Avoiding Spam & Greylisting
The main email address at one of my web sites receives about 3,000 pieces of spam per day. This has quadrupled in the past year, and most of it in 2008. Managing this, and finding the real email is wasting lots of my time. I am looking for solutions.
This week I am researching an email anti-spam technique that is certainly geeky, and is not for everyone, but may be the solution I am seeking: it is called greylisting. It was tested in 2003 and described in a white paper entitiled, The Next Step in the Spam Control War: Greylisting, by Evan Harris.
I am grateful to Gary Jones of BlueFur.com Web Hosting for suggesting this solution in this thread at the TAZZU Vancouver Business & Technology Community forum.
Technorati Tags: BlueFur.com, spam, greylisting
2008 Internet New Year Resolution - Changing Web Host
Here are some of my Internet plans for 2008. I expect to consolidate my various web sites with a single host - probably Dreamhost. This means moving web sites and domain names as well as a phpBB forum and at least one database. [More in the next pane… ]
Technorati Tags: Axion, emcwebhosting.com, NeoOffice, Neureal, OpenOffice, phpbb, Uniserve
Linux Trials 1 - Ubuntu 7.1
After a very busy couple of weeks I am finally able to start testing various Linux systems. I found a great source for small hard drives so that I could install each system on a different hard drive - Free Geeks Vancouver. This group, part of a chain of volunteer organizations in many different cities, helps to recycle unwanted computers. I’ll blog about them another time. When I explained what I was doing, the manager, Dave, rooted around in a box and gave me a bunch of used hard drives for $5.
The better corporate site - Dreamhost - for example
There are a lot of corporate web sites. Most are designed to be ugly brochures, and most seem to work hard to convince me that I don’t want to do business with that organization. I’ll tell you why — and what I prefer to see — in the next pane…
Technorati Tags: dreamhost, Seth godin, Trojan Room, web site design
NeoOffice - OpenOffice.org for the Macintosh is available.
OpenOffice for the Mac has been available if the user is willing to install X11. It works, but it certainly does not feel Mac-like. In October, NeoOffice was released for the Macintosh, and it included all of the new OpenOffice features.
The folks who have worked on this point out that the program is offered for free, but, “the cost and time spent on NeoOffice are trivial for a large corporation, but they are very large for the two people that operate the NeoOffice project so donations are used to help pay for NeoOffice cash expenses like bandwidth, machines, and webhosting fees that we would have to pay for ourselves.” If you plan to use this, please consider a donation.
In addition to the trinity of office programs: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a draw program, there is a database and a presentation program. The database looks very similar to the one in OpenOffice. and that one looked at least as robust as MS Access. We’ll see.
Technorati Tags: Macintosh, NeoOffice
KDE vs Gnome
The first Linux distribution I was about to download was OpenSUSE, a free Linux distribution offered by the American networking giant Novell, who offer two different versions of Linux - a KDE version or a Gnome version. So today’s effort went into discovering the difference between the two before downloading.
My plan is to download five or six different versions of Linux as I discussed in this post to try out how each works. Once I’ve chosen one, I’ll use it for a month to see if it can become my main computer. Along the way I’ll post my findings for anyone who is interested.
It is not nice to try too fool mother Google
If you have a site that ranks well with Google, perhaps you can use your high ranking and provide links to other sites to increase their ratings.
That’s okay, especially if you think that visitors to your site would appreciate the link. That is more than okay, it helps build the web.
But if that link is so valuable to other webmasters and their wretched sites, perhaps they would pay you to have that link.
That would make mother Google really angry.
Actually, mother Google is really Matt Cutts, and he has spoken… Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank.
Technorati Tags: Google, Matt Gutts
A rant to suggest designers stop using PDF files at web sites
I really wish folks would stop using PDF files as web pages on web sites.
I know that some folks don’t like having to look at a rant, so if you want to see it, you will have to open the next pain pane.
Technorati Tags: Portable Document Format
Which Linux is right for me?
I’m amazed by Open Office, which is the Linux world’s replacement for MS Office. I’m using it on a Windows XP desktop to give it a try.
This has got me thinking - maybe I should try working on a Linux PC. I have a spare PC that I could load up with Linux and give it a test drive. But which Linux?
Is Open Office a replacement for MS Office?
Open Office 2.3 is very different from the version I looked at a few years ago. It could well be ready to take the top spot from MS Office on my desktop.
I am a power user of MS Office. I need to link MS Access database fields to Word documents in order to insert data into form letters and the like. I use spreadsheets to model financial “what if” scenarios using functions that are built in to Excel.