Blogging

I Need Your Help With Spam

Spam Sucks

Comment spam has never really been a problem on this site thanks to Askismet. However, I’ve recently become a victim of Trackback/Pingback spam. It looks like bots are creating automated blogs which either scrape the entire block of content or in my case, an excerpt. Sometimes, the bot states that I’m the author of the post. Other times, the bot gets the author incorrect but still displays my content.

When I visit the culprits site, the posts are usually posted in the UNCATEGORIZED category by either ADMIN or UNCATEGORIZED. At first, I was fooled a couple of times thinking these were legitimate links but I’m starting to recognize these sites as being spammers. The joys of maintaining a blog right?

How have you tackled this problem of linkback/trackback url spam? I was told that I should install a plugin called Bad Behavior but the site was down.

I have also noticed that I am receiving spam comments on at least two specific posts within my blog. The first is on the subject of joining a forum pertaining to your niche, the second deals with my take on guest blogging. I have no idea why these two posts are attracting so much attention from spam bots but they are.

I’m open to discussion on how to combat my apparent spam problems. Any and all suggestions are welcomed. 

Why CLIQ May Kill BlogRush

When BlogRush was released to the masses, it became the next best thing for bloggers since Akismet. BlogRush claimed it would provide it’s users with a RUSH of traffic from relevant blogs through the use of a widget. This widget would display your blog posts via credits earned by displaying posts from other blogs through the widget on your own site. The truth is, neither I or many others witnessed the RUSH in traffic that was almost guaranteed to those who used the service. If you’d like to see my results that came along with BlogRush, please read an earlier post I made called Is The BlogRush Over With?

After reviewing CLIQ and what that service had to offer, it dawned on me that this service could potentially wipe BlogRush off the map. Here are the reasons why.

Full Control:

With BlogRush, you have no control over which posts are displayed on the widget. You can only control what DOESN’T show up. You also have no control over who displays your blog posts.

With CLIQ, you have full control over what will be displayed in the widget. You also have the ability to make your group private so that members can only join if you accept their request, or if you manually invite them.

Relevancy:

BlogRush does provide a FILTER list that allows you to create WORD or PHRASE based filters so that you can sort of control which posts are displayed or not but when you think of all the posts your going up against within a widget that only has 5 spaces, the filters become less of a factor. BlogRush maintains a category based organizational system. Without knowing how many blogs are actually within this category, it’s hard to judge how much competition you’re actually up against. BlogRush also uses an algorithm to detect relevancy between the blog, category and blog post title.

Because CLIQ provides you with an option to make your CLIQ invite only, you can essentially control how relevant the content will be within the widget. That is, if you only invite members that post similar or close to similar content, your going to have a relevant widget that contains blog postings that your visitors and the visitors of your member blogs will have a higher probability of clicking.

Creating Your Own Niche Network:

Users have no way of creating networks within BlogRush. Your essentially at the mercy of the BlogRush algorithm to determine when your blog post fits the right criteria to be displayed next to 4 other entries.

By creating your own CLIQ, you have the ability to invite high traffic blogs into your group. Each blog that joins your CLIQ is a referral. CLIQ administrators can set unofficial TRAFFIC requirements for CLIQ memberships meaning, you can determine what amount of traffic a blog has to gain and refer in order to maintain membership. This produces competition amongst the members to drive up their own traffic which in turn, benefits the group as a whole.

Conclusion:

If you haven’t picked up on the theme yet, as a user of BlogRush, your essentially at their mercy versus CLIQ which gives you total control. Why rely on BlogRush to provide you with a lackluster rush of relevant traffic based on algorithms when you can do it yourself and reap the benefits? Sure, the CLIQ method revolves a little more in the way of work, but hey, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Bloggers won’t be benefiting from BlogRush anytime soon unless your JohnChow. So do yourself a favor, ditch it and go for something you can control and manage yourself.

CLIQ is what BlogRush should of been and I’ll leave it at that.

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know by leaving a comment and contribute to this conversation.

