The Machets’ Blog

This will be the last post on The Machets’ Blog. I have reached a point where I must spend my time wisely, and unfortunately this blog is one of the sacrifices that must be taken.

Please note that the blog itself will remain, and you will still be able to comment on most posts. At this stage there are no plans to take it down.

The computer services section will continue to be updated, and you will always be able to contact us about prices and other things generally.

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.

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.

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

It’s that time of year again: My birthday! Happy new years eve!

DragonFable is a game made by the same people as Battle On. It is made with flash and you don’t need to install anything on your computer. The aim of the game is to go around the land accomplish quests and get stronger. Once you level up you will be able to acquire stronger weapons and more moves that use mana points. When finishing quests you can find weapons or items to wield or items which you collect to make rare items. DragonFable gets regularly updated and sometimes you can take part in special daily or monthly events.

A new account add-on that has just been released called “The DragonAmulet” which you don’t have to get but you might want to consider buying it for some extra fun, as it adds 200 dragon coins which lets you buy rare and limited items within the kingdom (not including Battle On for now), Special areas for more adventuring (with better item drops, special classes), Be able to wield rare items, make more characters and repaint your armour (A normal character can only be painted at the start and not repainted)! Also supporting the game means they can make more graphics and data for DragonFable!

I have found a cheat in the game that lets you have as many attacks as you want without the other opponent causing any damage at all. If you want to know how to do this go to the comments of this post to discuss and see what this is all about! Soon there will be a newsletter available to get the latest news. For some screenshots of DragonFable Click Here or just start playing now Click Here!

Update 26/11/06: Cheat does not work as this bug got fixed.

I have just updated The Machets’ Blog with the latest version of Wordpress, the best blogging system. This update contains about 50 security fixes.

On another note, you may have noticed some more changes to the blog, including much better links (with words instead of ?p=123). I have updated and added some useful plugins; small add-ons for Wordpress which extend its functionality. I will post a list of which ones I use in the future.

Wishing you a happy, healthy and sweet new year (of the Hebrew Lunar Calendar).

As previously mentioned, the media cannot be trusted. To emphasise this fact, Zombie has written an in-depth analysis of an incident that occurred during the Israel-Lebanon war. According to this unambiguous source, reports that Israel fired missiles at two Red Cross ambulances are completely false.

Lo and behold, when we look at other pictures of undamaged Lebanese Red Cross ambulances, we see that many of them just happen to have a ventilation cover of the exact same diameter as the “missile” hole right in the center of the cross on the roof.

On September 2, The Age published an article in response to both Zombie and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s comments:

Red Cross volunteers manning the ambulances and Mr Fawaz insist the hit was caused by small weapons fired from unmanned drones that they heard circling above after the attack.

There is no substantial evidence given the Age’s report, and any details are in direct opposition to the initial article. The fact that the Age was prepared to give such comments further emphasises its ideals and biased opinions. There are many quotes from Lebanese sources, however the article provides one and a half paragraphs of information from the other side from an anonymous Israeli spokesman.

As a final word, how many people do you think who read the article in the newspaper or online will actually visit Zombie Time?

I highly recommend that you pass this around (the link to this post is http://www.machet.com.au/blog/2006/09/16/the-media-cannot-be-trusted/) to everyone you know — this is one of the most important world news articles.

Links: The Red Cross Ambulance Incident; or Ambulance Attack Evidence Stands the Test.

I have recently made some changes to The Machets’ Blog which you may or may not have noticed. All of our plugins (addons to the blog) have been brought up to date, and some other small changes have been made.

It’s now even easier to receive our feed, as there are more programs and choices available. I have added a new poll that is worth voting just to see the effect. Other small enhancements include the name of the poster, the ability to print each post and the time taken for each page to load is displayed at the bottom. Unfortunately, however, all the link counters have been reset to zero, so the values reflected in older posts will not be accurate.

If you have any suggestions, or if you have discovered any problems with the blog, please let me know.

Update: Poll in progress.