Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

Comment Spam and Nofollow – a new twist

Posted on in Blogs, Spam.

Today I got a comment spam, nothing very unusal just the normal online poker thing. But what was odd, and novel, about it was that the two dozen or so links in the comment all had rel="nofollow" as part of the link code.

Hang on, I thought, isn’t nofollow supposed to be defeating comment spam? (It’s not intended to stop comment spam hitting your blog, at least not straight away, but it is intended to make comment spam less attractive to search engines thus eventually killing it off by reducing the ROI.)

So why would a spammer send out comment spam with nofollow already included?

It could be that the spammer in question is an idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Nice thought but most spammers are actually quite smart. I know it doesn’t look like it when you receive a million penis/breast enlargement spams which (a) you don’t need anyway 😉 and (b) don’t apply to your half of the population, but they are playing the numbers game in a big, and profitable, way and they do know what they’re doing.

So maybe they’ve discovered that some blogs are letting comments through without moderation so long as they have rel="nofollow" on all links, coupled with search engines that don’t yet support this new “standard”.

Or maybe they’re just experimenting to see if the above case is true anywhere. Damn I hate my blog being used as a lab rat.

Any thoughts?

More cleverness

Posted on in Blogs.

Of course the technique I outlined a few days ago isn’t limited to favicons. It can be used with any appropriate image. I realised that I could make links to Live Journals look exactly like they do on LJ itself by including the following in my CSS.

#content a[href^="http://www.livejournal.com/users/"] {
  background-image: url('http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

Still Gecko only obviously, due to the use of the CSS 3 selector.

What I should do is cobble something together in WP that automatically converts <lj user="foo"> into an appropriate HTML link complete with icon. This is the sort of thing that Live Press was supposed to do but (a) I could never get it working and (b) it hasn’t been upgraded to Word Press 1.5. Time to brush up on my PHP and get hacking.

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Funky CSS stuff for Gecko browsers

Posted on in Blogs, Browsers.

This grew out of a discussion regarding .ICO files and CSS on alt.html. Now, I made some mistakes in my off-the-cuff suggestion there (I used [att|=val] rather than the correct (and, annoyingly, CSS3) selector [att^=val]. After switching to the correct selector I realised that, even allowing for the simplification supplied by Toby Inkster, this would be Gecko only for now. But it is a nice trick anyway.

In essence what it does is insert a site’s favicon before any link to that site. As CSS doesn’t parse the value of att() it can’t be done on a generic level (it could be done with JavaScript but raises a number of other issues) but it can be done for sites that you link to frequently.

#content a[href^='http://groups-beta.google'] {
  background-image: url('http://www.google.com/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

#content a[href^='http://www.imdb.com'] {
  background-image: url('http://www.imdb.com/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

#content a[href^='http://www.amazon.co.uk'] {
  background-image: url('http://www.amazon.co.uk/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

#content a[href^='http://en.wikipedia'] {
  background-image: url('http://en.wikipedia.com/favicon.ico');
  padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
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