Davinian

Comment Spam - does Akismet work?

A week ago I was receiving on average 10 spam comments a day. I had Akismet running and was more than happy that it was catching all the nasties for me. But while updating a few plugins I appear to have inadvertently turned Akismet off. I didn’t realised this until today when I received an email saying I had 1 comment awaiting moderation.

I logged in to check it out, but soon realised it was only spam — strange I thought, why hadn’t Akismet caught it. Then I realised the Akismet Spam Tab was missing and then I realised I must have accidentally turned it off — but wait a minute I thought — why have I only received 1 spam comment in the last week when Akismet is turned off?

My brain is still trying to work this out, but I appear to have received more spam while Akismet was turned on. That can’t be right? Can it? I am going to turn it back on and see what happens — but I must confess I don’t have it running some of my other sites, and interestingly they hardly ever get any spam.

A question I’d like to ask is — has anybody else noticed anything weird with Akismet? Do you use it? Or perhaps some other spam catching method?

125Cards.com has landed

125Cards.com is about design, style and how we can improve those lovely little 125 x 125 Adverts and Cards that we so love to place (drop) on other peoples websites.

They are meant to advertise what we are selling, be it a product, service or even just ourselves. Yet, they really don’t do us justice, they are difficult to read, look gimmicky and hardy every relate to what we are trying to sell.

Remember, they should be driving traffic to your site - so come on, get serious… visit 12Cards.com, grab a free template and start designing a better Advert.

I’m a Bloggin-Ads winner!

Madness is all I can say. I can’t remember the last time I won anything.

Not 100% sure exactly what I have won, but I’ll let you know in full as soon as I have the details. If you wondering what this is all about and why you didn’t enter - head over to the rather excellent Bloggin-Ads to fine out.

What do you do to stay focused?

I have come to the conclusion that I am much better at brain-storming an idea than actually turning it into reality!

For instance, I am currently trying to complete a website for a idea I had two weeks ago, I’m getting there, but find I’m getting distracted with newer ideas - I lack concentration and find it hard focusing when a new idea pops into my head - I need to be strict with myself and stop, write the idea down, then continue with the work in hand… but it’s bloody difficult!

I’ve read plenty of books and websites on time-management, better productivity, staying focused etc., everything makes sense and I know what I should be doing, but after a few days I seem to slip back into my old ways and lose interest… I need to focus and require your help…

What do you do to stay focused and ultimately be productive?

100 Deadliest Karate Moves

No 83 - Punch to Groin Damage: cracked or broken pelvis, bruised testicles. Result: attacker will be unable to stand for many minutes; may be crippled.

While running some key-word/niche searches I accidentally ran a search for .pdf - no name, just [dot] PDF as in an Adobe PDF document.

The list that came back was interesting as it appears to show an all to sorry story of what the internet is most commonly used for…

Out of the list of 100 or so results I looked at - that’s the search results I looked at, not the actual PDFs the following subjects and titles appeared the most:

• Sex as in Playboy Magazines, Massage Secrets, How to get beautiful women and the Karma Sutra.
• Conspiracy this, that and the other, 50 things you’re not supposed to know, Secret Societies, Free energy and who killed Elvis, Kennedy etc…
• Health and Fitness, Body building Secrets, Lose weight fast, be Big and Strong, 101 workouts and my favourite, 100 Deadliest Karate Moves (looks like a great book!!!)

Some of the more sensible topics were: Learning a language, to cook or play a musical interment - i.e. speak Japanese, play the Piano and Cooking with Jamie Oliver for some weird reason?

Then followed the usual Windows this, that and the other for Dummies, How to crack this, that and the other application, network or firewall, and even more dummy guides for dummies!

There were some interesting results, but apart from the cooking and learning a new skill, most of them were for topics that generally give the internet a bad name. Why?

Still each to their own I guess - we do live in a free world after all… don’t we?

Jumping on the Entrecard Bandwagon

I’ve decided to give the latest self-promoting buzz a go - Entrecard is a weird little business card/advert sharing network that’s designed to allow like minded individuals to contact each other by leaving their 125 x 125 sized business cards on each others website.

