I keep getting cold emails from VPN companies asking me to blog about their services. So, as a middle finger to them, I thought I’d share this instead:
Category Archives: Spam
Why Short URLs are Evil and You Should Never Use Them
Ok, so maybe that title was a bit of a hyperbole, but this is one of my biggest pet peeves on the Web right now. Joshua Schachter has a comprehensive analysis of the concept of Short URLs and the myriad problems associated with it, but the biggest one for me is the fact that the […]
Excessive SEO is Ruining Google Search
Sadly, I have to completly agree with Jeff Atwood’s assessment of the recent decline in the quality of Google search results:
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
Adding reCAPTCHA to a Kentico Form
Google reCAPTCHA in a BizForm Tutorial shows how to use reCAPTCHA in a Kentico CMS form. Note my comment in the thread about needing to reference the reCAPTCHA library; if you don’t you’ll get an error saying that it can’t find the assembly.
Working with Qmail’s Queue
Relaying Qmail Through a Spam Filter
If you’re running a mail service on a web server so it can send out e-mail from contact forms, etc then you’ll want to make sure it’s relaying outbound mail through a spam filter, or it could be used to send spam if the forms get hijacked. For qmail, you just need to create /var/qmail/control/smtproutes […]
The Good, Bad and Ugly of SEO Methods
I agree with a lot of what Derek Powazek wrote about the SEO industry in Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists. His main gist is that the good SEO techniques — like using tags that match the semantics of the content and setting up 301 redirects when pages move — should just be considered good development practices, and […]
Protecting Contact Forms From Spam
I’ve had several clients complain about getting spam through their contact forms. Initially, I tried checking the referrers to make sure the comments were being submitted from a browser rather than just a bot, but that didn’t help enough. Luckily, many people have created libraries for Akismet, the anti-spam service that WordPress uses. I setup […]