I returned home from the Microsoft MIX06 conference in Las Vegas last Thursday (I meant to blog sooner, but I’ve been busy catching up after the trip). It was a good chance to take a look at what Microsoft is working on with Sparkle and their other interactive media (“Expression”) tools. It was also a great chance to hang out in Vegas (and play a lot of Halo) with friends from the Flash world.

A quick thanks to Lynda.com and Microsoft for getting everyone together, and exposing us to the new products. Thanks to Adobe for giving us somewhere to hang out in Vegas, and hooking up the XBoxes. Fragging Mike C, Mike D, Guy, Aral, Chafic, Erik, Beau, Danny, Hoss et al was a lot of fun. Coming in second in the Halo 2 tournament was even better – the final game with Guy was a real adrenaline rush!

Here’s my quick rundown on the products MS showed, my apologies if any of this is factually incorrect, I’m just going from my hasty notes and memories:

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Ok, maybe I asked for it. Over the past few days as everyone has been getting massive blog spam, I was feeling pretty smug. Since I implemented my simple spam counter-measures, I’ve received about 5 spams a week, each of which only takes about 15 seconds to delete.

I knew my system was FAR from inviolable, but I felt that it wouldn’t be worth a spammers time to work around them, when I had shown an obvious commitment to deleting spam. So far, I have been proven completely right.

Apparently though, it is worth some no-talent script-kiddy’s time to write a script specifically to junk up my blog. Today I got hit with about 2000 junk posts in about a 5 second period (yeah, should’ve updated MT earlier, but life is busy). These weren’t spam posts – they didn’t have any content other than random characters, they didn’t link anywhere – they were just pure vandalism. Some little shit giggling in his parent’s basement as he used his daddy’s computer to waste my time. Just makes you wish someone would throw a little bleach in the gene pool.

So, what is the result? Well, like everyone else, I’m disabling comments for now. I hate the fact that one moron with low self-esteem can ruin things for everyone, but I don’t have a choice until I have more time in which to update MT, and look at other solutions for countering idiocy like this.

I promise I’ll post more in February too, life has just been a rollercoaster ride.

Blah.

A friend of mine pointed me to 1and1.com, where they are giving away 3 years of free hosting to generate word of mouth promotion (like this) until Jan 21. I’ve read through some of their FAQs, and it seems legit: 500MB space, 5GB transfer, PHP, MySQL, etc – and their overflow bandwidth is cheap at 99cents/GB. They’ll even register domains for you for only $5.99/yr.

The only catch I’ve found is that you don’t receive phone support, but I don’t consider that much of a catch (who calls their host anyway?).

I haven’t signed on with them (my current host keeps me pretty happy – and supports FlashComm), but even so, I’m tempted to dream up a new domain to register with 1and1.

Well, I finally got pissed off enough about having to delete at least 15 spam comments a day to get off my duff and do something about it.

I have implemented two solutions, one that is preventative, and one that is a clean up tool for after spam is posted.

The first change I made was to rename my comments script, and then remove ALL direct links to it. I accomplished this by:

1. Removing the links from my index and date-based archives, linking instead to the comments section of the individual posts.
2. Obsfucating the comment script’s url in the comment posting form using javascript. Now, when a user hits the submit button, the script url is assembled and assigned by javascript. It’s a simple bit of code that should prevent most bots from posting comments.

Unfortunately, there are also spammers freaky enough to post spam manually, and there’s not really anything I can do to stop them. What I can do though, is make deleting their comments easier to save myself some clicks, and some time. To this end, I followed step 6 of this great post on preventing blog spam at Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader blog. Now, when I receive an email notice that someone has posted a new comment to my blog, I also receive a direct link that lets me delete their comment with only 2 clicks. Based on some of the feedback on Yoz’s post, I also moved the delete link above the comment text in the email notice, to fix an issue with spammers leaving open html tags to obscure the link.

I hope this all works – it didn’t require a huge investment of time, and I expect it will save me a lot of frustration. I’ll post my results after a couple of weeks.

Please let me know if you encounter any issues with using the comments, beyond needing to have javascript enabled in order to post. Thanks.

I also got sick of people typing search terms in my subscription form at the top left, so I added a bit of javascript to validate the email before posting.

I just ran into this very useful (and free) service online: http://www.mailinator.com/ offers you a way to deal with annoying forums and software downloads that require you to provide an email address, then email you your log-in information. Most people have a hotmail account for this purpose, but Mailinator is cleaner, and smarter.

Just sign up for the forum (or whatever) with any mailinator.com email address (ex. joebob@mailinator.com), then go to http://www.mailinator.com/ , and sign in with the name you chose (ex. joebob). Mailinator will receive the email for you and hold on to it for a few hours so that you can get the log in info and get your download, or scan the forum for the support info you need. It’s completely unsecure, so be careful what you use it for, but it certainly can come in handy.

Just wanted to make a quick post asking people to support their user groups if possible by purchasing MX2004 through the affiliate program. If your user group doesn’t have a banner up, email the manager.

If you’re not part of a user group, but don’t want those affiliate dollars going to line Macromedia middle management’s pockets 😉 – the Edmonton Flash User Group could definitely put them to good use – just click this link, and click the Macromedia Affiliate banner at the top of the page before purchasing your software from MM.