On the Track and Picking Up Steam

It’s been over a week since I last posted, so I thought I’d do a brief update at least…

I spent most of last week in Phoenix job-hunting and apartment-scouting. I’ve got a line on a guitar teaching position at a music store, which I will know more on at the end of this week, and I’ve narrowed the search area considerably for housing. Good progress and the weather was gorgeous. And, as always, it was a joy to see my friends.

Despite my dismal practice record of late, I got a Tangos and a Sevillanas vocal at my guitar lesson. I nearly made myself hoarse practicing the vocals on the way back to Flagstaff and I’ve gotten them memorized already because of that. Best of all, the lesson seemed to turn around the musical block I’ve had going for weeks and I’ve been practicing every day since. Funny. Practice really does seem to make a difference…

I’ve been back home for a couple of days now and have gotten the “Music by Ariel” site up and running with Drupal. Flamencophile now has blogs, a calendar, and a forum operational. It’s still in development and behind schedule, but it’s progressing. I’m roughly on track with my novel edit, too, only about two days behind my schedule, and I’m hoping I can get caught back up by the end of the week.

My exercise program has been wavering a bit, but is not forgotten. Lifting boxes and the amount of driving I did last week has been a little hard on my legs, so I’m still at the earlier level and taking it all very easy. I expect that to continue until I actually get settled in Phoenix. I have lost two more pounds in the last month, however, so my old rate of weight loss seems to have returned, which makes me quite happy. I’ve still got some more to go, but at this rate I’m within a month of having lost 40 pounds. Yeeha!

While I was gone, the temps took another dive into the 20’s. My maple tree turned red and dropped most of its leaves while I was in Phoenix. The aspens up on the San Francisco Peaks are turning golden and I hope to take a drive up that way in the next few days before it’s back down to the Valley for another round…

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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 Oktar” by Matt on WordPress.com

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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 open access or no, and I do make my allusions from time to time, bethonged buttocks and promises of 3 more inches in three weeks are not what I think my readers expect to see here. I’ve sent in the email requesting to be removed. After today’s spammer/scraper trench warfare and hours of research on copyright issues, plus several buggy things on my Drupal dev project, I’m done in for today. I hope that they really do remove my blog, but I’m tired and cranky enough at the moment to be more than a little cynical.

Even if wordprexy’s actions are for the stated purpose, I just don’t want my work being used in that way. Did they think it through first or try to come up with a better solution? The vitriol in the comments on their blog makes me wonder at the whole premise. Get a sponsor or a recognized NGO to help ahead of time…something…find a way to do it right, folks.

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The Insanity Continues…

Okay. Now I’m really confused. I just got what, at first glance, appeared to be a trackback to an earlier post on this site that somehow got caught in my Akismet spam filters. It was the standard form of trackback, but with someone else’s name and IP, plus inserted text.

Note – I have removed the link, site name and other identifying site info. The rest is an exact duplicate. I have no idea if the person named is in any way actually associated with the offending site. Maybe, maybe not. I have no way to know. (My name is certainly plastered all over a bunch of sites that I want no association with.) Notice what was done:

[…] David Szetela wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptI 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 I wrote for “Guitar News.” (This is not the site’s actual name, just what they are using in their scraped … […]

The inserted string at the beginning (ending with the word “excerpt”) included a link to my post on the other person’s name. (The lack of a space, and the otherwise poor punctuation, sort of gives it all away…) The only thing I can figure is that in a matter of hours, someone scraped the scraper, inserted their own name, but kept the original URL (though not the hypertext itself) intact.

Good going, guys. I went to the site and they’d used the title of my post as their own page title – “Web Para-sites.” Indeed. It seems they are cannibalizing each other, in addition to everything else.

Once again, this is Ariel Laurel Strong for the Cloud of Unknowing on WordPress.com, signing off at 20:47 UTC on September 21st, 2007.

Afterword: I went and looked more closely at my original vs. the scraper’s scrapbook job and I think I see what was done. They simply sliced off the first two sentences, that contained a link back to my site, inserted their all-purpose lead-in with the post link and went on from there. Quite an easy thing to do with scripting. They could have at least gotten their punctuation right, though, the stinkers. 21:06 UTC, Sept. 21, 2007.

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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 realized that I simply don’t have time do those things right now. (And it will take several readings and some note-taking to get all the action steps lined out.) Until I get settled in Phoenix, go through all the information and do everything in a professional manner – which is what I have thus far failed miserably at – I am going to have to accept that I can only do the bare minimum to deal with the content thieves right now and simply endure my indignation and wounded pride.

That’s just the way it is. I can sally forth in defense of intellectual property rights in a month or two, and do so in an a more honorable manner, instead of being such a barbarian about it. Mea culpa. Sometimes I still act like there’s a fire on the other side of the door and I’ve got a halligan in my hands.

