First, links to a pair of pieces I wrote — one new, one old, both for Linux Journal. The former is Linux and Plethorization, a short piece I put up today, and which contains a little usage experiment that will play out over time. The latter is The New Vernacular, dated (no fooling) April 1, 2001. Much of what it says overlaps with the chapter I wrote for O’Reilly’s Open Sources 2.0. You can find that here and here.
I link to those last two pieces because neither of them show up in a search for searls + glassie on Google, even though my name and that of Henry Glassie are in both. I also like them as an excuse to object to the practice — by WordPress, Flickr and (presumably) others of adding a rel=”nofollow” to the links I put in my html. I know nofollow is an attrribute value with a worthy purpose: to reduce blog and comment spam. But while it reportedly does not influence rankings in Google’s index, it also reportedly has the effect of keeping a page out of the index if it isn’t already there. (Both those reportings are at the last link above.)
I don’t know if that’s why those sites don’t show up in a search. [Later… now I do. See the comments below.] But I can’t think of another reason, and it annoys me that the editors in WordPress and Flickr, which I use almost every day, insert the attribute on my behalf. Putting that attribute there is not my intention. And I would like these editors to obey my intentions. Simple as that.
With the help of friends in Berkman‘s geek cave I found a way to shut the offending additions off in WordPress (though I can’t remember how right now, sorry). But I don’t know if there’s a way to do the same in Flickr. Advice welcome.
And while we’re at it, I’m still not happy that searches for my surname always ask me if I’ve misspelled it — a recently minted Google feature that I consider a problem and which hasn’t gone away. (To friends at Google reading this, I stand my my original guess that the reason for the change is that “Searles” is somewhat more common than “Searls” as a surname. Regardless, I prefer the old results to the new ones.)
Spamnation
April 25, 2010 in Blogging | 8 comments
Here’s what I see at the top of my WordPress dashboard:
Well, a lot of those spam comments have worked their way past Akismet lately, and I’ve had to kill them off manually. Most of them are obvious, but many are not, and seeing whether or not those are real takes time. So, between the tide of spam and the time it takes to sort through the whole mess, a number of legitimate comments haven’t been approved right away. To right that wrong, I just went back through 75 pages of comments and approved about twenty amidst perhaps hundreds of spams. Most of those approved were for old postings. My apologies about that.
The way the system here works, if you’ve already made an approved comment, your future comments are automatically approved. It’s only first-timers that get stuck in the moderation queue with all the spam. I’ll try to be better about looking for comments beyond the first page in the queue listing, when the first page (and the second, third and so on) is mostly spam.
If you make a comment that doesn’t appear, write to me. My email address is my first name at my last name, dot com.
Share this:
Tags: Akismet, comments, spam, wordpress