loving the dot com

Recently I setup another blog at spampress.net. This new blog (as suggeted by the name), will publish nothing but the spam it receives via email.

What’s the point?

Spampress.net has been setup as both a demonstration and experiment. Primarily, it will show exactly how much spam is received to a domain which is completely unpublicised. The second reason is an experiment to demonstrate how spammers are becoming more savvy with including specific keywords in their emails.

Why use keywords in email?

The term ‘keywords’ usually brings to mind SEO and other types of web targeting, but recently spammers have started adding more and more ‘random’ keywords to their email as a way of fooling spam filters. If you view your email in HTML format you might find a lot of spam is made up of one single image, by using this tactic the spammers can overcome a lot of the spam filters because the text isn’t directly readable, and therefore cannot be analysed. By viewing these same emails in text-only format often the email contains nothing but random keyword text. These are used to throw off the spam filter further.

What will this accomplish?

After the blog has been running a while I will be publishing the results collected by Google Analytics and the webserver’s local copy of Awstats.

Stay tuned.

Having been rediculously busy with various things, it has been rather a while since my last post, so here’s one that’s been sitting as a draft for ages, hopefully some of you will find it useful.

Wordpress Plugins – what’s the point?

Wordpress is a great publishing platform from the outset, but Matt also built in a great architecture for coders to expand the system to do all sorts of other neat stuff. I know of some blogs which use tens of plugins to make their site work, but at the moment I only use 4 main ones. here’s a quick rundown of what they do, and why I use them.

Akismet – stopping comment spam

If you haven’t already got some sort of anti-spam plugin installed on your blog, it’s more than likely you are getting lots of comments submitted which seem like utter junk, or just blatant spam. This is where Akismet comes in. This plugin actually comes preinstalled with Wordpress, but you need to signup to Wordpress.com and get an API Key to use it.

Since I started making more regular posts, the amount of comment spam I received has just been rediculous, and Akismet has successfully sorted all that out for me. Make sure you have this turned on, seriously.

Feedburner Feed Replacement

As I mentioned in my redirecting your Wordpress feed to Feedburner post, this plugin provides you an easy way of redirecting all subscribers to your feed through the Feedburner service, allowing you to accurately keep track of reader statistics.

Name Dropper – let your visitors publicise your posts

The name dropper plugin gives bloggers a simple way to allow their visitors to submit their blog posts to a number of social bookmarking sites, including StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us and many others. It’s well worth installing it – you can see it in use at the bottom of every post here.

Optimal Title – fix your titles for SEO

Optimal Title replaces Wordpress’ wp_title() function and just moves the seperator to after the title, rather than before it. This means the title of your post will be picked up by search engines, BEFORE the name of your blog. That way visitors will more easily find their way to your posts directly.

Google Sitemaps – helping Google spider your site

Having an accurate sitemap of your site can often appear to be more trouble to setup than it’s worth, but thanks to this plugin, the task no longer needs to be a tough one. Just install the plugin and hit Activate, all the rest is done for you. See the sitemap it generates for this site here.

Twitter Tools – simple integration to Twitter

My last post was all about the Twitter service. This plugin allows you to simply integrate with their API to view and submit your latest tweets. Seen here in the sidebar on the right.