PageRank has not been available for a few days

Moe blogged about it, I hadn't noticed it yet. Doesn't seem really important to me ...

Blechtrommeln machen Lärm and like Heiko, I'll keep banging on my little drum. Even if I'm just one Oskar Matzerat among many.

Ann Elisabeth was diligent and identified the Bulgarian twin spammers - who are likely responsible for a large part of blog spam.

Michael Hampton examines what nofollow has really brought: Nofollow revisited. If you're still using the raw version of WordPress: NoNoFollow install and disable nofollow.

Write blog books, but not understand RSS

That's the summary of Don's complaint about RSS readers. Sorry, but at this point, it's really getting on my nerves (Don isn't the first, just the loudest on this topic): if you provide an RSS feed, you have to accept at least one thing: that people will use it. If you're so cheap and don't offer a full-text feed, but at the same time are too lazy to write an excerpt for an article, then you can't complain that people judge you after the first few sentences - you only give them the first few sentences to see.

No, it's ridiculous to expect everyone to only read blogs in their original form on the website. Yes, this means, for example, that the layout of blogs is lost because you can't see it in the RSS reader. Yes, that's definitely a good thing - especially with various far-right blogs or blogs with stupid color choices with insufficient contrast between text and background.

If a user with an RSS reader doesn't manage to entice me to read an article (if it's not fully included in the feed, then also on the website) with their entries, they've done something wrong with their RSS feed. Period.

Insulting users with RSS readers is a rarely stupid action for someone who always claims to understand blogs in discussions and always mocks other bloggers - be it because of their tech obsession, their arrogance, or whatever else displeases the gentleman ...

Jubel-Äum or something

Chaoswind hit a round number here: this is the 1000th comment on this blog. I mean, I'm already surprised that I have made over 4600 posts here myself, but that people write comments here and that there are even 1000 of them (ok, I wrote part of them), I find that even more astonishing.

Ping TopicExchange from WordPress

Phillip Pearson has written a WP-plugin that simplifies simple pinging of TopicExchange. TopicExchange is essentially just a list of trackback targets with its own wiki for each trackback target. The idea is to provide a simple group blogging function that users can access through their own blogs.

Vacation!

So, tomorrow we're off to Flensburg. Taking photos, lounging around, checking out Flensburg, watching the Rum Regatta. Let's see if the weather gives us a chance - the forecasts sound more like frostbite and water damage.

In the meantime, I'll just let the blog keep drifting along. Check out the old clutter - there's plenty. Or alternatively, check out more interesting blogs or watch the wallpaper dry ...

Da Vinci Crock

Lewis Perdue claims that parts of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" were copied from his book "Da Vinci Legacy" and has set up a blog describing, for example, the publisher's reaction to the allegations in the lawsuit: Da Vinci Crock

Normally, such things are quickly and discreetly settled (no, not what you think - through payments, of course!), but with a megaseller like "The Da Vinci Code," the publisher naturally makes a fuss.

And now I'm wondering whether to give the whole thing the category "Law" or "Entertainment" or whether I need a category "Blogsoap."

(I found the whole thing at photomatt)

Demoted ...

... that Google: my PyDS-Homepage always had a PageRank of 7 before, now only 6. Tsk. Such a thing. Somehow I now have the feeling that something has been taken away from me - I just don't know exactly what yet.

Just as a hint ...

... if I get the following message when accessing your weblog:

Sorry, your IP address is listed in the local realtime blackhole list. You may not enter this site.

then you have done something wrong by definition. Blogs are meant as a means of communication - and installing silly communication preventers just because you don't want links in your referrer log that come from spammers is simply ridiculous. In that case, you might as well take your blog completely off the network.

XFN Graph graphically displays link relationships that are provided with XFN attributes.

Online Magazine and Journalistic Honesty

News - Bombenstimmung im WWW - someone is upset here that George Orwell didn't censor the entire internet right away because there are so many bomb-making instructions on the net. If you read the article more closely, you will find a gem like this:

His company, a Hamburg-based internet filter provider, discovered a shocking record during the regular update of their blocking systems.