Share Blog Traffic Via CLIQ

CLIQin.com Logo

Background Info:

Just the other day, I noticed this service come across my FeedReader. It’s called CLIQ but the domain is actually CLIQin.com CLIQ is a service that allows bloggers to work together in order to share their collective readership as well as audience engagement. Members who are part of the same CLIQ share links to featured, popular and related posts on their own site through the CLIQ Widget. Users can manage which posts are featured on the widget as well as see reports about which blogs and posts are getting the most views and driving the most referrals around the CLIQ. By the end of this review, your going to be sick and tired of seeing the word CLIQ.

First Things First:

When you register an account with CLIQ, you’ll be presented with two options. Starting your own CLIQ or joining a pre-existing CLIQ. For the purpose of this review, I have created my own called Jeffro2pt0 A CLIQ Covering SEO, Blogging and Web 2.0. When creating your own, you’ll be presented with a number of options. These include the name of your CLIQ, Description, username, email, password, BLOG URL, and CLIQ Enrollment where you can choose whether to make your CLIQ private (invite only) or public. I have chosen to make my CLIQ private because I want to have complete control over who joins my group. Since I’ll have complete control over who joins my CLIQ, I can ensure that only relevant blog postings and URLs are displayed within my widget.

Your CLIQ Widget:

After you register your CLIQ, your given the chance to invite others via email. Unlike Quechup, your friends won’t be bombarded with invite spam since this is a manual process. Once your done with the invites, you can then give your CLIQ a public avatar image. This image will represent your CLIQ and will be seen within the CLIQ directory.

ShinySilver Bold Black GoofyGreen

At the time of this writing, CLIQ only supports three different color schemes for their widget. Those are: Shiny Silver, Bold Black, and Goofy Green. I would imagine that there will be additional color schemes available sometime in the future but I wonder, why don’t services that offer a widget give users the chance to colorize the widget themselves via CSS or HEX codes? It can’t be that hard to implement. The minimum width of the widget is 160px but will scale to fit the width of your blogs sidebar.

Once you choose your theme and move on to the next step, CLIQin will automatically try to recognize the blogging software attached to your domain and provide you with the appropriate code to copy and paste into your blogs sidebar. Here is some detailed information from the CLIQ support forums in regards to which blogging platforms are currently supported.

In order to fully support a blog platform, two things have to “work” :

1. CLIQ has to be able to ‘read in’ information about the posts (Title, Tags, etc.)

2. The CLIQ widget (which is JavaScript) has to display on the page correctly.

Currently, we fully support blogs with standard templates on TypePad, WordPress and Blogger.

Blog templates with customized fields and names for data elements require some manual set-up from our team, which we can do on a case-by-case basis.

Due to their JavaScript limitations, the CLIQ Widget does not currently work on Hosted WordPress blogs. If you’d like to see JavaScript on Hosted WordPress, contact your Senator…

We are looking into ‘slimmed down’ versions of the CLIQ Widget that would offer (likely limited) functionality on the platforms we don’t yet support…so stayed tuned!

Configuring The Widget:

There are a few options in which you can use to configure what is displayed within the widget on other blogs. You can choose to feature your most RECENT post which is updated daily. You can choose to feature your LONG TAIL which shows one of the five posts with the least total views, this also rotates daily. Or you can choose the manual option and select an article from the list of articles that are presented to you. This is a good feature if you want to pump some Google Juice into a specific page.

Configure The Widget

There are a few things that I don’t like about this widget. The first is that, it doesn’t look good if you have a skinny sidebar for widgets. The text appears cramped and at times, the content within the widget looks like a mess. The second, there is no link displayed that allows visitors to JOIN the CLIQ or at least REQUEST TO JOIN if private.

CLIQ Reports:

Since I created an account yesterday, the reports section of CLIQ is pretty bare. The reports section displays a dynamically generated graph that highlights views that were contributed through CLIQ. You can choose to view stats from your own blog, member blogs or, all blogs. The stats timetable is broken up into three sections: The Last 1 Day, Last 7 Days and Last 30 Days. Alternatively, you can select ALL VIEWS or how many times your CLIQ Page was viewed within the CLIQ Directory.

