Move the Crowd

Over the last week or so I’ve been on a mission to improve the performance of my web server, and especially MySQL. I took Arne’s advice and turned on the query cache. That helped but I still needed to do more. After doing some research I discovered MySQL’s slow query log, which […]

Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2005 Black Weblog Awards. Here they are:

Daily Views, Pop Culture, Rants and News — Blogger of the Year, Best Humor Blog, Best Writing in a Blog and Blog of the Year
The Heiress Diaries — Best New Blog
Crunk and Disorderly — Best Entertainment Blog
Brown Glasses — Best […]

Just trying out some stuff with Flickr:

The Google Sandbox is well-known but is there also a Technorati Sandbox? If so, I think I’m in it — or at least one of my three blogs is in it. For some reason my main blog (http://tradermike.net/) hasn’t been indexed by Technorati in months yet my other two blogs, which are hosted […]

Check out the revamped (and well designed) Technorati. Here’s what’s new in the beta release:

We’ve improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We’ve tried
to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we’re […]

Terry and some other folks have noticed that their weblogs don’t seem to ever be listed on weblogs.com any more. That has raised a question of whether certain sites are being targeted. I haven’t been to weblogs.com in such a long time that I don’t even know if my sites still gets listed […]

Six Apart has just released Movable Type 3.16. Hopefully some of its ‘over one hundred fixes’ will fix the annoying problems I’ve had recently.
On a related note, this SpamLookup plugin looks like it’s worth installing. It’s so effective that Jay Allen, the author of MT-Blacklist has disabled his MT-Blacklist installation as […]

The Register interviewed a link spammer who revealed some of his methods and motivation. The bottom line — spammers can make up to seven figure incomes from some simple computer code. Some key points:

For even a semi-competent programmer, writing programs that will link-spam vulnerable websites and blogs is pretty easy. All you need […]

If you’re using Movable Type be sure to install the new ‘nofollow’ plugin. It implements a new way of marking links in comments and trackbacks so that they will be ignored by search engines.
Let’s see what the spammers do now to try to get around this. (hat tip to Hashim)

Last night I happened across a post by Martin Schwimmer entitled “Why I Have Asked Bloglines To Remove My Site From Its ‘Service’“. It generally accepted that BlogLines is by far the number one news aggregator so I had to go read that post. Here’s Martin’s post (emphasis is mine):

This website is published […]