Well, so an online magazine has done nothing more than give a filter company free advertising and disguise it as a journalistic contribution. And then simply use the link to the filter manufacturer as a source - of course, filter manufacturers are always so neutral in their assessment of the net ...

Since the online magazine has an editorial staff according to the imprint, they probably think they fall under the category "professional journalists". Well, in that case, I would rather take a stack of bad blogs as reading material than such a stealth advertising heap ...

Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam

Seen at Netzbuch: Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam - photomatt funds WordPress servers and the first WordPress employee through search engine spam. This is done through articles and hidden links to various high-cost search terms that then point to search engine spam pages provided by a service provider. photomatt is just the middleman - the spam bot, only he doesn't spam comments but search engine results.

In German: that's absolute crap. Such behavior is - especially for someone who suffers massively from spammers with his software - absolutely unacceptable behavior. The talk of "if the community doesn't like it, I'll stop" is bullshit - why did he even start such crap? Especially since blog software is repeatedly accused of being a search engine polluter, one should be very careful in this area with stupid ideas and not pour more oil on the fire ...

At the same time, this is another good reason for me to use GPL software: if it were a company whose actions I cannot accept, I would have to refrain from using the software. So I can continue to use the software - because the actual programmer is relatively indifferent, I can fork it anytime and go my own way with the software. The separation between the software provider and the software itself is much more open.

Let's see what comes out of the community discussion on the topic, if necessary, it's time for a fork ...

First fallout: wordpress.org has been removed from the Google index.

And since the discussion about the financing of projects keeps coming up and is used as an excuse for the behavior: sorry, but that's bullshit. You can't sanctify the means with the purpose - someone who suffers massively from spammers and indeed fights against them cannot resort to similar means. And yes, it is and remains spam: anyone who abuses search engines - and thus the searchers! - to push their ranking is a search engine spammer. Period. The comment spammers also like to excuse themselves by saying they only use open resources and don't really spam - bullshit, both.

Yahoo 360 Degrees

Missed the all-around view. Anyone who also wants to check out the toy: theoretically, I should be able to send invites. If you think I actually should have passed you an invite and really want one to check it out: speak up. Oh yeah, you need a Yahoo ID for that. Oh, and if you want an invite even though I've never linked to your blog here or know you from anywhere: at least come up with an interesting reason why I should invite you.

The Pheed RSS Specification is an extension for RSS that allows you to explicitly include links to photos. Could be interesting for my Fotoblog. However, WordPress has few hooks for manipulating feeds.

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

My new photoblog - and the first ladybug

The first ladybug of the year. There are a few more pictures in my new photoblog (not active since 2007). By the way, it also works with WordPress, but with a few self-knitted plugins for photo management and the strip calendar (I'll put that together someday and make it downloadable). I'm already quite satisfied with the state over there. In the long run, I will probably create a mechanism that allows the photos to wander into this site here as thumbnails and then post pictures here rather rarely (at most the usual snapshots).

Why did I build something myself at all? Well, I find a number of features of Flickr quite nice, but I have a massive aversion to entrusting my content to foreign servers where I have no say in the operation or software design. Therefore, I have stolen some of the ideas from Flickr and also helped myself generously from other projects (for example, I copied the idea for the strip calendar from PixelPost) and integrated everything into WordPress. The layout was once Kubrick, but I hope it has become sufficiently different from it even for Kubrick allergics.

I had also looked at a whole range of content management systems beforehand to see how suitable they would be for something like this (you could read about the fallout from this partly here). And even toyed with the idea of doing the whole thing directly with PixelPost for a while. But the clearly superior comment features in WordPress (especially all the anti-spam techniques) eventually led me to stay with WordPress.

A few things are still on the to-do list, but in principle it is already quite usable and is therefore officially announced herewith.

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

Yahoo really buys Flickr

Yahoo buys Flickr - which is one of the reasons why I no longer entrust my data to central services but do everything myself (and am currently working on a site based on WordPress with a few self-knitted plugins - stay tuned). I experienced this with OneList, I went through it with eGroups. Yahoo buys it and then there are tons of transition pains when merging the accounts. And afterwards there are tons of ads on the pages, forced ads on interstitial pages and all sorts of nonsense.