One Of The CLIQ Report Views

Conclusion:

Overall, this service reminds me of old fashioned web rings from way back when. Web rings were essentially a group of websites that were all related towards a specific topic. Maybe I’ll coin a new term here and say that CLIQ is WebRings 2.0. Unlike MyBlogLog, BlogRush, or any other community based widget I have come across, this one gives site owners full control over who is part of the group which means, you can really create a targeted CLIQ and share each other’s traffic. Because most if not all of the posts within your CLIQ will be related, there is a higher probability of someone clicking on your blog post, thereby gaining you a new visitor.

I would compare this service to BlogRush but that is for another post. If your a blogger currently using BlogRush, I strongly advise you to check this service out and create your own CLIQ. Work on inviting high traffic blogs that are related to your content and build a small niche network where everyone within your CLIQ benefits. As it stands, I currently have my own CLIQ. If your blog covers the topics of SEO, Web 2.0, Blogging or WordPress related material, your welcome to request an invite to join the group.

As always, I look forward to hearing your feedback whether it be about this review, grammatical corrections or questions.

A Big Heart Felt Thanks To YOU

Thanks To You

I’d like to say thank you to my sponsors. Just kidding. No sponsor has been dumb enough to give me money so instead, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my readers. This blog was started back at the end of May as a one year project to see where I could take it. So after four months into the project, let’s take a look at some statistics.

Subscribers:

This site now has a total of 103 Subscribers according to Feedburner. This number varies day to day but is steadily showing over 100 subscribers. Thanks to all of you who have subscribed either by email or by RSS. I truly do appreciate it as it tells me that what I’m writing is important or at the very least informative.

Conversations:

At the time of this writing, this site has a total of 348 comments on 227 posts contained within 13 categories and 1,147 tags. Some of the comments within this specific stat are actually trackbacks or pingbacks but for the most part, the comments were made by real people. One of the major goals that I am trying to achieve with this site is building a COMMUNITY. A social community at that. A community that contributes intelligently to the conversations that I start with each post.

Any time I publish a post on this site, I always look forward to checking my email to see if and who has contributed to the conversation. I realize that as a blogger, comments are hard to come by. That is why I try to thank everyone who leaves a comment as I’m appreciative of the time you took out of your day to stop by and say hello. So I’ll end this by saying THANK YOU to each and everyone of you who have left a comment on this blog since it’s inception. It’s nice to know that I’m not blogging within an empty room.

Akismet The Time Saver:

Every blogger seems to toot their own horn when they reach a milestone with spam such as Darren Rowse. I’ll be no different except to let you know that so far, Akismet has blocked 1,377 spam messages. Although a far cry from two million, Akismet has been one hell of a time saver for me. I will say however that, Akismet is not perfect and in recent weeks, Akismet has been missing spam but overall, it’s the best anti spam solution I’ve ever seen other than disconnecting from the net. So here is a big thank you to everyone involved with Akismet.

In Closing:

According to the logs, each month has shown a steady increase in traffic, an increase in subscribers and more importantly, an increase in user interaction. In the past four months, I’ve managed to develop virtual relationships with various people across various blogs. The next four months will be interesting as I continue to experiment with this blog and continue with my writing. I’ll write up another post like this when we hit the eight month mark to see where we have progressed. Rest assured that I appreciate every comment, trackback, pingback, linkback, bookmark, stumble, digg ect. that is given to me. It would be great if I could get paid to do this sort of work, but as it stands, this blog is advertisement and sponsor free. So in the mean time, what I mentioned above is what I consider blogging currency. From what I’ve seen so far, I’m no longer a blogging bum, thanks to you of course.

Readers First

Unlike most other sites or blogs, I don’t mind thanking those who have helped me reach this point. So in no particular order, I’d like to thank the following people. I apologize if you don’t see your name on this list.

Last but not least, thanks to all of you who have joined my MyBlogLog community, added me to Twitter and to everyone that I have associated with on TalkShoe.If you want to be removed from this list or if you would like for me to change the site your link is pointing to, let me know by leaving a comment.

