Rebecca notes a problem with tags that goes beyond spamming, namely people who purposely pollute the public tag-space to be funny, offensive, or to push their own political agenda. I suppose this is a specialized case of spam. I still think this folksonomy idea is very cool, but we’ll see how it plays out over time.

If you’ve been using the internet long enough you can remember when spam first became a problem for you. While filtering has taken care of nearly all my email spam, I still have the occasional problem of comment spam on the blog.

To combat comment spam, I have used the MT-Blacklist spam filtering plug-in, closed commenting on old entries, banned repeat offenders, and now even started offering TypeKey authentication. These measures have reduced the comment spam problem to background noise.

I have always thought that if spam didn’t pay, the slimy people who send it might spend their time on other pursuits, like say bilking the elderly out of their retirement savings. Unfortunately, spam does seem to pay enough to keep them in the game.

Comment spam is slightly different than email spam. With comment spam, the spammer is trying to use a whole stack of internet software to increase their rank in search engines, and thus drive more traffic to their scam web sites.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to see in my RSS reader, that the MSN search folks were going to support a novel modifier of the A HTML tag, namely <A HREF=”LINK” REL=”NOFOLLOW”>. The idea being that if comment spammers increase their “pagerank” by polluting blog comments, that search engines would ignore those links with the NOFOLLOW attribute set.

It’s a very simple idea, which appears to reduce the incentive for comment spammers to bombard blogger web sites. I don’t expect them to change their habits overnight, but perhaps they’ll move on once comment spamming is deemed less effective.

After reading the MSN search team blog entry, I thought to myself, “I suppose I could make a plug-in to MovableType to automate that.” Tonight when I logged in to my MovableType installation I saw the announcement that there is already a new plug-in available.

The cold war between the forces of good and the evil empire of spammers continues. The first presidential candidate who promises to send the spammers to Gitmo gets my vote.

According to this TSA document knitting needles are allowed on planes, but spear guns are not.

What gives? Those knitting needles look sharp.

The part of me that likes to think up funny ideas, which are funny right up until the point where you get put into jail, thinks it would be funny to fly with exactly one of each of the allowed items.

[ Link courtesy of b^2 ]

Upgrading to MT 3.14 was relatively painless. Other than a little driver error when I uploaded some files as binary, which should have been ascii, it all went smooth.

Unfortunately, I can’t really say the same for enabling TypeKey. This should really have been covered better in the MT Docs.

Fortunately, I found some help.

• TypeKey Authentication for Comments
• Migrate Your MT 2.x Blog To Movable Type 3

As of right now, commenting using typekey still seems wonky. I also haven’t tried trackbacks yet. I’ll figure it out later.

Maybe I should have done a fresh install in a different directory, then manually merged templates.

I’m finally taking the plunge and upgrading to MT 3.xx. Expect instability for a few minutes.

Blog t-shirt.

[Link courtesty of b^2]

I love funny t-shirts. I never buy one, but I like to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of person who might wear one.

So last week, when Elise and Jeannie were sick I took Matthew to pre-school. Once a week, I guess, the parents sit in a room and have a parenting class. They spent the first 45 minutes or so in a time they labeled “Joys and Concerns“. During the “Joys and Concerns” part of the show, people told one awful story after another about children melting down in stores while other shoppers just stared, dysfunctional family gatherings, siblings walloping each other, and little girls who won’t wear their coats or get dressed on schedule.

The saddest thing to me is that I actually enjoyed it a little. I don’t know if it was my recent reading of the novel “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk or what but I really enjoyed listening to their stories.

The problem was that I wanted to inject humor into the discussion, which clearly was not on the agenda. I managed to censor myself successfully. Other parents would say something like “I notice children are often needy at six o’clock, maybe you should do you medical transcription later in the night.” I wanted to say “Have you thought about vodka on the rocks for breakfast?” or “Your assignment for the week is to start a fight with a stranger.”

I shared the only joy of the day. I said I had a nice trip on the train with Matthew. When I said this people just looked at me like I had gone for communion at church and said, “No thanks, I just ate I’m stuffed” or “Do you have the cheesy wafers?”

I have to go to this class more often.

The 14th annual Coffee-thon is coming up soon, tentatively scheduled for January 28th, 2005. Last years winner drank 28 cups of coffee. Do I need a doctor’s note to participate?

It’s been a cold weekend. Right now it’s a balmy 0° F (-17° C). The only nice thing about these cold days is no on looks askance if you walk around looking like a thug in a crime sketch.

Elise has been going to ice-skating lessons. After the first class Elise confided to Jeannie that she had been frightened the ice would crack and that she would fall into the water and drown. Even with that fear in her mind, she got out there on the ice and followed directions and kept working on her skating and falling skills. Daddy’s little girl is a real trooper. We’ve since reassured her that there is no way she’ll drown at the local ice arena as the ice is just inches thick. I think she felt a little less trepidation about yesterday’s lesson.