Unfortunately, social software is often operated by antisocial guys ...

Social Software and Un-Social Behaviour

Again, a social software manufacturer is causing a stir: Technorati censoring employee blogs? - of course, an employee can potentially harm a company if they speak negatively about the company or the business. That's one reason why there's nothing about my employer on my blog and nothing about our customers - you have to draw the line somewhere. But would I accept if my employer wanted to dictate what I think? If I were no longer allowed to report negatively about the nonsense of the IT industry because my employer is in the industry? I don't think so - that goes way too far.

Even as an employee of a company, one should be allowed to express one's opinion freely - within the limits of what is legally permitted, of course. Recently, I was even insulted as a German because we supposedly don't know what free speech is - we are all censored, regulated, and brainwashed. And then I read from the land of unlimited idiocy how free speech is trampled on there, lands you in jail, or gets you fired. Strange idea of free speech. And when I read the blogger's reaction - who was brainwashed there?

What kind of light this sheds on manufacturers of so-called social software is a whole different topic. It's not the first time that such a company has stood out extremely negatively (I spontaneously think of friendster) - communication seems to be a terrible threat to the communication experts.

blo.gs: for sale - oops. The operator of blo.gs wants to sell his entire system (domains, software, database).

Seen at Lummaland: BlogFox: everything just stolen - about a search engine that simply sucks up content from blogg.de and bags it. Not exactly the fine English way ...

Found in Lummaland: We will all be fired. Wow, exciting, a filter that blocks employees of a company from accessing weblogs so that no corporate secrets are published and no false image of the company is drawn. Nonsense. But you can make money with such marketing lies.

Blogs! Why Verisign or Jamba Six Apart and Livejournal will be bought - and why Don Alphonso sometimes scares me ...

GeoURL (2.0) - the other GeoURL, meaning the original one, is back. Not entirely original because it's operated by someone else, but it has the same URL and apparently the same database. Essentially, it's the same map and everything. So essentially everything is the same. Also the slow speed. Doesn't matter - geourl.info works just as well and a bit of redundancy never hurt anyone.

Nice Firefox extension: JustBlogIt with a simple right-click. And in the 0.2 version found there, it also works with blogging pages with umlauts in the title. The 0.1 version on the Firefox Extensions page is quite buggy.

The Technorati Plugin Beta provides a similar list to regular comments - except the links and text excerpts come from the Technorati link cosmos for an article. I'm currently wondering whether something like this couldn't also be done meaningfully with blogger.de - this way you could also catch those who aren't automatically linked via Trackback or Pingback. Of course, you'd have to check for duplicates against the regular trackbacks and pingbacks. Hmm.

New Game, New Luck: b2evolution

Today I took a look at b2evolution (as usual, just a brief superficial test flight). It's related to WordPress and that alone is interesting - let's see what others have done with the same base code. So I got the software, grabbed the Kubrick skin (hey, I'm liking Kubrick these days), and got started.

What immediately stands out: b2evolution places much more emphasis on multi-everything. Multi-blog (it comes pre-installed with 4 blogs, one of which is an "all blogs" blog and one is a link blog), multi-user (with permissions for blogs etc. - so suitable as a blogging platform for smaller user groups) and multi-language (nice: you can set the language for each post, set languages per blog). That's already appealing. The backend is reasonably easy to use and you can find most things pretty quickly.

But then the documentation. Ok, yes, the important stuff is documented and findable. But as soon as you go deeper, almost nothing is self-explanatory or documented. Ok, I admit I shouldn't have immediately set out to make the URIs as complicated as possible - namely via so-called stub files. These are alternative PHP files through which everything is pulled to preset special settings via them. Apparently you're supposed to be able to get a URI structure like WordPress with it - the b2evolution standard is that index.php always appears in the URI and the additional elements are tacked on at the end. That's ugly. I don't want that. Changing that apparently only works with Apache tools done by hand (no, not like WordPress's nice and friendly support for the auto-generated .htaccess file) and then corresponding settings in b2evolution. Ok, you can do that - I know Apache well enough. But why so complicated when there's an easier way?