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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 how it all works on their site. They are evidently experiencing major growth – and the associated growing pains – so updates are a little slow and I only got a partial day’s worth data on the first one, but I’m a happy little camper.

Ari, signing off for TCU, September 21, 17:21, UTC.

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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 I wrote for “Guitar News.” (This is not the site’s actual name, just what they are using in their scraped pages. I don’t want to malign any legitimate site that may use that moniker.) My evil twin must be ghost-writing out in cyberspace.

I went to the home page of the site and saw they’d gone one better on their AdSense links. They’d used CSS to turn a row of AdSense titles into navigation links! Gotta give them one for deviousness. I was impressed enough to go in and look at their page source. What an education! They’d stolen and/or repurposed numerous scripts and plug-ins, and had some fairly sophisticated javascripting going on, as well.

Well, well. What do you do when you are sailing in pirate infested waters? There’s no turning back. I’m already adrift on the bright blue sea and I’ve gotten plundered more than once. This deserves some real thought and considered decisions. It will definitely affect how I promote and monetize http://www.flamencophile.com and other sites I develop.

I keep going back to the original premise of the scraper sandwich I devised – humans can scan and discern genuinely valuable content when they want to. I can only conclude that the people that click on the scraper sites ads are being lazy and clueless, and that the scrapers do not have as good a click-through rate as a truly worthwhile site. It is the “volume” paradigm at work as opposed to the “value paradigm.

Parasites. Hey! “Para” – “sites,” that’s for sure. “Para-” meaning alongside of, beside, similar to or resembling. Definitely parasites – the tapeworms, liver flukes, and cattle bots of the web. Just have to be a hardy enough host to withstand a few, I guess.

That’s all for now. This is Ariel Laurel Strong signing off for the Cloud of Unknowing on September 21, 2007, at 17:20 UTC.

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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 back to the originating site in the first and last paragraphs with a content summary sandwiched in between. Way to go Binary Moon.

There is a lot of opinion out there regarding how Google penalizes people in their search rankings for duplicate content. I wonder who will listen if I submit this site showing the links and dates…the search engineers and the AdSense team would seem to be at cross purposes with one another.

This whole experience is making me rethink my strategy on my upcoming websites like http://www.flamencophile.com. I had been just assuming that I’d have a bar of ads down one side. Though I hate subjecting people to the advertising, I need to make something for my time and effort and it’s been sticking in my craw how others are making money from illegally reusing my content. I’ve been reading too many webmaster discussions lately about whether to even syndicate your content, the hours of time it takes to go after the scrapers, and the generally poor results of doing so.

I remember back in 1996 having discussions with colleagues how the imminent monetization of the web would affect its usefulness and integrity. Back then, we never dreamed of the vast junkyards that would come to lie scattered across the virtual landscape. (Erluvi.com, this means you…)

What would an internet renewal look like? Green zones…places where there was quality content and ad-free sites could flourish. Pardon my dreaming, or reminiscing, as the case may be. As in all things, the best and the worst of humanity seems to flow towards the newest frontier, and left in that wake, the little settlements pop up and are subject to the predations of bandits and marauders. The good, the bad, and the ugly…

This is Ariel Laurel Strong signing off for the Cloud of Unknowing on September 21, 2007, at 15:38 UTC.

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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 try something else. What follows won’t work against every scraper site, but it does alert users that they are reading stolen content and asserts your claim on your intellectual property. It’s kind of funny, too. Note: This is mainly for a hosted blog. If you have access to the server where your blog resides, there are better remedies.

I used two simple principles to design a “spam sandwich” to bait a scraper’s spider:

1) A human can quickly and easily scan to see if content is relevant and interesting. A human can also skim over the irrelevant parts and extract what was meant for human consumption only.

2) An automated scraper bot cannot. Do use care, however, in designing your “fly in the ointment.” Legitimate search engines can flag “over-optimized” content which is designed to alter search engine ranking, and could confuse your “spam sandwich” as an attempt to crank up your ratings, but with a little writing skill you can avoid getting penalized by Yahoo! or Google and still target your intended quarry – the dreaded Spiderbotus scraperus stinkerii.

Here’s the bot bait I designed using the above two principles: Three Great Ways to Increase Your Site Traffic

Here’s the result of the experiment: Open Season on Scraper Bots

There are lots of ways these ideas could be improved and refined. I’d like to hear the results of any similar experiment you conduct. The possibilities are endless. And of course, if you choose to indulge in this sort of behavior remember these words of wisdom by John Steinbeck:

“It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.”

