Tag: site

Tom notes logging in to his Gmail account this morning, and finding 50 invitations to offer to others. This prompted me to do the same, wondering if I would also have 50 invites, seeing as how the last time I looked at my Gmail account, I still had 4 from the previous 6 given to me still available.
Sure enough, there’s the little box, just like Tom has in his post, with 50 invites ready to go. How am I supposed to get rid of this many invites? Has Gmail already reached a saturation level, and it’s not even out of its invitation-only beta program?
Maybe it’s just me; I have a fairly close-knit group of online friends, with a slightly larger group of acquaintances. Everyone in these two groups who wants a Gmail account already has one. Heck, the reason I have a Gmail account is because one of my friends pointed me to a post by Tom offering Gmail invites back when they were hard to come by, and this is how he and I began chatting. (FYI: my winning funny is #2 in the comments.)
I’ve had a hard enough time unloading the last six invites Google gave me. I’ve joined Gmail for the Troops, but have yet to unload any invites that way. My own attempt to have fun while giving out invites met with one whole reader taking me up on the offer. So now I’ve got 50 invites. Want one?

Everyone seems to be linking to The Register’s interview with a link spammer. This is what caught my attention:

“The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas. Or those where you have to reply to an email, click on a link in it; though that can be automated too. Those where you have to register and click on links, they’re hard as well. And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that’s a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations’ folder names.”
So now you see why I’m using TypeKey.

His Gruberness has written, on behalf and with the input of, Six Apart, a comprehensive guide on weblog comment spam. This has given me some ideas for moving forward, though since I have instituted comment registration via TypeKey, I haven’t had a comment spam problem. Registration through TypeKey is free, easy, and fast, and it allows you to comment on any site which supports the protocol.

Anyone else out there find the 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist to be a total yawner?

I have come to the conclusion–and many of you may be wondering what took me so long–that Amazon’s search engine could be vastly improved. Viz: I enter “Politically Incorrect Guide to American History” in the search field, with the pull-down menu set to Books. In the first page of results, nada. By inserting “The” at the beginning of the search phrase, the book pops up as the number one item returned. One would think that the search phrase I originally entered would have been enough.
Likewise, I entered “Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World” in the search field, again with Books selected in the pull-down menu, and again, got nothing returned in the first page of results. I entered the author’s name, “Wesley J. Smith,” and his tome appears as the first search result. Only it has a capital “A” in the title. Again, the original search phrase should have been enough for Amazon’s search engine to figure out what I wanted.

So some of you may have noticed the site was down earlier this evening for about an hour. My sysadmin pulled the plug, so to speak, because those scum of the ‘net were hammering our server so badly, Apache may as well have been under a true DoS attack. I am referring, of course, to comment spammers.
So, henceforth, we’re going to try comment registration. It’s free, doesn’t cost you anything but a few moments of time over at TypeKey. With your TypeKey login, you can comment on any site that supports the protocol. (Nearly all of these will be those that use Movable Type or TypePad.) I’m sorry it’s come to this, but as with most things, a few bad apples ruin the whole barrel.

The previous entry marked number 800 for this now two-year-old blog. Despite it being noted on my calendar, I completely missed the two-year anniversary of retrophisch.com on the tenth of this month. So, two milestones this month, and here’s to many more to come.

I discovered these desktops by co2metal, aka Andy, while cruising through ResExcellence last week. Now, I’m not nearly in to the whole GUI customization thing as I used to be. I don’t really bother with custom icons any more, and more often than not, you’ll find my desktop pictures to be photos from our vacations or of our little one.
Yet I’m drawn to Andy’s abstract and fractal creations. I’m thinking of making a custom Mac OS X screen saver with selections from his gallery. I hope Andy doesn’t mind!

So after deliberating over whether or not to eliminate categories–and thank you so much for all those comments with feedback–I have decided to can the categories on this and all of my blogs. (Seriously, I do thank those few who did weigh in on the issue, either through comments, e-mail, or instant message.)
I feel Raena summed it up best in an IM: “Seeing as how you have the uber blog empire, I wonder whether it’s worth using categories either. If you were using one blog for all that stuff, then yeah.”
After replying that she flattered me–while I’m running five separate public blogs, I in no way feel I have a “blog empire” a la my favorite n3rdling–Raena then stated the obvious, which I suppose I hadn’t really considered: “Seriously, though. You have separate blogs for separate interests, so I don’t see that categories are as much of a concern.”
She’s right. Initially, everything was posted under Retrophisch, and categories were a necessity. No longer, however. With the different blogs for different interests, categories within each blog seemed nitpickish and maybe even a wee bit obsessive-complusive. Yeah, I think we can do away with anything obsessive-compulsive…
While I will no longer be posting within categories, the old category pages are still there, if you know how to find them, or you previously linked to or bookmarked them.