Spammers. We all know them and universally revile them. As a result, some of them develop anger problems, inferiority complexes, and all manner of issues. Lately my site and presumably many others have been seeing a massive surge in what’s called “nuisance spamming”, which is the act of spamming things like links to other, uninvolved people’s blogs for no reason other than to annoy the site owner.

As I’ve said before, and i’m sure i’ll say again before it’s all said and done, MT-Blacklist is just the greatest thing ever. As anyone who looks at the dates around here knows, I don’t pay much attention to this site currently. I haven’t posted in months, and rarely do I ever even check to see if there’s been new comments posted. A quick look around will demonstrate that even though more than 500 spam comments have been sent my way in the last couple of days, not so much as ONE has made it through my filters. They get zapped before they ever even see the light of day.

The moral of this story is that evil never triumphs. Keep trying guys, you obviously have a lot of free time on your hands.

God i’ve been so busy lately. The days just fly by. Uh..biggest things on my mind right now in no certain order are as follows: dual core processors, xdisciplex a.d.’s “the revelation”, work, the reason why full flavor KOOLs taste less harsh than my trusty KOOL mild 100’s, the lawn, and dogs.

my favorite links of late:

Edwards Wire Rope - almost there!

HardOCP goes without saying

XBit Labs - a new favorite

LouisvilleMojo - good forums, keeping Louisville weird

Maxthon - won me over from Firefox, article to follow at some point.

Newegg - venice cores? bueller?

What a way to start the day. Top story on CNN this morning, Dimebag Darrell shot dead at Columbus nightclub.

Senselessly, violently and quickly, another legend has been snatched from the earth before his time came. Dimebag Darrell influenced an entire generation as the lead guitarist of Pantera, and was in the midst of moving on to what could have been bigger, better things when he was killed.

You’ll be missed, Dimebag.

In my endless quest for the fastest, most reliable, and most useful software available, the web browser has until recently been the most difficult application to settle on. For a long time I used IE6, or variants like MyIE2, etc. Then I tried Opera, and I liked the speed, but the featureset and general style of it just weren’t for me.

Flash forward to 2004, when I tried Firefox (or firebird, as it was called at the time). This browser basically had everything I wanted. Speed, tabbed browsing, native popup blocking, and an intuitive extension (plugin) environment with a lot of great extensions available. Over the months I have endlessly tweaked and tried new things with Firefox to get it as perfect as it could be, and I believe I have finally accomplished this. This article will detail, step by step, how *I* personally achieved browser perfection. What’s great for me may suck for you, but I think just about anyone can find *something* in here that’s useful for them. Read on…
Read the rest of this entry »

Talking about spammers is more difficult than talking about any other internet group, with the possible exception of child pornographers, for one big reason: you can’t provide links to the things you’re writing about. Well, I suppose that technically you COULD, but then you’d be doing the little weasels a favor, since all their annoying garbage is for the sole purpose of getting their link out anyway.

My site doesn’t get much traffic when compared to big blogs out there. I get probably a 10th or less of the traffic of even medium-well known blogs, but wow do I get spam. Comment spam, mainly. We’re talking 5-10 per day. If you’re reading this and saying to yourself “Pfft, 10 per day? That’s bush league. I get 10 before breakfast,” then I offer you my sincerest condolences, and humbly request a 20 or 30 pixel tall link right up under your header.

The only thing that has kept comment spam from taking over here is a Movable Type plugin called MT-Blacklist. It has been my savior since the first day my site went public. It is a Great White Shark amongst the schools of cod which are spammers. It leaves a thick, lingering trail of scumbag entrails in its wake. It smites would-be comment spammers with a battle axe. And so on.

It also allows me to block spammers from ever commenting in the first place with an amazing black list of spammer domains, constantly updated, and allows me to destroy a spam comment before it ever gets published on my site, even if it isn’t already listed in the blacklist. It uses a divine mixture of my brain and its artificial brain to ensure that not a single spam ever sees the light of day on ianmassey.com, and I cannot invent a word, phrase or sentence which praises it highly enough. If you use movable type, go get it immediately. You will soon delight in slaying hordes of spambots with just a click or two of the mouse, just as I do.