obfuscated.org

I’ve gotten the same comment spam three times recently. What’s interesting is that it made it past Akismet’s filter each time.

It’s always from the same IP address and same email address, and the content has the same form every time:

I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100% regarding White on black or black on white?, but it’s just my opinion, which could be wrong :)

I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100% regarding AFI Top 100 Films List, but it’s just my opinion, which could be wrong :)

I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100% regarding t!, but it’s just my opinion, which could be wrong :)

And then from the same guy

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article t!, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

And with each post a link to some dumb link farming page with poorly-targeted ads on it. I wonder why Akismet doesn’t catch it. I guess with content like that it’s pretty hard to tell whether or not it’s really spam. (It’s reads pretty typical Ham rather than Spam.) Best of luck, I guess, to the young gentleman on the bad guy end of things. I hope he enjoys making the internet worse for everybody.

I moved. Sort of. I switched blogging software, that is. Turns out that it’s easier to monkey about with software than it is to write something interesting. Who knew?

Anyway, enjoy. Permalinks from the old site are almost certainly broken, as are countless other features. Features that you never even knew were here. Because they weren’t.

Far out! I’m getting tons of blog spam. Does anybody know how to make WordPress not accept comments on older posts? I wouldn’t want to have to, you know, read the docs or anything like that.

I had a nice little email conversation today with the Word of Blog folks. They addressed my concerns regarding their service, specifically the reason for the redirects through their site. From their email:

Regarding the redirects, they indeed serve multiple purposes: a) It enables Recovery 2.0 to track clicks (if you take a look at http://www.wordofblog.net/info.php?id=291, you’ll see on the left side the list of the blogs which posted the badge and how many clicks they generated so far), so that they know who their supporters and well wishers are. b) As a related matter, it enables Recovery 2.0 to exercise some control over who posts the badge — the beauty of sell side advertising is that bloggers get to pick and choose whichever organization they want to support; however, the obvious danger is that the badges get displayed on blogs that the organizations wouldn’t want to appear on. So by hosting and serving the Recovery 2.0 badge, we enable Recovery 2.0 to potentially take out the badge from any blog or site they don’t want to appear on. c) Finally, because we host the badges ourselves, we can offer attractive user features such as badge rotation — if you want to support several organizations on your blog but don’t want to sidebar to look like a “christmas tree”, you can have several badges rotate on your page ( i.e., change each time the page is refreshed) — that’s the option that Jill, who commented on your blog post, chose, for example.

That all sounds pretty reasonable. Thanks, guys, for clearing that up. I can’t wait to read your blog. Let me know when it’s available ;)

Does anybody know if “Word of Blog” is at all legitimate (you can get to it via wordofblog dot net — I don’t want to link to them for now)? I got email from them today asking for a link to them for Recovery 2.0, which is cool and something I support, but I’d really rather not support somebody collecting links to sell ads or whatever. Can anybody vouch for them? Jeff Jarvis, are you out there? Are these folks legit?

Most of the groups on the site seem to be pretty typical leftist pap — “Impeach Bush” and the like (I’m all for the left, and my opinion of our president is fairly negative, but for cryin’ out loud you can’t impeach somebody just because you don’t like them). I’d feel a lot better about this site if more of the people using it made sense….

There it is. The "Hello World" post. As far as I can tell, it’s the way these newfangled blog things are started. Hell, the software I’m using to do this filled the title in for me. Very kind of it, that.

"Hello World" has been around since 1973 (Wikipedia’s "Hello world program" entry). I know this because, well, because I looked it up on Wikipedia. Also because I’ve been doing the whole "Hello World" thing for a while now, and it seems the natural way to start this sort of thing. It’s comforting to know that the tradition that comes along with new endeavors in my field is older than I am. It makes the whole thing feel solid, grounded.

So there we have it. I’m Corey. I write software. This is my blog. Enjoy.