Wordprexy Removes Ads

Good! Wordprexy has removed the ads and readers in Turkey can see WordPress blogs…
More power to them for breaching the “Great Firewall of Turkey” and, now, in a way that does not violate bloggers’ or readers’ rights or sensibilities.
For the background on the banning of WordPress in Turkey, see “Why We’re Blocked in Turkey: Adnan [...]

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Wordprexy

I’m all for open access to the Internet, so I was prepared to be somewhat lenient in my views towards wordprexy.com in their stated efforts to get around Turkey’s ban on WordPress. What I wasn’t prepared for was to go onto my blog on wordprexy’s mirror and see porn ads. Enough already.
Freedom of speech and [...]

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Red in the Face

While it was a great diversion from the other frustrations in my life, I have to admit that I behaved rather badly in this matter of dealing with content scrapers. After reading “What to Do When Someone Steals Your Content,” by Lorelle on WordPress.com, I’m ashamed of myself.
I read most of the article before I [...]

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Clustrmaps

I don’t know why I get such a kick out of stuff like this, but I do. A couple of days ago I signed up for a free account on Clustrmaps.com and they just drew up my first map. (See lower portion of the sidebar to the right.)
They do a very good job of explaining [...]

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Web Para-sites

Now I’m really getting cynical. I did my Alexa search and after half-a-dozen pages of seeing my scraped writings (and with more to go), I got angry all over again. I clicked on one of the sites for “free guitar lessons” and saw pretty much what I expected with my content. Gee, I didn’t know [...]

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It Just Gets Better…

OMG. The scraper site that I originally made the “spam sandwich” for scarfed up both of my “vigilante blog posts,” one of which even has the unchanged link in it to the original stolen work…on their own site.
And it looks like another blogger is using a similar tactic. There’s an obviously scraped post with links [...]

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Vigilante Blog Justice…How to Out a Scraper Bot

It all started out innocently enough. I just got mad about my content being scraped over and over. I’m all for humans using technology to eliminate drudgery and expand opportunity. What I don’t like is humans using technology to use other humans.
After railing about the injustice and applying a few ineffective remedies, I decided to [...]

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Three Great Ways to Increase Your Site Traffic

Now that I’ve gone to putting at least one link back to this site somewhere in every post, I’m finding lots of my original content scattered around cyberspace. I’m not getting trackbacks, either; I’m finding the posts off of referrers coming into this site and to Flamencophile.com. They don’t even have the decency to give [...]

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Development Progresses…

Things are starting to take shape over at Flamencophile.com, even though I didn’t get the header graphic done today as planned. I got sidetracked into web usability and accessibility issues, which was fine. Better to work on that than the eye-candy right now anyway.
One tool that I like to use is Vischeck. It lets a [...]

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Wiki Mind Map

Geek fun. Well, flamencophile.com is going to have to have one of these…

WikiMindMap is a free, open source Flash browser that organizes a set of links into a mindmap. Too cool. It’s written in Java using the Swing toolkit and it’s compatible with Drupal, too. Try it out on Wikipedia.org by clicking the picture to [...]

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QSL

In amateur radio operator lingo, “QSL” translates to “What is your location?” and is also a shorthand for the trading of postcards with your “ham” call sign on them. I never got into trading QSL cards, probably because I was lousy at Morse code and therefore never made that many actual contacts, but I sure [...]

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Copyscape Fights Content Theft

Since getting scraped last week, I’ve been doing some research and I wanted to share a bit of what I found. Beyond learning of the magnitude of the problem and the fact that content stealing is growing, and reading a lot of diatribes by other bloggers about their bad experiences, I found a great resource [...]

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Contact

I’ve been having a lot of fun watching my blog stats via Sitemeter. It’s been about three weeks since I added it to my blog and the thing I’ve enjoyed the most is seeing all the different countries pop up in the visit details:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, [...]

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If Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery, What is Plagiarism?

It was bound to happen. I’ve finally had a post scraped in toto, no link, no attribution. At least this is the first one I know about, anyway. The only way I knew about this one was through a trackback from an embedded link.
It looks to me like the scam is totally automated. There is [...]

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Gettin’ Down and Dirty in Drupal

Drupal is now installed on my webhost and I have my test bed set up. I’m also in the process of cleaning off an extra hard drive and installing a server on my laptop – Apache, MySQL, PHP – so that I can do a lot of the development locally. Hopefully, I can make any [...]

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