Icon Based Social Bookmarking Plugin

m Lienzo.com Logo

Aaron over at Milienzo.com has published his first ever WordPress Plugin entitled ‘I Love Social Bookmarking‘. I love social bookmarking gives your readers a chance to submit your site/articles to various social bookmarking services via a tidy drop-down list.

Screenshot of the plugin in action:

Screenshot Of The Plugin

Version 0.1b is a pre-release trial version released to eliminate bugs and identify popular feature requests before a general public release. If you’d like to help me test this version please install it and let me know of any problems you encounter or additional features you’d like to see included.

Personally, I enjoy using the ShareThis plugin as it provides many more options than Milienzo’s plugin, including the option of emailing the post. However, this is his first ever plugin so it will be interesting to see where he takes this. Milienzio, my advice is to look at what ShareThis has to offer and see if you can improve upon that.

Break Down Of Communication

Ever notice how a good conversation on a forum or blog will usually take a nose dive? What was once an informative exchange of information turns into a slug fest with expletives being tossed around left and right with someone usually being referred to as a nazi. I’ve learned that the term for this breakdown in communication is called ‘Godwin’s Law’.

Back in 1990, Mike Godwin of the EFF noted a feature of online discussion groups: As a thread gathered steam, members would start hurling insults and inevitably someone would be compared to Adolf Hitler. Hence Godwins Law. The longer an online conversation continues, the greater the possibility of a reference to Nazis. Usually at this point, the conversation is over.

Although this video doesn’t highlight the comparison to Adolf Hitler, it does a nice job of showing just how communication breaks down.

Viewer Voices: Where We Respond To The Opinions Of Our Uninformed Viewers

FeedSmith Plugin Security Update

Feedburner.com LogoThe FeedBurner Feedsmith plugin for WordPress which consolidates all of your WordPress RSS Feeds into one, has undergone a small security update. According to Feedburner, older versions of FeedSmith, can be vulnerable to what is called a “cross-site request forgery.” This permits someone to change WordPress plugin settings on your system without you noticing during the time you are signed into your WordPress control panel.

Feedburner recommends downloading the latest version of the plugin, FeedSmith V2.3 as this version ensures that the only person who can change FeedSmith settings is the administrative account that is signed into your WordPress account.

Here are the directions to update your plugin.

  1. Download version 2.3 of the plugin.
  2. Sign in to your WordPress admin control panel.
  3. Under Plugins, locate the current FeedSmith plugin, and click “Deactivate.”
  4. Copy the plugin file, FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php into your default WordPress plugin directory, wp-content/plugins/
  5. Reactivate the plugin by logging in to your WordPress administration area, clicking Plugins, then clicking Activate at the end of the “FeedBurner FeedSmith” row.

At the end of this process, v2.3 will be active and will use your existing feed redirection settings; there is no need to re-enter them. You will also be protected against any potential request forgery attack.

Is Ticketapp The Twitter Yappd Killer

TicketAppTicketApp compares themselves to Twitter but I’d say they are a lot more than Twitter. TicketApps is a Tumblelog, todo list, note taker, image publisher, bug tracker and so much more. While Twitter may lay claim to the word “Tweets“, Ticketapp messages or postings are simply called “Tickets” Because this new service is like so many others, there are a lot of similarities.

Like Twitter, Ticketapp offers a public timeline where users can see recent tickets. These recent tickets can contain any number of different forms of content such as images, text and links but one thing missing from the equation is the ability to publish videos.

Edit Your TicketApp Profile

Users can customize their profile by adding their own avatar and adding a background image to their ticket page but that’s about it in terms of customization. When are sites going to enable users to come up with their own color schemes? It can’t be that hard. One last note about customization. Ticketapp provides an option to make your tickets public or private.

How Does This Thing Work?

Unlike Yappd or Twitter but similar to Tumblr, The TicketApp text editor gives users the ability to post quotes, images, links, and snippets of code by allowing these specific html tags to be used. I must admit, typing in HTML code is annoying and these tags should be substituted with buttons that perform these functions automatically for highlighted text. These tags are generally allowed on numerous blogs within their respected commenting areas so it’s interesting to see a service pick up on the notion of Twitter and provide this additional functionality. One other thing that is worth mentioning is that there is no character limit. You can go way beyond 140 characters if you choose to do so.

