because not enough websites start with the letter “Z”
Posted in life, nerdliness on Sep 21st, 2009
My first Internet email account was with AOL around March 1993. This was soon followed by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) account in late 1994. In February 1996 I acquired this domain and had my first domain email address. I still have that address, although I don’t use it actively any more. Like a lot [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Aug 20th, 2008
A week or so ago I installed the Close Old Posts plugin to try and combat some of the comment spam zanshin.net receives. Â The plugin closes comments on any posting older than 14 days by default “on the fly.” No database queries are used, the postings are updated as they are viewed.
The plugin is working [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Aug 12th, 2008
After some poking around on Google, I found a Wordpress plugin that closes the comments on posts older than 14 days, automatically. Â Since most of the comment spam I get is on older postings, I am hoping that Close Old Posts will reduce the amount of spam Askimet has to filter for me.
Posted in elsewhere, nerdliness on Jul 23rd, 2008
Amateur Neurotica has a new posting about those incredibly annoying telemarketing phone calls that greet you with a computerized voice when you answer the phone. Â I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment expressed in her posting. Â I would add, however, that until you endure the computerized greeting, and the hold time, and tell the human [...]
Posted in life on Apr 30th, 2008
Recently I have been dealing with a particularly egregious form of spam – technical recruiter emails. One company in particular, Talentberg, stands out for its lack of professionalism and ignorance.  They absolutely refuse to prune their mailing list, even when repeated requests are made.  And they attempt to justify their actions through an intimidating, if false, [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Feb 5th, 2008
There seem to be two schools of thought regarding comments on personal blogs. Prominent sites like Daring Fireball don’t allow comments, and moreover, explain why. Other equally prominent sites have huge comment threads on nearly every post published.
Zanshin.net is by no means prominent. After nearly eight years of having a blog I [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Feb 1st, 2007
In the last couple of weeks the amount of trackback spam my site has been subject to has skyrocketed. In all the time I’ve been using MoveableType to manage the site I’ve only had a handful of trackback pings that were spam. In the last ten days I’ve had hundreds at a time.
Not wanting to [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Nov 17th, 2006
I’ve updated my resume page, and I’ve cleaned up some trackback spam from some of the older links.
Keeping ahead of the trackback spam is particularly annoying. My email spam filter grabs the notifications of new trackbacks and throws them in the spam folder when the trackback itself tastes like spam. Since there are some 700 [...]
Posted in nerdliness, random on Jun 18th, 2006
As I have had the same email address for over ten years now I get a ton of spam; upwards of 500 a day. Yes, five hundred. As a consequence I use an industrial strength Bayesian spam filter to clean out my inbox. In a week’s time the filter traps and segregates 3500-4000 spam messages [...]
Posted in nerdliness on May 13th, 2006
After nearly six years of having a blog, and close to 900 entries, the one thing I don’t have is many comments. There have been twenty-nine comments total, to be exact, barely three percent in ratio to the postings. I don’t really write here for the comments, and I suppose that most of my postings [...]