For the past day or two, a small item of graphics (30 x 100 pixels) was snatched from my site. To make things worse, it was HotLinked and appeared at the front page permanently. This means that my site was exploited for traffic. Webmasters would definitely be familiar with the nuisance. To cut this story short, below are the results of my intervention:

An explanation: The large PNG image with the yellow glow comes from my domain. The site shown is in no way related to schestowitz.com; it displays graphics it does not own by forming a link, placed at the right-hand-side bar. I simply changed the image, which some would say was a harsh move.

To spammers, one of the greatest sources for victims are archives of newsgroups. Many archiving systems which process mailing lists and forums omit E-mail addresses from message headers. However, some E-mail software quotes explicit addresses in the body of messages, thereby exposing these addresses to spam-bots.

Likewise, information that is entered in Web forms will rarely be kept confidential. Privacy is not always honoured and E-mail addresses can find their way into so-called affiliate companies.

Whenever possible, avoid disclosure of E-mail addresses. Spam protection is still immature and can rarely be trusted.

Taking this point slightly further, it is important to be assigned different passwords in different sites. Always. Only days ago, Wikipedia inadvertently leaked passwords.

It appears as though Google removed PageRank from the public. No official announcement has been made though. Google once warned about abuse of public PageRank and trading of links. They were probably most dissatisfied by the involvement of AdSense, their advertising program, in the midst of this abuse.

It is difficult to surf the Web without an indicator of any kind. It is hard to establish trust in information unless there is a measure of reliability bound to it. As a substitute, Alexa rank can be used as part of a Firefox extension called SearchStatus. Alexa rank is not as verbose and dynamic as PageRank, but it is far better than nothing.

SearchStatus in action

For the past day or two, the Google PageRank indicator has been greyed out (or invisible in Mozilla Firefox — see above). There are speculations and rumours regarding the reason:

Is it the end of Google Pagerank as we know it? Is Google replacing or eliminating our ability to read the value of a website (as they see it)

Google’s “Trust Rank” algorithm has been around for a while, but I don’t believe fully implemented. Maybe we’re seeing the change from Pagerank to TrustRank.

The thread makes insightful observations, but the original poster fails to provide information to support his statements. Also, the transition to a new ranking system would have been seamless. Are Google preparing an announcement and halt PR in the interim? This has already lasted too long to be a technical fault.

Gentle Introduction to Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a fast-growing social bookmarks network. It enables people to centralise their bookmarks (favourites) on-line, share them with others, and even view bookmarks of people whose interests intersect. This also provides insight into the popularity of links.

Each bookmark in Del.icio.us can be delivered as an RSS feed, which can then be added to the native browser as a live bookmark, i.e. a dynamic bookmark whose source is remote. Bookmarks as such are still significantly slower than a personal portal.

An example of a del.icio.us bookmark

Import/Export in Del.icio.us

Here is one major pitfall: Del.icio.us do not yet incorporate import and export facilities, which is surprising. This has two implications:

• All bookmarks are dependent upon a remote source, namely del.icio.us. They may not always be available and there is a vendor lock-in situation.
• Assemblage of bookmarks must begin from scratch, with little or no chance for re-use.

There are third-party solutions, but they are not ideal:

• tagSense.net – a Windows del.icio.us client which can import bookmarks fully.
• Netscape-style import script – a perl script which imports Netscape-style bookmark files into del.icio.us
• delicious2safari – import tool which brings del.icio.us to Safari.

There are (at least) 3 conceivable methods to keeping track of Google:

• Google Alerts: HTML-formatted E-mails which occasionally get sent. Recent changes in SERP‘s of interest are highlighted.
• Perl and Cron Jobs: keeping track of Google from the command-line.
• RSS Feeds: RSS interface to Google search results (Ben Hammersley).

The key to success in on-line auctions (such as eBay) is rapid and frequent flow of purely useful information.

There are at least two circumstances where RSS feeds can greatly assist:

• The first: Keeping track of rare item/s
• The Second: Finding the very best deal, as defined by a low range of prices

rssauction.com is a Web site that provides customised, self-tailored eBay feeds. For those who do are not familiar with RSS feeds, JavaScript equivalents are made available too.

Remembering the days when
auctions were announced by paper