 that I’d not been able to explain.  Every one a call to a comments page that when I checked didn’t exist. The address was a unique combination of a unique comment number and the page the comment had been posted on.

2006/02/more-thoughts-on-the-game-without-a-snappy-title/comment-page-1/#comment-9940

I’ve seen 404s like this for months and couldn’t work out why they were appearing.

Then it struck me what they were.  Those comment pages were for comments that Akismet caught as spam. The only way (short of brute force which would show up in the logs) that someone could know the combination of the comments unique ID and the page it had been posted on was to be the original poster (or the spam system that posted it) .  Those 404 pages must either be the spam bot coming back later to see if it worked or some other system running quality control before paying out for links to a site having been created.

I’ve not had a chance to match up spam messages to 404s because I keep my spam logs clear but I’m going to keep an eye on it and see if they support the idea.   I’m intrigued to see how often they check a comment, if they come fromt the same IP as the spam message and how long after posting they check.

I thought I’d post another satellite picture after last weeks picture of the boneyard. Being a fan of the old Bond film Goldfinger I thought Fort Knox and the United States Bullion Depository (the large building with nothing around it at the bottom of the map).

View Larger Map

I noticed that several newspapers had shots taken from Google Earth of the eleven square kilometer US Airforce 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group Aircraft Boneyard today so I thought I’d dig it up on Google maps to have a look myself.

View Larger Map

Google launching Buzz has crystalized a thought that’s been running through my head for a while.  Ever since the WWW came on the scene there have been a series of landgrabs for bits of the Internet.  Bits that give revenue which might be page impressions giving advertising revenue or e-commerce giving cold, hard, cash revenue.  Sometimes its been the potential for revenue or the myth of potential revenue.  That’s where we had the first big crash when the bubble burst.

At the moment a pile of the players are going after the social networking pie.  Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook and all the other general purpose networks are all busy trying to tie us into their set up.  The problem from a users point of view is that we end up with our network fragmented depending on where our friends are.  These networks are quite crude at the moment.  Basically they tend to be quite private or quite public but with messages shared with everyone or just one person.

Then there are all the niche network sites built on old style forums where we meet up with people who share an interest.  There are all sorts of sites which may have something you’re interested in from personal blogs by friends, news sites and everything else in between.

Keeping up with all of those takes time.  RSS and Atom feeds made it easier to keep up with sites by letting us know when there was something to read rather than having to trawl over the sites every few days.  TweetDeck lets you pull your social networks together in one place.

So after all the preamble here is my real thought – is the real winner down the road not going to be whichever social network grabs the most members or gets the model right but will it be the tool that we all use to keep up with Social Networks, RSS, forums and Email in one place.  I don’t know if it will be a web app, something you install or a mix of both but I wish that was the Buzz Google had launched today instead of the one we got.  That would seem to me to have been closer to Google’s mission to organise the world’s information.

Allegedly.  I’ll come to that in a minute.

Most spam is annoying but once in a while the bots assemble two random concepts that make a slightly surreal or scary combination.  Once in a while those are so out there and look so like real messages that they make it past the spam filters.  Here’s one I got today (I’ve pixellated out the site’s info not because I don’t want to embarrass them but because I don’t want to give them any publicity) about my post about gobos the other day…

I’m not going to go into the rubbish about SEO other than to say if they’re link building this way how do I know they’re not doing all sorts of black hat SEO that’s going to get them blacklisted as a bad neighbourhood and do me more harm than good.

In this case the bot found some of my recipes and some of my stuff about gobos and decided that there was a chance that there was some sort of long tail search that it could optimize for.  Given the money being mentioned for some of that kind of automatically written content it’s no wonder that companies are trying to get in on the act.  This one though takes the biscuit.  Or as the American’s might say the cookie.  Cookies are made with Cookie Cutters which is a term sometimes confused with gobos although strictly speaking cookies and gobos are not the same thing which is why I think the bot may have made its blind leap of machine logic.

What I find funny is the idea that they would include gobos in a recipe database.  Gobos.  Pieces of glass that are etched or otherwise treated so as to project images or patters from lights.  I can’t help thinking they would be a little bit chewy and might cause some indigestion.  Not quite as funny as Monty Python’s Albatros or Crunchy frog but not too far away.

Anyway it amused me but I’ve not explained the Edible Underwear connection.

So what does any of this have to do with Edible Underwear?  Not a lot really other than something that happened when out drinking with some friends who do a bit acting.  They’d been eating the left over sugar glass props (bottles and some glasses used in a fight scene) from a play to see how one of the bar staff they knew would react.  One young lady who was normally quite prim and proper who had probably had a bit too much to drink said it tasted like edible underwear and promptly went a fetching shade that matched the beetroot red of the wine bottle she was nibbling on…

I noticed awhile ago that I was blogging less.  Partly I put it down to frustration with the time it took me to add a page to my web site.  If I couldn’t easily add a page about something I didn’t need to blog about the page.  Partly it was a disatisfaction with the blog and site not being integrated.  Partly it was a concern about what I was blogging about.  I like posting about fun little discoveries – you tube videos, interesting web pages, announcement and all the other stuff thats going on.  However I was always picky about how much of it I posted.  I knew it could easily swamp out my own stuff in a huge noise to ratio disaster.  Its bad enough that I choose to post on several different themes I’m interested in rather than focusing on one theme.  Thats why I use categories and tags to classify my blog posts.

So I delt with the first two problems by switching my site to using WordPress as a Content Management System.  I know some people will say WordPress isn’t a CMS.  Frankly if it isn’t a Web CMS then every other Web CMS I’ve ever worked with isn’t either including the one those people are touting.  Yes it’s a blogging platform but that doesn’t stop it also being a CMS.

The third problem, the noise to content issue, I’ve pretty much put to rest by the happy accident of using microblogging.  Now I signed up to Twitter sometime in 2007 to see what all the fuss was about.  I didn’t really do anything with it till this summer when I needed to know about it for work (and probably foolishly removed my few early tweets since I was using it to test a development at work).  Anyway I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now for amongst other things the noise stuff and just consolidating the posts to my blog once a week.  Twitter has the added bonus that unlike blog comments, which tend not to end up being conversational because the lack of a consistent alerting system, twitter can have at least a bit of a discourse.

And the point of this post? I’ve no idea really.  Maybe that blogging, like the web, is still evolving.

Anyway I’m off to do something more useful instead.  Just as soon as I’ve checked Twitter…

Kim Knox Rox my Sox Button - The Unofficial Kim Knox Fan Club

Kim’s now got her very own unofficial Kim Knox fan club. Won’t be too long before she has a has a twitter hash tag all of her own too #kimknox