You can also rent space (currently one day at a time) on sites displaying the Entrecard widget. You do this by using credits that you accumulate from either displaying cards on your own site, by clicks on your cards, or by dropping (leaving) your card at other sites. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t - trust me!

Credits can also be exchanged for real world goodies, but I haven’t earned enough credits yet, and the current list of goodies is very short.

Why all the fuss? Entrecard seems to be the next big thing in traffic generating ideas, and plays on the relatively new and fast becoming popular 125 x 125 sized adverts you see on such sites as ProBlogger.

The only problem I can see is that the card is actually 127 x 148 when Entrecard tags on the little “Drop yours” button and border. So it wouldn’t fit very well if you had a couple of rows of 125 x 125 adverts.

Anyway, some stats. I only signed up late last night, but my card seems to have brought in just over 50 new unique users in less than 24 hours. Whether they will return again or not remains to be seen, but the cards do seem to be working, and I guess it will boost my visits, readership and hopefully profits for a while.

Do you have an Entrecard? If so, drop it off and I’ll pay you a visit.

Four Months Messing Around

Four months ago I decided I was going to seriously try my hand at making money online. Everything started off well and I did make a few hundred dollars, but then I lost enthusiasm and started to get distracted, and before I knew it, I wasn’t making anything.

Making money needs a special kind of dedication and commitment which keeps you going, even when things look bad. There is also a fine line between knowing when to keep going or when to quit a bad idea. I think I failed all of the above and as a result I have wasted a lot of my time running around after foolhardy ideas, and not dedicating myself to the things that were working.

I am now going to wipe the slate clean and give it another go. The knowledge I have learned over the last four months will be used to hopefully help me get things right. I have learned the hard way as they say, and I think it has taught me to respect the knowledge of others and that you do not necessarily need to come up with a new winning formula. In fact, the last four months have blatantly made it clear to me that there is plenty of room out there to actually copy somebody else’s really good idea and make it work for yourself. All you need to do is put your own spin on it.

So that is what I am planning to do. It’s not lazy, not stealing (especially if you pay for somebody else’s knowledge) and it is definitely not cheating. It is however, hard work and requires that special commitment — qualities I think I now have and understand!

Twitter Tools really puts the Pressure on!

Having Alex Kings Twitter Tools installed is great for letting your Twitter followers know when you have posted something new on your site - and in reverse, it is also really useful for making a blog post of your previous days twitterings, but …

… if you do have the “Create a daily digest blog post” turned on like I do, then the pressure to post something everyday really gets turned up to the MAX! As I think there is nothing more unsightly than having two days of Twitter Updates side-by-side! Yep I know I could turn it off or even delete the update posts - but that would be cheating… wouldn’t it?

Anyway, as you can tell - I have struggled to write something today and as a result I have had to write about something that is a bit trivial - mind you - Twitter Tools is cool and worth installing if you don’t have it.

A Something and Nothing Day!

It has been one of those days for me today, I tried to write this morning, but kept finding myself being distracted by other things. When it happens it is damn hard to break out of it. If I catch myself free-falling early enough I can usually do something about it, but today wasn’t one of those times, so I decided to take a break and headed out of the house for the day.

On reflection it was probably the best thing I could have done, as I got thinking about Tumbled (my free Wordpress theme), and I think I should try and make it more Tumbleblog-like with separate styling for each category - links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video being the obvious ones - what do you think? Should I make it more, dare I say it… Web 2.0 ish?

Tumbled - A Wordpress Theme

Tumbled, a Wordpress theme.
click to enlarge

This is my first Wordpress theme I have made publicly available, and it’s not something I have had sitting around for ages either - I started it yesterday afternoon with the soul intention of making it purely for public release.

So here goes, I would like to introduce you to Tumbled, a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr.

Yep, that’s right, you can now have that Tumblr look on your Wordpress blog.

I must warn that Tumbled is still a Beta, but rest assured I have tested it in Safari and Firefox on the Mac, and Internet Explore 6 and 7 plus Firefox on the PC. Everything seems to work fine, although there is a slight discrepancy with the navigation in IE 6 - there always something wrong in IE 6 though isn’t there!

NOTE: A problem was found where Smiley Faces inherited the default image styling! It is recommended that everybody downloads the latest version to avoid the visual unpleasantness - sorry about that!

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