2005 January
I noticed in my Shortstat logs that much of my referrer spam comes from a single IP address. In one instance, five domain names spawned from the same IP address, which originated from a DSL connection in Germany. Most likely, this is due to a spammer who got his hands on a zombie and used the connection as a relay to deliver spam to my server. However, it might just be a really stupid guy who didn’t even bother to cover up his steps.
In any case, I’ve also noticed that in the last few months, the spammers have been getting smarter. Most of the spam for a single domain now comes from multiple IP addresses from multiple countries. This makes banning by IP virtually impossible. Of course, you can use Apache to block referrer requests by the domain name — the method I’m currently using.
It’d be nice to see a central referrer spam blacklist develop, much like MT-Blacklist. Until that happens, I’m going to rely on filtering out the sites myself using mod_rewrite. Juju has written a Perl script to clean up existing server logs.
Gracenote
- Alternative & Punk
- Blues
- Books & Spoken
- Children’s Music
- Classical
- Country
- Data
- Easy Listening
- Electronica/Dance
- Folk
- Gospel & Religious
- Hip Hop/Rap
- Holiday
- Industrial
- Jazz
- Metal
- New Age
- Pop
- Reggae
- R&B
- Rock
- Soundtrack
- Unclassifiable
- World
iTunes Music Store
- Alternative
- Audiobooks
- Blues
- Children’s Music
- Classical
- Country
- Dance
- Electronic
- Folk
- Hip Hop/Rap
- Jazz
- Latin
- New Age
- Pop
- R&B/Soul
- Rock
- Soundtrack
- Vocal
- World
Note that iTunes uses Gracenote’s CDDB service, which claims to have 25 metagenres in the latest version, CDDB2. iTunes currently only has 24 metagenres, with no subgenre support. Hopefully this will be introduced in a future iTunes release. I find it a bit annoying that these metagenres differ between iTMS and the CD importer. However, I don’t think Apple is ever going to resolve this in the future because that would mean retagging millions of files in the store. Oh well.
I installed sIFR 2.0 RC 3 this morning on my weblog. I have Flash MX 2004 Professional, so creation of the .SWF file was painless. Thanks to Mike Davidson and his crew for such a great script! If you have any sIFR questions, feel free to drop me a line. I might use this in future web design projects for clients.
Google might need to start thinking about a new way to deliver ad content to Adsense affiliates. I’ve noticed a constant decline in my Adsense revenue over the last few months, and I have a feeling this is due to the adoption of Mozilla Firefox. I love Firefox personally, and use it as my everyday browser. However, I’ve noticed that you can install two methods to avoid advertisements. This includes Google Adsense text ads, which I find to be unobtrusive. If this is in fact the reason why my Adsense revenue is experiencing a steady decline, Google is going to start losing advertisers. This effect would take years since Google is so hot at the moment. However, ad delivery is the core money maker for Google.
Adblocking has had an adverse effect on a number of web sites, and needs to be used with caution. I’m a fan of blocking malicious ads and animated banner ads, but blocking Adsense is a little extreme. Nevertheless, most adblockers filter out <iframe> tags, which is how Google currently delivers advertisements. It’s possible that RSS ad delivery could be the wave of the future, or even open_base_dir PHP includes.
All I know is at the moment, this is a potential problem that must be addressed, both by webmasters and Google Adsense employees.
I signed up for Flickr on December 4th. So far, the service has been simply fantastic. Flickr Uploadr lets you upload photos in batches to the service so it’s very easy to add your complete archives to the site. I’ve already uploaded 1534 photos as of today. Flickr lets you store the full-size image to their services and also allows other users to download your high-resolution images. Flickr doesn’t currently limit how many photos you can store on its site or how much disk space you can use. They limit Pro users to 1 GB of uploading traffic a month, which is huge. When I uploaded my photo archives last month, I only hit about 50% of my quota, and that was for 1500 photos!
I think Flickr is going to run into server problems with its increasing popularity. Many users have 5 megapixel or higher cameras, which makes the files saved to the service rather large. I like saving the full-size image to their site instead of downscaled ones because my friends like to download the original, uncorrupted image. Also, Flickr announced their plans to roll out a photo printing service, so having full-sized images on their site ready to go is probably a good idea. This way, family and friends can get really nice print copies from your images. Nevertheless, if every user on the service was like me, they would take up a lot of disk space. I’m unsure as to whether Ludicorp can handle thousands of accounts that take up over a gigabyte of disk space.
Already, the service is getting overwhelmed by new customers. I love Flickr and hope that their current policy doesn’t change, but it seems to me that they’re going to have to cut back somewhere to deal with the increased popularity. Either that or Google can purchase them and customers won’t ever have to worry about disk space again.