PAM is everywhere. It comes in different flavours and the way to chew it varies as well. This essay is not about meaty cuisine, but rather about the plague of the electronic age. Anywhere one has an opportunity to gain, spam will prevail. Several days ago, the MATLAB Web site got flooded by endless spam and many innocent contributers got false E-mail notifications, me included.

Spam should not be attributed to and associated with just E-mail. An initiative by AOL at al. to eradicate spam through taxation has most recently been criticised harshly. Genuine mailers begin to suffer financially, to make matters worse than the need to purge spam. This morning it took me approximately half an hour only to purge spam. As for the impact spam has on my life, I continue to tolerate spam through:

• E-mail
• Forum subscriptions with site addresses
• Forum messages
• Guestbook entries
• WordPress comments
• WordPress trackbacks
• PHP-Nuke links
• PHP-Nuke news submission
• Wiki
• Referrer spam
• Zombie attacks

I have set up cleanup/purging cycles in my schedule, with frequency dependent on severity. The chores at hand are still a very time-consuming activity and it gets worse by the day. I recently had a fierce argument over someone who used to comment spam. This involved someone who was possibly in cahoot with the spammer. Some spammers deserve a death penalty. If not practised law, then at least as an effective deterrent. Related item: WordPress Comment Spam Prevention

ESTERDAY I received an E-mail from a stranger. The message contained a much-sought-for answer to a question which I had asked several weeks ago. This came to show the advantages of asking questions in public forums (news:alt.www.webmaster). What was my question then? Well, my intent was to merge multiple feeds and deliver them as just one aggregated feed. There were issues with implementation of such tools:

• Formats and versioning, e.g. Atom, RSS v. 1, RSS v. 2
• Tolerance for invalidity of feeds
• Sorting in merger based on category/time

I wound up finding RSS Merge, which enabled me to compose the following page. It combines various feeds from my main domain. Another Open Source package that is worth mentioning would be Planet. My only complaint (wishlist item rather) is that the tools do not deliver aggregated output in feed form. They are merely echoed as Web pages.

Never post to your blog while drunk because you will regret it the following day. Being inebriated at the moment, I can barely even remember how to use the spellchecker, let alone add the image above. Fingers go astray on the keyboard. I will not say anything more.

VER three years ago I started with a personal site, which was quite profession-inclined. I used it for placement of my CV and was pleased to have had something that was beyond a notorious “blog” — a quickly-growing phenomenon at the time. But nowadays almost everyone has a homepage; everyone including my 9-year-old sister. She has a site/section that comprises a few pages. It was in fact updated with her by my side just a week ago.

Returning to the issue at hand, I felt reluctant to add opinionated opinions on a variety of issues without global consent (e.g. politics, software politics, atheism/religion). The ‘blog’ component of the site bridged a certain gap. Also appealing was the professional layout and base structure of a modern CMS, which required little maintenance other than composition (and of course comment spam purging).

The new blog spot had plenty to offer. Suddenly, rants and raves finally have their deserved place; Any opinion fits under a suitable category, even a new one sometimes; There are no limits in terms of scope; Readers are often those whose interests intersect with the author’s; The blog serves as somewhat of a diary. It is also a gateway to my work, research, my family and it neatly organises thoughts and progress chronologically. Any arbitrary thought and idea can somehow fit without any context, so rich site content can rapidly be added. This is not the case with a contextual, hierarchical site that chooses a theme. It is even the case with a single open forum, where the audience congregates due to common interests.

In blogging, anything goes. This may results in frivolous domains (or subdomains) with incoherent content, but as long as the author is happy, who is to object? With blogging emerges a clique of on-line friends and colleagues. It encourages involvement and mutual support. It also helps you help others, not only receive and digest information. The elements of Web 2.0 (Hype alert! Duck down) involvement promotes all of that.

Here’s to another year of joyful blogging!

Related item: “I Searched the Internet and all I Got was this Lousy Blog”

Akismet cleans up your blog spam,
but false positives sometimes go unnoticed

Akismet is a comment spam prevention mechanism. It can tell apart genuine comments from ‘comment bombing’ and used do so almost flawlessly. The Akismet filter has quickly gained popularity among its origins: WordPress blogs. I set up Akismet in my WordPress 2.0 test blog and mentioned this before in a writeup on ending comment spam using collaborative spam flagging.

Akismet can be used only given a key which establishes some trusted identity. Nevetheless, its performance is said to have degraded recently. I have been wondering for quite a while what would prevent a guild of spammers from downloading and installing WordPress 2, getting an API key and then posting comments to self. They could begin marking comments improperly en masse. Only a trusted few need be able to flag messages. It is is a necessity when one wishes for robustness to fraud to ever prevail. I even mentioned this before, roughly a month before the tool was publicly available.

I have an API key for one blog and another test blog that ran Akismet without a key. That was back in the early days when spam-stopper, as is was named at the time, was actively developed and tested by a set of individuals. Ever since, I believe it has reached many hands and became too easy to gain access to, for malicious purposes as well.

There is hope of successfully reverting the learner back to a more reliable state if backups were made of it on occasions.