In the last few days I’ve noticed some weird blog spam in some of my blogs. The thing with this spam is that Akismet is not reacting and marking the comments as spam. They go directly to the approve comment queue.

It’s easy to see that the comment is a spam comment, but it’s a little bit annoying that Akismet can’t see it’s spam

Anyway, the weird part of these spam comments are the URL field because it’s just http://url as web site and not a wokring web site Since the comments don’t contain any links or other contact information these spam comments are completely useless if they somehow should get approved and not marked as spam. They are simply just words Since the spam is coming from everywhere (different networks, IPs and users) it must be some kind of trojan infecting peoples computers and sending the spam.

As you can see on this sample comment, it’s just words and a non-working URL:

I get a feeling that someone did a poor job programming this spam bot/trojan

Have you also seen this kind of poor spam comments lately?

I guess you’ve heard of GPS (Global Positioning System), a system allowing you to find out your exact position using satellite signals, and the map service Google Earth before. But did you know there’s an easy way to combine these two?

By using the GPS Tracking Key from LandAirSea Systems and a laptop with Google Earth installed you can see your exact position in Google Earth. The internal computer determines the exact GPS location of the device within 2.5 meters and records this data every second. The data can then be downloaded and viewed in Google Earth simply by plugging the Tracking Key into the USB port of a computer. You can then view where you have been on the satellite images in Google Earth with the time you spent at different places. You can also see the speed you had while moving!

The device is water resistant so you can use it outdoors and even on the sea . That’s really good since I rarely need to find out my location when I’m indoors .

On Youtube there’s a video where GPS tracking helped solving a murder case thanks to it’s accuracy. The authorities discovered there was a global positioning system in the suspects car that his wife put it in the truck, because she suspected he was having an affair. Based on the information taken from the tracking key, the suspect was charged with murder o a 12 year old girl.

[youtube]RpM1wJ-AXZs[/youtube]

It’s amazing what you can do with GPS tracking

As you may have seen on Twitter we moved our blog (blog.xaviermedia.com) to another server yesterday due to poor response times at the old server. So how did we know that the response times where poor? I’m using a service called mon.itor.us where you can setup web site checks to monitor up time and response times of web sites from three different locations in the world: US, Austria and Germany.

I like mon.itor.us because it’s free, easy to use, got nice graphs and you also get a weekly report with average load times and how much down time your site(s) had. When I for example wrote about the down time Entrecard.com had I used graphs from mon.itor.us to show the actual down time Entrecard.com had.

As you can see on the graph entrecard.com had horrible loading times for several hours on the 3rd of February. The uptime was as low as 75% which means that during 6 hours (25% of 24 hours) the visitors of entrecard.com couldn’t access the site or the time it took for the site to load was extremely long.

Here you’ll see the graph for adventure (the server hosting this blog) and entrecard.com from yesterday. Notice that the maximum response time for adventure is only 463 ms while entrecard.com got a maximum load time of horrible 8982 ms! If you study the graphs you’ll notice that Entrecard must have done something with it’s server around 4 since the load time improved dramatically.

Another example is winningtheweb.com with an average load time of 649ms which is bad. It’s especially bad for a blog about making money online since that’s a highly competitive niche. If the site is not loading fast the readers can get almost the same content from a much faster blog

Why do you need to monitor your web site?

Simply because if your site constantly goes down or is loading slow you will not be able to make any money and I guess most of you want to get some kind of income from your web projects. You will also be able to figure out if you need a new server because you’ve out grown your current hosting solution. Even if you don’t have your own server (you’re on shared hosting for example) you need to monitor your server status since some hosting companies fill their servers with thousands and thousands of sites. If all those sites grow, the server will pretty soon start acting slow which leads to less sales for you.

By using a service like mon.itor.us you’ll also get an idea how slow or fast your site loads from other locations then your own. In my case I can check the load time from US, Austria and Germany in the same graph

In these Internet days we need to update the phrase “time is money” to “server response time is money”

If you got a camera to improve your posts (like I wrote in Five things all bloggers need) then you will sooner or later find a jerk or two that’s stealing your work and using it on their own blog/web site. As a blogger you need to protect the content you’ve worked so hard for and you need protect your bandwidth from bandwidth theft. Unfortunately it’s not always so easy, but to protect your pictures from “hotlinkers” (people using content hosted by you as their own without giving you credits) there’s an easy to use way to make their life a little bit harder.

If you’re site is hosted on a Un*x server you can use something called .htaccess to make hotlinking almost impossible. I used this method when Xavier Media had a free Midi file archive at www.xaviermedia.com/midi/ so I know that it’s working

Create a text file called .htaccess.txt using Notes or Wordpad:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?sampleaddress.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/prohibited.jpe [L]

The first line turns the Rewrite Engine so this example will work, the second line will allow your own domain name to link to your pictures and the third line will allow empty referrals. [NC] on the second line means No Case and is used when you need SaMPleAddreSS.com to be the same thing as sampleaddress.com

In the fourth line you set the file extensions you want to rewrite and the image to display instead of the hotlinked images. Please note that the prohibited image is called .jpe instead of .jpeg so it will show in the visitors browser (otherwise you create an infinite loop which will case no image at all to show up ).

If you know the domain names of some bad guys hotlinking to your valuable stuff on your server you can use this code in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+.)?facebook.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+.)?blogspot.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+.)?myspace.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/prohibited.jpe [L]

You can block as many domain names you like. Just make sure you add [NC,OR] at the end of each line except for the last RewriteCond line which should only have [NC] at the end.
When you’ve saved your work simply upload the file to your server (the www directory or maybe the directory where you keep your pictures). If you called your .htaccess file .htaccess.txt you need to rename it to .htaccess when you have uploaded the file to your server.

If you got other files you need to protect this example works with any other file type. I mentioned in the beginning of this post that I used it on midi files

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• you value privacy and expect others to trust you

The price for SSL Certificates from eXavier.com used to be $20.95/year, but we’re having a special sale where you can get your own SSL Certificate for only $14.95/year. Check out the details at eXavier.com.