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Archive for the 'online' Category

Sorry for the late comment approval.

Just approved a few comments with some dating a month ago. Since using an offline blogging tool, I hardly sign into WordPress admin and didn’t notice the comment waiting.

Happened that I bought a new notebook (acutally was a used, traded in my HP) and have not installed BlogDesk. So I went in and found the comment wait.

Wonder why I did not get any email notification…

Site Preview with Snap.com

You may have notice that as you hover over a link on this site, a dialogue bubble pops up showing a snapshot of the link (Try it).

Snap.com provides that a little javascript that does the magic that you saw. You don’t even have to sign up.

Site preview with Snap.com

Thumbshots has thumbnail preview of sites for a long time (and I’m sure there are many more). These (Web 1.0?) sites should have made it as easy to include thumbnails for user to include into their site. But I guess they stopped innovating and Snap came in. A case of doing something simple, better.

It would be interesting to see Snap.com’s revenue model.

Now my comments are spam

At least Akimet thinks so.

Lately I noticed that my own comments reply are not appearing. I was pretty sure the comments were posted. After some test, it turned out that Akimet marked them as spam! It some became a pain to have to go into the admin after every reply to unspam my own comment.

One problem of living and accessing the Internet from China is that many spam filter consider my IP as a spam source. I had similar problem before commenting on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

Akismet do not reveal how spam are determined so it is not clear if Akismet use IP as one of the factor. I would hate to think that it was my email or URL and certainly the content of my comments does not read like spam.

After digging around it seem like there is an option in Options > Discussion, right at the bottom, there is a checkbox,

Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies.

Backlist! Don’t get me started on why blacklist is a bad idea.

No luck after unchecking the option. My hope now is the false-positive feedback to Akismet really work.

[tag]spam, akismet[/tag]

Donation for October

This month’s donation comes a little late. I was thinking which other software that I use regularly that I should send in a donation. In the end I decided to send to an online service instead.

EveryDNS is a project that provide free DNS service to the internet community. The founder David Ulevitch, has since moved on to start OpenDNS, another free DNS service that I had been using as well.

Managing DNS is not as easy as it looks, especially when it comes to the smaller details. And often it is the smaller details that gets you.

For example, providing 2 or more DNS server, making sure the 2 DNS are at two different routing (and/or physical) location, syncing the DNS records between them, etc.

EveryDNS solves these, provide an easy interface and take away the server maintenance. I’m happy to make a little contribution to keep it going.

[Tag]dns, donation[/Tag]

Domain hijacked for Spamming

Today I noticed an unusual amount of bounced emails. Initially I thought they were just spam mails so I just marked as spam and deleted them.

But more and more emails started to appear in my inbox. Some were bounced, some quota full, some vacation reply, some verification. Very strange.

So I took a look at them and found that all the mails were for one of my domains - freebizware.com.

It struck me that spammers are hijacking my domain to fake the From: address! Here are some examples,

fake spam emails

They were even generating random usernames and names.

I considering implementing SPF in my mail server. But I want to see if there are other ways to stop this from happening.

Do you have a similar experience? How do you deal with this?



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