Introduction

I'd like to touch upon the subject of attitudes and methods, when it comes to coding, that are rife amongst amateur coders ... usually the sort that call themselves a "webmaster". They get on the big wide web, and it's full of bells and whistles and new toys, and they just want to have them all. So they produce a website using tables (when it'd be far easier and bandwidth friendly to use divs), they have flash buttons (to achieve a rollover effect that could be achieved with css), they use javascript effects (quite a few of which can be reproduced with just css), they also tend to produce fixed width sites (because they're easier) and usually their site only works in IE6 (although a few hours with a validator could cure most of that).

Ok, I might sound like a bitch, but let me tell you why I find all of the above appalling.

Keywords : [keys][webmaster] [xhtml] [css] [cross-browser] [wai] [javascript][/keys]

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Well bugger me!!!! I'm actually in the top 500 for Pond Pumps in Google(uk) ...... mind you, the total results have dropped to back 1,500,000 (looks like google have severely prunned their database) ...... but that still means that I'm in the top 0.03333333333% (ish) of the results ....... hmmmmm, maybe I should start selling them?

Once again, if you're a confused visitor that's landed on my tacky pad looking for somewhere to buy a pond pump you might prefer to visit this online aquatics shop where they actually sell them ;) ..... In the meantime I'm just gonna quietly get on with my world dommination of the google results.

My mates gonna be pissed ..... he'll pretend that he's not of course, and he'll point out the fact that I'm only in the top 500 ...... but he'll still be pissed . Of course, I could have attempted to speed up the process by being just as anal about "keyword frequency" and "word weight" and other technical stuff like that, but hell, the suns out and who has time for such stuff?

It does show some of the power of a blog to affect a search engines rankings though, you should see how many hits I get from people searching for pond pumps ....... mind you, the hits I get from the less endowed looking for a totally different type of pump is head to head for highest position ...... so to speak :|

Anyway, I'm off for a beer to celebrate.

¥

Keywords : [keys][pond pumps] [google] [mate] [pissed][/keys]

Birth of the SpamHound

SpamHound is born

[b2evo] (which is the blog software we use) comes complete with it's own [b]antispam blacklist[/b], which is basically a list of urls that have been reported as spammers by multiple blog users. Sounds great huh? ...... Well, it kind of is ...... right up to the moment where you want to include one of the "spam" urls in one of your posts ...... and you get called a spammer!!!!

The current antispam blacklist has about 4,400 spam urls listed, many of which have to be obsolete by now, and every hit on a page is checked against it. All comments left, by memebers and visitors alike, are checked against the same list. This all adds up to a lot of unneccesary overheads for the poor old server cpu.

With this in mind I decided to see how effective the blacklist is, and just how many of the urls are actually needed. So, I implemented a comment moderation system for visitors and the emptied the blacklist ....... After deleting several thousand (moderated) spam comments I decided that this wasn't the way forward! The bright side was, I had a shedload of spam comments that I could analyse for common trends.

At the start of March I decided that I was ready for round two, so once again I dropped all of the antispam urls in the blacklist, this time however, I had the SpamHound to protect the blogs. Any comments that the SpamHound munches are automatically added to a seperate table so that the data can be further analysed, and any that get through enter a comment moderation process.

To date the SpamHound has munched over 26,000 spam comments and less than a dozen have managed to get as far as the moderation process!

Keywords : [keys][SpamHound] [SpamStats][/keys]

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Only Scott can sum up a (long ....... verrrrrrry long ...... way beyond the "grey hairs and great great great great great grandchildren" era ...... hell, he's 48, that's bloody ancient!!!!) lifetimes worth of experience as :-

[quote] that's the great thing about being a guy, rocks off == rocks off (quality either way) [/quote]

?

Keywords : [keys][scott] [love] [ancient] [/keys]

This post should have been all about steralising the beds in the main greenhouse, but the local kids decided that my posts needed livening up. With this in mind they amused themselves by throwing bricks at the small greenhouse. After putting through three of the panes at the back and almost putting a couple through the roof, they wandered off content....... It's a bloody good job we never caught them or we'd be in prison by now :|

continued.....

Damn, I can almost see the end of winter, complete with snow this year as well ...... which confused the rain a tad, it kinda didn't know where to land.... so we gave it directions to France. Anyway, today was the first day of the year that I bimbled down to the field, how cool???? ..... well, a tad parky actually, I didn't quite break out my shorts for the occasion ..... although, being an optomist, I took them with me.

continued.....