Things have been going well, though I haven’t gotten any website-related work done in the last week and I’ve been really tired. This past weekend my roommate, his brother, and myself moved most of the essentials into the new appartment, and later today (Wednesday) I get my bed. So I’ll offically be moving in today. We’ve been rather slow about the whole process, but I think it’s mostly because he had to finish his thesis (he defended on the 5th) and I had a bunch of little things I had to take care of.
I hope to have some new stuff up soon, but I don’t want to set any dates since I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to work on things. I still have a lot of new apartment things I need to do.
MySpace.com Search
For a couple of years now I’ve noticed that Google is better at finding myspace profiles than MySpace is. MySpace’s search feature just sucks. I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a MySpace profile search app that uses Google. Something in the same vein as g2p.org. I’m not sure I’ll do it, since it’s not something I do often, but I figured I’d float the idea out here to see if anyone was interested. Facebook has apparently allowed the profiles it stores to be indexed too, however, the search feature on that site is excellent and can’t really be improved on by using Google.
Spammed
This made me smile, well, the post near the bottom by milorad did. A couple of months back I asked the WordPress.com community about a weird Trackback issue I had been having and I ended up with some rather icy responses. I’m glad someone was nice enough to take the time and answer my question. It sucks to think that a certain percentage of my visitors are spam robots, but I guess that happens to every site with a blog and there really isn’t much one can do. Also, I ask you all to please not post in that thread. I don’t want to cause a disturbance or seem like I’m trying to start something. I just wanted to share it here since finding it made my day :).
Actually I was just looking on myspace and the search bar has a “Powered By Google” logo next to it.
Anyway is their development platform out yet? I hope it doesn’t require any ColdFusion knowledge, but it seems that’s what their site uses. I probably wouldn’t be interested in using widgets or whatever they’re calling the apps; but developing them definitely.
Doh! I didn’t even see that, I always look at the options below the “MySpace Search” caption. I was thinking of possibly adding options that’d allow you to search with certain fields (ex: “xx years old” in quotes), but it’s probably not worth the work.
I remember reading about how myspace was opening up their platform a couple of months ago, I haven’t read any new news on it though. They only recently (within the last 2 weeks) added status updates, so I wouldn’t suspect that they’d release anything like that for at least another month or so.
You simply have to be aggressive when it comes to SPAM. I combat hundreds of automated referrer SPAM, RFI (Remote File Inclusion), harvesters, and other miscellaneous bots each and every day. With your PHP knowledge you should be able to automatically deny access to various clients you know to be malicious (and even some you don’t).
I’ll look more into spam prevention. I didn’t start getting referrer SPAM until last month (I got around 10 bogus links). I was actually appalled when I saw it. It doesn’t even make any sense – no webmaster is going to click those links, and no one else can see them, it’s completely pointless. Maybe they’re just running out of ideas.
Generally referrer SPAM relies on access log files being posted publically, available for crawling and indexing by search engine bots, or simply displaying referrers in visible statistics shown to users. I get very little of this, but generally ban the IP (and entire subnet), the website as a referrer, and depending on the User-Agent used I tend to block that as well. Most of the issues my site faces however are automated crawlers looking to exploit various issues. Regular expressions make it a whole lot easier to identify these types of problems, and prevent them.
Ah, that makes sense.
With respect to the regular expressions, are you talking about checking out referring URLs (seeing if they have certain buzz words) or are you checking something else?
Congratulations on the apartment Pat! You should have called for more help. When’s the housewarming party?
best,
Dave
Yeah, we planned the move-in rather poorly. My roommate threw out everything he had (he wanted to start fresh), so we assumed it wouldn’t take much to move my stuff. Luckily his brother was pretty knowledgeable about packing stuff and moving, because we would have taken forever without him.
We’re thinking about doing something January, though we don’t have a date yet. We figured the holidays were a bad time to do one, plus we’re still getting settled in. I’ll let you know as soon as we have a date.