Torrential Web Dev

After mentioning in January the FOWD Conference which took place a few days ago on the 18th April it's safe to assume from the lack of coverage on the blog that I was sadly unable to attend.

All is not lost though as presentations and MP3s of the various presentations are now available on the official website. If you were unable to attend why not take a look?

Since July last year (10 months) this blog has received over 20,000 spam comments. It's an interesting statistic but fairly meaningless. Far more important is what happened to them all.

From those 20,000 spam comments I've only actually seen 2. A simple combination of Akismet and the blogg.de blacklist have caught all the rest. That's a 99.99% success rate. For the 1-2 minutes of work it took to install and configure the spam protector plugin for serendipity I find that really very impressive.

Although these tools prevent spam creating a visible impact it still remains a problem. So many spam comments are going to use up a fair amount of bandwidth. Also, things are only getting worse. On average I've received 2,000 spam comments a month but I've received 1,000 in the past week alone. The pace is increasing.

I've discussed Bad Behaviour before but I've never felt that I personally need it. I think it is getting towards the point where I need to take another look.

As some of you have already noticed over the past day comments have been disabled. During this time the site has been moved to a new server. This should allow me to better handle the growth of the site.

The move seems to have been relatively pain free but if you spot any problems or anything you think is a bug please let me know in the comments of this post.

The big news of the day appears to be eBay acquiring StumbleUpon. A fair question is to ask why. To me it doesn't really make sense. Om Malik at GigaOM has an interesting take though

By marrying the [StumbleUpon] toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take.

I haven't used Skype so I couldn't comment on whether this would be a workable strategy but I do know that I have never used StumbleUpon for search. If I want to search for something I generally use google. If I want to kill 5 minutes I use the StumbleUpon toolbar.

If eBay genuinely was looking to get into the search business then this deal doesn't really make sense to me. Especially with technorati flaunting its statistical finery.

The second part of this news story is the response of google. Supposedly a potential suitor for StumbleUpon until very recently google has released a new feature for the Google Toolbar, on the same day as the acquisition, which closely resembles the StumbleUpon functionality.

With Microsoft complaining about Google acquiring DoubleClick and demanding an anti-trust investigation after presumably being priced out of the running itself and now the response of Google to the acquisition of StumbleUpon does anyone else feel that the big players have abandoned the idea of innovation and decided just to squabble amongst themselves? Their conduct seems to be increasingly petty.

I've been meaning to post about this since Cal Evans talked about the dzone site on the Zend Developer Zone. Whereas dzone already has the participation of developers in languages other than PHP and is looking for PHP developers I'm in somewhat of the opposite situation.

Firstly some background. Bumpzee is a site where people with similar interests can congregate in communities to share blog posts, 'bump' them up digg-style, comment, start discussions and generally network with other people sharing their interests. I joined the site a little while ago when there were only about 4 communities established. Since then the site developers have been working hard to make the site better to the point where users are now able to establish their own communities.

There wasn't anywhere to share my interest in programming and so I set up a new community. I've not really been involved with any language but PHP for over a year now and even then it was a relatively obscure language in academia which isn't that well know for active blogging so the community has a distinct PHP bias at the moment.

To fully live up to the name I'm looking to more fairly represent a variety of different languages and interests. As such, if you regularly blog about programming, or even if you don't but want to read some of the best posts as voted for by the community, then head on over to the programming community on bumpzee.

With an article on the Smarty templating system over at PHPBuilder.com and an article on the Template IT PEAR package on the Sitepoint blog today seems to be the day to discuss templating systems.

Not being one to miss a band wagon I thought I would jump on as well.

Continue reading "Templating Day"

I came across popuri.us a while ago and have been holding off posting about it for a while because it seemed a little unstable after being highlighted by TechCrunch.

It reminds me a lot of the page strength tool at seomoz. The metrics reported aren't all the same and you don't get an overall score with popuri.us as you do with seomoz but it is another very good tool for gathering info on a url.

Integrating popularity ranks other than Alexa is a good move for popuri.us. Alexa is known to be biased towards the webmaster type crowd so looking at other such metrics is probably a good move. For sites with an rss feed it also fetches the number of bloglines subscribers. It would be nice to see data being collected from a few other online feed readers but overall this is a really nice tool. It has certainly earned a place in my bookmarks.

I'm currently subscribed to the developershed newsletter. I mainly get them for the programming articles but having just read the emails from the past few months and it was a couple of SEO articles that really caught my attention.

The SEO field is great in that a lot of people are willing to share what they know. It's possible to take a sceptical perspective and say they're only looking to build their mind-share and brand but there is still good information out there. Brands are being made by offering real value.

This is why these two articles stuck out. These articles were not about valuable content. They were about self-promotion all the way. Continue reading "DeveloperShed - All about self-promotion?"

April 1st has finally passed and once again we can trust our news services. Here is my brief take on some of the 'news' stories passing through my rss reader.

Google announced two new services. Google Paper doesn't really catch my imagination but Google TiSP looks interesting. The TechCrunch article presents it as requiring self installation and given that this new broadband service streams data along a fibre optic cable through the sewers installation could be messy. Luckily things aren't quite that bad as Google has 'Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers' waiting in the sewers to plug your connection in. They do spoil us.

Jonathan Snook has a totally new logo. Curly brackets are clearly 'it' this season.

Brian Clark has some good advice on getting links to your site. Following the basic idea that if it works for canvas it'll work for the internet - he suggests that one good way to get links is to die.

Finally, unless I've been tricked, it looks like PHP4s days are numbered. Even though my host is now offering PHP5 on new hosting accounts I'm still using PHP4. Perhaps this news will finally kick me into action and get me to contact my host about upgrading. I may decide to convert at the same time as the site redesign. Believe or not but it is still coming.