Referrer Spam is quite a bit of pain in the ass - if you care about your log files. Of course the referrer logs are quite interesting, looking at which google search terms find your site, which other sites link to you - but one should never make the mistake of putting too much effort into these logs, especially when 95% of the links are spam.
So how do you get rid of it? One step would be to just delete the items that look like spam - they are everywhere with minor variations - but that still takes time.
jotsheet has just recently published an in-depth article about the why and how of referrer spam as well as possible approaches to blocking it. I really like the idea of a combination of .htaccess blocks, local and remote blacklists to do the spamblocking. I hope one universal and trusted system comes out soon enough to finally win another battle for the anti-spam movement; if not the war? 
Archive for February, 2005
Another one of those days where I run that searchfor dancesport related blogs. Here is what I found today:
And these sites make me realize that dancesport seems to be quite popular in the US - at least in the blogging community?!
As I was writing yesterday in “Raising the big questions” I wanted to ask Steve Pavlina more about his concepts on purpose, how these purposes are set in real terms - short: get an example and more story about this. Thanks to Steve’s full-text RSS-Feed I have found more than I asked for. For those who do not know I am offline during the weekends as I do not have internet at home (nor a land line telephone), so I rely on News-feeds downloaded before the weekends - which are also used to keep up with my subscribed feeds and webpages that are dropped into my DevonThink inbox.
Steve wrote the article “How to discover your life’s purpose in about 20 minutes describing a method that clears your mind of all external ideas, values and hopefully comes up with a true answer coming from your deepest inside. An answer whose truth you will feel instantly. Steve writes:
Usually it takes 15-20 minutes to clear your head of all the clutter and the social conditioning about what you think your purpose in life is. The false answers will come from your mind and your memories. But when the true answer finally arrives, it will feel like it’s coming to you from a different source entirely.
I have not done the task yet - maybe because I am afraid? My rationale would be “I do not have the time to do se now - maybe tomorrow” which in part is true - as I am currently in the process of writing this article as well as in the need to get ready for tonight’s tango fusion party. But you know how these things are… there usually is no “I do not have the time” but more a “I do not want to take the time”. Whatever. I will do the exercise - it is a logical conclusion of my inner needs and drives that have taken control at times these last months. Part of these was my adoption of “Getting Things Done” Methodology, as well as the discovery of Steve’s blog - making me think and question as well as curious.
Of course, the pure idea of having a purpose has never been strange to me, nor have certain ideas I have had in the past years about this purpose - my purpose - but never been really that convincing - many ideas have seemed to be too simple (can this really be it?) or too far off that they sounded true but also so in-concrete as that I would not really see how that idea, that purpose would really work. My past attitude towards this has always been a trust in life that things will work out as they will as well as that these “ideas” that I have will eventually make themselves more clear to me as they start to come into my life. But then there is this time now, the last year of my 4th septade, my 28th year on this planet and I somehow have the feeling I will need to know what I really want to do this year as it will be a good place to start in the right direction rather than following down a road I don’t really want to go - just because it is so easy and obvious to follow it. Yes, I will finish my PhD-Thesis sometime this year, probably not before November, maybe before April 2006 - but that is about the time I have set for it as well as a good reason to figure out what to do then - where to go next and what I really want to do. Yes, of course there are many options, many that I could easily master - many challenges, quests and possibilities - and also many places I can already see I would be selling part of my soul if I would go there without knowing why. Without staying sane in the process and not getting sucked into the “career path” that we all seem to follow, that the “system” offers.
Here was my final answer: to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace.
were Steves last words on his purpose, a truly noble and true statement that makes me think I may lie on similar terms - but the sentence does not ring any bells inside me - which would be expected as it is not my statement - but this also necessitates spending the time to find my own mission statement, my own purpose in life.
The questions
Having just finished 4 seasons of Babylon 5 I am feeling quite a bit wondering… wondering about the questions raised in the series, its dialogues and especially behind the scenes and between the lines. There seem to be three questions asked:
- Who are you?
- What do you want?
- Why are you here?
I am not sure if these questions actually are everything there is to it, but they sure are deep and meaningful questions - questions I cannot answer but also questions I want to have answered, that I feel I need to start putting some life into.
What do I want?
It seems easy to answer the second question “What do you want?”, but maybe it is not that easy. Sure, there are certain needs I have, and things I want - but that cannot be the answer I am looking for. I can fill a page with things I want - maybe this is exactly the way to approach this. Write down everything that is on my mind, write down everything I want and then start looking what is behind all that. This idea reminds me of Dave Allens “Getting Things Done” method, where you try to get everything out in the open, all open loops out of your brain which is not the place where reminders are supposed to sit if it is to live, decide and act instead of just running after shadows.
Who am I?
This is even a better question - and will its answer change the things I want? In the end it will probably all converge into one thing on a high enough level - but then the answer cannot just be “to be” in itself - even if this is enough meaning for anything; just too metaphysical for me I guess. (not really, but not practically either).
Why am I here?
The least concrete question and probably the source for who I am - if there is something like purpose or meaning in the universe - everything I am and want is because I am here - but then there is a difference. If there is such a thing as destiny and/or fate - my wants and my self-view, the answers to questions 1 and 2 do not have to fall in line with it. There is always the filter of the subjective out, always the ego that interacts with the world, that has ideals, flaws and changes perception to reflect its inner self image into and onto the world. So by answering the first and second question I do not get anywhere near the answer to question three - whereas the answer to question three might be changing and determining the other answers. Difficult to think about it, but even more difficult to find the answers. Steve Pavlina talks in his blog about those high level effects - but just on a theoretical level, I cannot really follow as he does not give too many details, no examples - I might need to send him an email to ask for more, to ask for some ideas.
Thanks goes out to Todd who notified me of my broken comment system. At first I thought “that can’t be, I tested it and it worked” - then I realized most comments from last night, including Todd’s were held in the moderation queue. I suppose SpamKarma was set to a too strict setting. Now what happened when I wanted to answer some comments at the post “Tags in Itunes, Anyone?” was quite unexpected: I received the following message:
“Sorry, you can only post a new comment once every 15 seconds. Slow down cowboy.”
Hey, someone must have had a bug like this before, right?
Now there is nothing wrong with a good check against comment flooders - but I had not done anything like that. Oh well, I checked the WordPress Support Forum and found an answer here suggesting that a wrong date in one of the comments was causing the problem - being in the future - and thus thinking that a difference of a negative time between posts was bad. In fact this error did not happen here.
What on earth could then be wrong?
I googled the error message a bit and finally ended here, basically at a changelog of the WordPress function that checked against comment flooders. So what basically happened was that every comment posted by a previous commenter (same IP) was being trapped inside this function - just because some missing brackets ;( So it was quite obvious why not all posters had seen this before - just those who commented a second time.
Now what?
I fixed the code once and for all - until the next feature of a nightly build comes up. Until then: I suppose I will update to the current nightly build to make things more interesting!
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