Spam: Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages in Emails, Comments, and Everywhere

No Colour Hat SEO Blog’s article, “Email, Spam, and Unsolicited Junk” is part of a series of an indepth look at spam email and comment spam, and other unsolicited junk that plagues us on the Internet and in our lives. SPAM stands for Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages and sometime referred to the meaning of an […]

Comment Spammers Getting Smarter – But Not Smart Enough

I don’t know if you have been noticing any changes in the comment spam caught on WordPress.com blogs by Akismet recently, so I thought I’d bring it to your attention since this blog is getting hammered by comment spammers, with few getting through, thank goodness. Here are a few examples of some recent comment spam […]

Comment Spam Fighter Spam Karma 2.1 Released

For those who have followed my exploits battling comment spam over the past year, and have employed the same thorough techniques to save your site from horrid comment spammers, you will be excited to know that there is a new release of Spam Karma 2. As a reminder, these are the tools used on my […]

Americans Spend 40% of Their Time Online Deleting Spam

According to a new report by Mcafee called “Americans and Spam Survey” reports that Americans spend at least 40% of their time online deleting spam from their email inboxes. According to the Americans surveyed, email spam is the No. 1 technology time waster (49%) by wide margins over other tech annoyances including automated voice response […]

Mystery Solved: Introducing Akismet Comment Spam Protection

The mystery of the API numbers in your wordpress.com Administration Profile panel has now been revealed. It is part of a new benefit package for wordpress.com users. Not only will you get a free blog on wordpress.com, but the future looks like it will also give you other goodies for being a part of the […]

Comment Spam and Viral Marketing – BBS Weblog Watch

BBC’s Weblog Watch’s Bang blast takes a poke at advertising on blogs, specifically targeted advertising through coments, aka comment spam and Viral Marketing. Now imagine writing an entry about making contact with a parent after three decades of silence. And now imagine finding someone had slapped an advert for bleach on it. One which made […]

Katrina Comment Spam Assaults Blogs

WordPress does an amazing job battling comment spam, reinforced with a couple powerful comment spam fighting WordPress Plugins if you need them. But the comment spammers are always looking for an angle to get in and make your life miserable. Katrina based comment spam is now hitting blogs around the world. The problem is compounded […]

What is Comment Spam?

Comment spam is a fact of life for blogs and sites with an open door policy for comments and interaction. Comment spam arrives on your website in two main ways. Occasionally by hand posting of time-wasting idiots who post nonsense for fun or try to get links to their site by posting links to their […]

Website Hammered by Hotlinking, Spammers, and Free Loaders?

My main site recently was hammered by Hotlinking, Spammers, and Free Loaders. This can happen to any website, so we all need to learn how to keep an eye on potential abuse of our sites. Hotlinking Images Hotlinking is the technique of linking to images on your site for use offsite. That’s the simple description. […]

Blog Exercises: Comments Policy

We started with the Bloggers Code of Ethics in our blog exercises on site policies, starting you off on the right foot by knowing where you will draw your lines in the sand when it comes to your rights and responsibilities as a blogger. In this Blog Exercise, we are going to tackle the next […]

Blog Exercises for April

April seemed to fly by in this Blog Exercises series. Have you been able to keep up now that we are done with month four of improving your blog? A lot of the blog exercises this month deal with interactivity and links, tips for building a community with your site. One of my favorite exercises […]

The Brute-Force Password Attack on WordPress Sites

My mother emailed me and asked if WordPress was under attack. With all the news of last week’s attack of the Boston Marathon, the attacks on WordPress and other PHP-based web publishing sites was low on the priority list for myself and others, but this is something to take seriously. As we get back to […]

Blog Exercises: Site Policies and Bloggers Code of Ethics

It’s time to start working on all of your site policies, one by one. So far, we’ve touched on some of these in Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging, Blog Exercise: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About, Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies, and Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes. The basic policies […]

Fight Against Trackback Death

I’ve heard the many threats of trackbacks and pingbacks dying over the years, going the way of the virtual dinosaur, but I’m terrified to hear from Andraz Tori that Typepad is killing pingback functionality and stating that WordPress might be considering it, removing the joy of getting a notification that someone online is talking about […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. While it is simple to explain the two basic organizational and navigation elements of a WordPress site, coming up with tags for each post is a struggle many bloggers battle. Tags represent micro-categorization of your site’s content. It helps the visitor find closely […]