The Machets’ Blog

Every day, thousands of blogs receive millions, if not, billions of comment spam. But why do they do it? The whole reason behind comment spam, and undesirable messages and links on the web is to attain as many links as possible and thus get the top search engine results.

There is an important difference between email and comment spam. In email spam, spammers actually want you to buy their product (and if they send 10,000 emails and 100 of them return a profit, the whole exercise is worth it for them). But with comment spam, spammers do not care whether you see their messages. These inconsiderate people waste others people’s expensive bandwidth and server space, just so that web crawlers (robots) like Google can link to them and put their link at the top of a particular search. But comment spam is useless.

Links (URLs) entered into comments are given a rel=”nofollow” attribute. What’s this? It basically tells the robots not to follow that link, and therefore not to give it a better PageRank. So that means that no matter how many unsolicited comments are entered, (on Wordpress, LiveJournal, Blogger, Live Spaces and other) they are all redundant.

Comment spam is a complete waste for everyone. Bloggers have to waste time sifting through these useless comments. They also have to pay extra for the wasted bandwidth and their blogs lose popularity as they have checkered content. Spammers also waste their time and effort due to the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Instead they should be developing useful content and products that people should not be tricked into buying. And visitors to these affected blogs have to be able to detect what’s legitimate and what’s not.

The best comment spam plugin for Wordpress, Akismet, has detected 4,230 spam comments on The Machets’ Blog. This figure increases by about 20-25 every day. And occasionally a few still manage to sneak through.

Reporters interviewing a 104-year-old woman, “And what do you think is the best thing about being 104?” the reporter asked.
She simply replied, “No peer pressure.”

Just before the funeral services, the undertaker came up to the very elderly widow and asked, “How old was your husband?”
“98,” she replied. “Two years older than me.” “So you’re 96,” the undertaker commented.
She responded, “Hardly worth going home is it?”

As promised, here is a list of the plugins that are used on The Machets’ Blog. It’s quite lengthy, and probably too many, but I use each one quite a bit.

Admin Drop Menus saving time by going straight to the right admin page.

Akismet filters out 99% of all comment spam.

Autorelated unclogs my post comments by removing internal pingbacks.

Click Counter tells everyone how many times a particular link has been clicked.

Contact Form ][ allows anyone to drop me an email through a handy form.

Edit Comments gives guests and visitors the ability to edit their comments up to 30 minutes after they are posted.

Google Analytics adds code to each page and provides me with useful statistics.

Google Sitemaps makes a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of the blog and main page.

Live Comment Preview lets you see what your comment will look; live.

Maintenance Mode when activated, disables my website so I can upgrade or change the blog.

Related Posts adds a list of related posts on a post page.

Subscribe me lets you subscribe to the feed through your favourite feed reader.

Wordpress Database Backup emails me a backup of the blog on a daily basis.

Wordpress Reports blends in the Google Analytics statistics into the admin panel.

WP-Cron tells Wordpress Database Backup to send the email each day.

WP-Print makes a printer-friendly page of each post.

If you would like to use these plugins on your Wordpress blog, simply Google the name of the plugin and it should come up. If you’re having trouble, drop us a line and I’ll send you the right link.

A few weeks ago, I decided to reinstall Windows XP onto my computer. That is, wipe everything and put it all back on again. This dramatically improves system performance, and I am very familiar with the process from the beginning to end.

After backing up my important data (such as my Microsoft Outlook emails and contacts, Desktop, etc), I decided to save space on my backup hard drive by leaving the My Documents folder on a spare internal hard drive. After the long 2 hr process of installation, I discovered that Windows had been installed on the spare internal drive (My Documents). I realised that there was no way of retrieving the information.

But fortunately, my files had been backed up the last time I reinstalled the operating system (about a month or two before). However, since my backup hard drive had almost reached its capacity, I had begun to delete many large files and folders. So I had deleted my previous backups as well.

I did a quick search on the web, and found a program called Recover My Files. At first glance the website looked a little suspicious, but SiteAdvisor told me that it was OK so I downloaded it. It searched my backup hard drive (very slowly) and returned a list of every deleted file. I was then able to recover my important documents. Of the 1100 or so files, only about 20 had been corrupted. Luck was on my side.

What did I learn from this exercise? What we have all been told since the dawn of computing. Backup your files. I can’t stress enough how important it is to make a backup. I strongly suggest that you invest in an external hard drive, and backup your data as often as possible. Because what if a virus came and destroyed the lot? What if you accidentally press the “Delete” button? It can and does happen.

Time Required: 2 Minutes Difficulty: Easy

If you would like to make your photos have faded edges, it’s quite easy to do if you have Adobe Photoshop. Here’s how:

1. Open a photo.
2. Convert the background to a layer by double clicking on it. (Give it a name if you wish.)
3. Select the Elliptical Marquee tool.
4. Drag a marquee selection around the area of the photo you want to keep.
5. Click the “Add layer mask” button at the bottom of the layers palette.
6. Click on the layer mask thumbnail in the layers palette.
7. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and make sure the Preview option is checked.
8. Adjust the radius until you are happy with the amount of fade and click OK.
9. Add a layer under the photo and fill it with the desired background.

Tips

• You can paint in the layer mask with shades of gray for other effects. Just click the mask thumbnail in the layers palette to activate it for painting.
• The icon next to the eye in the layers palette will show a paintbrush icon if the layer is active, and a mask icon if the mask is active.
• If you decide you don’t like the effect, simply drag the mask thumbnail to the trash icon on the layers palette and then click discard.
• To reposition the vignette, click the link icon between the layer thumbnail and the mask thumbnail to move the mask independently of the layer. Don’t forget to relink them when you’re done.

[From About.com]

A plane is about to crash. There are 5 passengers on board, but there are only 4 parachutes. The first passenger says, “I am Ronaldo, the best football player in the world. The football world needs me, and I cannot die on my fans.” He grabs the first parachute and jumps out of the plane.

The second passenger, Hillary Clinton, says, “I am the wife of the former president of the United States; I am the Senator of New York and I have a good chance of being president of the United States in the future.” She grabs a parachute and jumps off the plane.

The third passenger, George W.Bush, says, “I am the president of the United States of America. I have huge responsibilities in the world. Besides, I am the smartest president in the history of my country and can’t shun the responsibility to my people by dying.” He grabs a pack and jumps off the plane.

The fouth passenger, the Pope, says to the fifth passenger, a young school boy, “I am old. I have lived my life as a good person, as a priest should, and so I shall leave the last parachute to you; you have the rest of your life ahead of you.”

To this, the little boy says, “Don’t fret old man…There’s a parachute for each of us! The smartest president of America took my school bag…”

Another year has come and gone. Welcome to the year 2007!