spam and stuff | clagnut/blog

spam and stuff posted 27th May 2002

A List Apart has a geeky double issue which has partly pissed me off. On the good side there’s a pretty good attempt to prevent spam bots reading email addresses which uses JavaScript and character encoding.

On the disappointing side is an article explaining how to build an expandable client-side CMS. ‘Nothing wrong with that’, you might well think And you’d be right; it’s pretty good. But I do infer that the article I wrote for ALA describing an out of the box CMS using PHP and MySQL, is now unlikely to be used. I can deal with that, but what really wrankles is, having had my article idea okayed by the man himself, I have had no confirmation of receipt of said article, let alone a yes or no that they will run it. Now, I appreciate that Zeldman is one of the busiest people on this Earth, but my issue is that I am holding off publishing the article elsewhere (one of ALA’s publication stipulations).

Blacklisting comment spam: Everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s getting it: the evil that is comment spam. I have implemented a blacklist technique which I’ve added to a growing decentralised web of trust.
On decentralized blacklists: Do not merge other people’s comment spam blacklists with your own list. By keeping individual’s contributions separate, we have decentralization at work and this important for maintaining the integrity of a blacklist web of trust.
I blame Tonga: You may have noticed that Clagnut was down for most of last week. The culprits were referrer spam robots maxing out my database connections, resulting in my ISP putting my account on hold.
In a pickle: A List Apart explains a great time management system for those that can’t be bothered with time management systems. The gist is to schedule in the critical tasks of the day and fill in the gaps with all the rest (email, site maintenance, phone calls, reading ALA, etc.).…
Form layout: Semantically speaking, should we be using tables to lay out forms, or should we be using some other mark-up combined with CSS? There arguments for both, but I reckon the most flexible answer is hidden in HTML 2.