Ticketapp Text Editor

Will this service take off?

It’s hard to say. It’s nice to see a time line which isn’t merely all text but, Twitter is well established and so are the likes of Tumblr and Jaiku. The notion of having a service which is a clone of another is quickly wearing off and it’s really starting to drive many people up the wall. Perhaps with a few more UI changes, a publicly released API for third party support, and more options for user customization, this service may stand a chance to gain an acceptable userbase.

If you end up creating an account and giving it a try, please report back to us with your feedback and give us your opinion.

The Truth Behind The Digg Effect

The Digg EffectChris Brogan, a social media maven, has published an article on his blog that goes into detail about his experience with the so called “Digg Effect“. Chris provides a visualization which shows the surge in traffic he received when he reached the Digg front page. What happened as a result? According to Chris, NOTHING. His RSS subscriber base didn’t increase, nor did the initial traffic to his site which is the basis for this post. Bloggers and site owners alike believe that getting on the front page of Digg is like striking gold, unfortunately this is not the case.

I’m not saying that being on the front page of Digg is a bad thing, but there is something you have to realize. The type of traffic that Digg sends is the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” type of traffic. And while were talking about this sort of traffic, the same thing can be said for Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Propeller. I’ve read so many blog entries that covered their own surge of traffic and the similarities between all of them are the same. No one sticks around, no one subscribes to the RSS feed, and the site that was once popular ends up returning to the shadows of the web.

A blogger or site owner should be looking to grow their reader base and that won’t happen by getting on the front page of Digg or any other major social bookmarking site. There is the argument where if you appear on these sites multiple times, there is a more likely chance of gaining quality traffic. I wouldn’t consider the digg effect to be called quality traffic, but I do think that by receiving this fly by night traffic, your building brand awareness. Your brand being your site and it’s a golden rule that REPITITIVENESS works.

The gist of what I am trying to say is to not rely on Digg, Stumbleupon or any other website to provide you with traffic. Instead, write good quality content. Good quality content does the job of so many other facets of blogging. Good quality content creates links, conversations, interactivity, spawns relationships, builds your brand and does so many other positive things for you, that if I were to write a book on SEO, it would contain one page. That one page would simply say, WRITE QUALITY CONTENT.

Tell me what you think in regards to this issue. I’d be very interested in your opinion.

BTW. Hello to all of you STUMBLING across this post. Are you here to prove me wrong?

MyBlogLog Buzz Tracker Explained

MyBlogLog LogoThe What’s Hot In My Communities section of your MyBlogLog Profile is an easy way to track buzz worthy info but, how does MBL decide what’s hot and what’s not?

Simply put, the links you see within this area of your user profile represent the most popular links within YOUR MYBLOGLOG COMMUNITIES. If you are seeing links to porn sites or sites you deem unacceptable, the only way to remove them, is to find out which community your apart of that is posting that link, or information related to that link and leave that community.

If your thinking that tracking down the culprits within your large number of communities would be nothing more than a hassle, your in for some great news. MyBlogLog has added an interesting feature to their buzz tracker in the form of a question mark. This question mark will finally give MyBlogLog users the ability to figure out where those buzzworthy links are coming from.

Figure Out Where Those Links Are Coming From

For instance, let’s say you don’t want links such as Fox.com to show up in your list. You would simply click on the (?) and figure out which sites are posting this link and leave their community.

Search And Destroy

According to the question mark, the site Casual Keystrokes, is the culprit behind this link. As an MBL user, you would look for that community within your list of favorites and click on the LEAVE COMMUNITY button.

It’s really neat to see how this all works and it’s nice that Robyn Tippins has finally published an article that easily explains the process. I have to agree that, clicking on these questions marks is half the fun in trying to figure out why they are creating so much buzz. Give it a shot and let me know what you’ve discovered.