Web

For the last few days I’ve been getting weird feedback emails for all of my websites. I get 3-4 of them with random bogus addresses at my website’s domain and containing empty multipart MIME messages containing only the mime section headers. It looks like someone is trying to hack my feedback forms, most likely a spammer. Those forms have always been able to send email only to a particular hard-coded address. I secured all of the forms to prevent them from being accessed in any way other than from my webpage and I eliminated the PHP files so they’re now stored entirely within the site’s content management system.

I think it’s time to take some more drastic action against spammers. It’s gone beyond annoying to the nightmare stage. I’m almost at the point of giving up email & shutting down all of my websites, since I waste too much of my time dealing with spam.

I’m sure everyone’s heard about Google Talk by now. It works in both AdiumX & iChat. I’m on now, so give a holler at mike3k [at] gmail.com.

Will someone in New York City check out this address:

I’ve received about 10 spams since this morning listing that address for unsubscribing. These guys are exceptionally obnoxious as spammers go.

It looks like someone is artificially inflating the read count for the items he posts at MacMegasite. On the 15th, the bandwidth usage was almost 5x the average. 54% of the hits came from a single IP address in Cardiff, Wales. A very short article posted that day got over 1600 hits. Draw your own conclusions.

I’m the only person who sees the referrer log for this site, so your referrer spam serves absolutely no purpose.

Yesterday one single Google crawler accounted for more than 50% of the hits at WorldBeatPlanet.

I just had to take WorldBeatPlanet down completely because I’m *still* under heavy attack by that comment spammer. It will remain down until he finally gives up. The comment spams are coming from many different IP addresses and with many different user agents so I can’t selectively block them. Taking the site down is my only choice. If you want WorldBeatPlanet back, complain to rockwell.kephart@gmail.com, abuse@activehost.com, postmaster@namecheap.com, and abuse@layeredtech.com about the site which they host.

I just turned off comments at WorldBeatPlanet after receiving about 50 comment spams from the same site. It will remain turned off as long as necessary until they give up.

I now have two paying ad customers at MacMegasite. Previously I was using only affiliate programs like Amazon & Google AdSense. Of those, AdSense is the only one that was profitable. Thanks to DreamHost’s referrals, I haven’t had to pay for my hosting for several months. I’m also taking advantage of DreamHost’s new features which lets us create our own discounts to offer $50 off the initial payment for anyone who signs up with the discount code MACMEGASALE.

Jeremiah Cohick, who we know and love from Apple’s switch commercial, has designed one of the most original & striking WordPress themes I’ve seen. Most WP themes tend to look very similar and often use the same Kubrick-based page layout. Jeremiah’s layout doesn’t look at all like WordPress. It’s graphic intensive and heavily dependent on CSS & JavaScript with the blog content in a small scrolling area. Unfortunately since the design doesn’t use a scrollbar, you can’t page through it with the spacebar or use the scrollwheel.