Mokka mit Schlag » Blogging

I’ve enabled the Akismet plugin to try to stop the flood of drug spam that attacks this site. If it works I’ll expand it to The Cafes as well. If you notice a problem and can’t get through via the comments, please send me a personal e-mail and I’ll look into it. Thanks.

I’m afraid I accidentally deleted somebody’s valid comment while cleaning up the spam. To whoever’s comment that was, I apologize. The spam is really getting ridiculous. Despite the filters I have in place, too much still gets through. It’s up to two to three hundred pieces a day. They’re three or so things I can still try:
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I get occasional requests for the source code to the WordPress theme of this blog. It’s really just a few small modifications on the default Kubrick, nothing major. However I haven’t officially published it yet because:

• I haven’t bothered to figure out how to bundle up and distribute a theme.
• The theme includes some things unique to this site like my own Amazon associates ID, my own Google ads, and my own headshot. This would all need to be factored out so you could replace it with your own.
• There are still some bugs in the theme. The most important is that in Safari the sidebar tends to drop below the post if the window is too narrow. The second most important bug is that in short posts bottom of the sidebar aligns to the left rather than staying on the right.

I’ll cut a deal with those who’ve asked for the theme. If you can help me figure out how to fix those two layout bugs (without using tables, or placing the sidebar content before the text content in the HTML) I’ll take care of figuring out how to bundle up and publish the theme for general use.

I’ve been playing with adding more Amazon affiliate links to this site (and eventually others) since so far that seems to be the only thing that makes any real money. (Google ads don’t even qualify as pocket money, and Yahoo’s even worse.)

There are a number of ways I can structure these ads. One option is to use plain pictures like these:
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I agreed to participate in the beta for Yahoo Ads because they would let me put ads in the feeds, unlike Google; but it was clearly not ready. The targeted ads were incredibly poorly targetted compared to Google AdSense. Perhaps that was just a function of fewer advertisers. I don’t know. However there were two problems that were definitely Yahoo’s fault and convinced me it just isn’t as smart a company as Google:
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The comment spammers are getting smarter. I had a pretty effective antispam system of moderating any comments that included two or more URLs. However recently I’ve noticed several comments that included zero or one URLs. (The zero-URL spams work by shoving the URL on the commenter.) Plus they aren’t showing the usual gibberish I was seeing in comment spam. They’ve got plausible generic content in the comments. So far the amount of spam isn’t crippling; but if it continues to get worse I may have to take more serious measures.