In the meantime, if you like the idea, by all means use it. Just give me a link back, okay? (https://dangerousangel.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/vigilante-blog-justicehow-to-out-a-scraper-bot/)

Happy hunting. :-)
Ariel Laurel Strong on dangerousangel.wordpress.com

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Open Season on Scraper Bots

This is just too funny, although in a twisted sort of way. I tossed out my bait for a spammer spider and I caught one. (MY ORIGINAL POST – “Three Great Ways to Increase Your Site Traffic”) In fact, it’s the same one that I found that got me so hot under the collar in the first place. Take a look at MY SCRAPED POST. (Hopefully this won’t bite me in the butt someday, having links to and from a scraped site…Google doesn’t seem to mind right now, though, as there are AdSense ads on it.)

My original blog post is all there, too. No human eyeballs ever reviewed this scraped content before it went live on their site, that’s for sure. My embedded links are there and my unlinked name at the end, along with all of my tirade, though the link on the title of the post is changed to their site and my author link has been cleanly excised. Their program is obviously targeted to only strip out the standard blog formatting and has not been refined to do more than that. Keeping the outgoing links may be an attempt to appear legitimate.

This may be a hollow victory – sort of like shooting fish in a barrel – but it sure is funny. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep laughing. I’m sure there will be more; I haven’t had the heart to go search Alexa for others. The one above I’d bookmarked to check back in on – I figured the bait would be just too tempting.

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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 me a byline. Oh. Silly me. Such web denizens are not generally known for their well developed Internet manners.

The funny thing in all of this? My most recent blog posts with “web design,” “internet,” and “web development” tags are the ones that are getting hits the hardest (that was deliberate – read on, high volume readership – ha!) and it’s already sending lots of traffic to Flamencophile, which isn’t even out of development yet. (When a website isn’t even live yet, “increase in site traffic” is a relative term.)

Wonder if that title optimization will grab a few more of them. I hope so. And, I hope they use unmoderated bot-powered posts, too. That way, any human that happens to read this without an author’s attribution, or elsewhere than The Cloud of Unknowing on WordPress.com, will know that the blog or website they are on is posting content without the permission of the creator and in violation of intellectual property rights.

Itsy bitsy spiders crawling the web trying to find search engine optimized blog posts…but they do have certain built-in limitations. A computer program simply cannot do what a human can in filtering the written word for meaning and relevance. If you read this only slightly tongue-in-cheek article carefully, you can get an education in SEO. It could even be title d how to make money writing a thousand dollar blog post with web designs on how to get the highest traffic possible for search engine robot bait.

I learned many years ago in studying martial arts that an aggressive or offensive posture can often get you hurt easier than a neutral, or even a defensive, one. Save your energy for the big battles and use the attacker’s own momentum and energy against him… There’s more than one way to captcha the little web crawlers for one’s own nefarious purposes.

See, I didn’t wish a virus on those maddog scr*p#rs and sp^m$rs trying to make thousands of dollars, double their traffic, and earn high AdSense revenue off the work of honest bloggers like Ariel Laurel Strong. :-)

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Another Experiment in Blogging

As an experiment, I’m testing putting some articles in blog carnivals. I’ve got one on the “All Women Blog Carnival” at mommasez.blogspot.com. My first blog carnival has netted two views in three days. Hmmm. I’m just trying things out to see what moves some traffic, in preparation for really promoting the flamencophile.com site.

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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 web developer check how their pages look to someone with a deficiency in color vision. The tool has less than perfect support for CSS at the moment, but it is great for checking graphics and the developers are continuing to move the project forward.

They’ve also included an “About” page full of great links to research and information on color-blindness, and accessibility design in general. With one in twenty viewers having some form of color vision deficiency, it’s worth taking the time to Vischeck.

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All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go…Yet

Hey, a girl’s gotta dress up once in a while! I bit the bullet and forked over my fifteen dollars to WordPress to get the CSS upgrade for my blog.

For those of you who remember how everything looked a few months ago, yes, the old header is back. I’m also tinkering around with the link styles and such. I kinda like the new/old look.

This is a prelude to the deployment of some of my Drupal development projects that are slowly, slowly progressing on a test site sequestered somewhere out in cyberspace. I’ve moved my main beta to Sept. 29 (2007!).

Eventually, there’s going to be a lot of rearranging here and this is just the first noticeable tremor…

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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 to use to fight theft of your content.

Copyscape is a free service (for us little guys) to scan the web for plagiarism of our pages. They also offer a premium service for more professional needs. But the real find here was the information they offer on how to respond to and prevent having your content swiped. Just follow the links under the plagiarism menu item in the upper right hand corner of their main page. You’ll find more than enough to keep you busy!

Now I’ve got yet another set of things to do – run all my URLs through Copyscape’s search tool, post the notices and banner, etc. It’ll take a little while to implement the steps Copyscape recommends, but it’s great to know what I can do about the problem and I hope this helps some of you do the same.

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