Well, but the real catch for me comes next: b2evolution can only do blogs. At least in the standard configuration. Exactly - just lists of posts ordered chronologically. Boring. Not even simple static pages - sorry, but where do I put the imprint? Manually created files that you put alongside it? Possible, sure. But not exactly user-friendly.

There are also some anti-spam measures, for example a centrally maintained banned words list (well, I personally don't think word lists are that suitable) and user registration. Not much, but sufficient for now. You can certainly do more via plugins. Speaking of plugins, there's a very nice feature to mention: you can have different filters activated for each post. Each time anew depending on the post. Very nice - WordPress has a real deficit there, the activated filters apply to everything across the board - one change and old posts suddenly get formatted wrong (if it's an output filter).

Also nice: the hierarchical categories really behave hierarchically - in WordPress they're only hierarchically grouped, but e.g. not much is done with the hierarchy. In b2evolution, posts from a category automatically move to the parent category when a category is deleted. Also, thanks to the multi-blog feature, you can activate categories from different blogs for a single post and thus cross-post - if it's allowed in the settings.

Layout adjustments work via templates and skins. Templates are comparable to the WordPress 1.2 mode and skins are more like the WordPress 1.5 mode. So with templates everything is pulled through a PHP file and with skins multiple templates are combined and then the blog is built from that. Special customizations can then be done via your own stub files (the same ones that are supposed to be used for prettier URIs) and via those you could, for example, build fixed layouts with which you could simulate static pages.

All in all, the result of the short flight: nice system (despite the somewhat baroque corners in URI creation and quite sparse documentation) for hackers and people who like to dig into the code. For just getting started directly, I find it less suitable - WordPress is much easier to understand and get going with. And to compete with Drupal, b2evolution is too thin on features - just too focused on blogs. You can certainly bend it in the right direction - but why would you want to do that when you could just use something off-the-shelf that can already do all that?

Hmm. Sounds relatively similar to what I wrote about b2evolution almost a year ago. There hasn't been much development there in the meantime.

For a given reason ...

... I point out that I simply delete trackbacks from blogs if their sole purpose is to promote some obscure Amazon shops. Sorry, but just because advertising junk is stored in a weblog software doesn't mean I let every inappropriate trackback through. And no, just because a keyword from the post also appears in one of my posts doesn't make it an interesting trackback—it's just spam.

Finding Deep Links in Log Files

I asked Pepino about it recently, so I put my Deep Link Finder Script online. It's a simple Python script. Should run on Python 2.2 and up, possibly even Python 2.1 (but that hasn't been tested). The script is configured in the source code (I've added comments for it) and then simply called with multiple logfiles as parameters. It extracts from Apache Combined Logs which sites deep link to specified file types (configurable, some image types are set by default) and how often. It outputs an HTML fragment that you can add headers and footers to in order to put it online - for example, that's how my Zeitgeist page for deep links is created. The other pages have similarly structured scripts, except they collect search terms and general referrers instead.

I take a look at the deep linker list now and then, and if someone shows up there who deep links quite a lot and isn't an aggregator or news service, they get shown a corresponding replacement image. But really only those sites. It bothers me too when my feed reader suggests I'm an image thief or traffic robber.

Podcasts? No.

liquid design on em/ex basis

From the CSS Zen Garden: a liquid design that is based on em and ex units and therefore grows and shrinks in layout along with a changed font size. That might be a usable basis for my blog, because it's precisely the fact that a fixed design doesn't respond particularly well to font size changes that bothers me about Kubrick.

Now I just need to figure out how to implement it properly. Above all, I'll probably have to incorporate the header graphic quite differently — images just don't scale sensibly with this approach. Let's see if I feel like tinkering with it at some point.

GeoURL is back

GeoURL has been revived - or rather, a new GeoURL service has been built. Simply go there, register your own site, and then integrate a link like my nearby link. And suddenly we can see who's in the vicinity again. The whole thing is still somewhat spartan, but it's enough to find neighbors (greetings over to Paderborn and groetjes naar Enschede!).

By the way, to help my rusty Dutch (I can read it relatively fluently, but write it only extremely haltingly), the German-Dutch dictionary at pauker.at was helpful.

Update: cool, no sooner do you post about it than other neighbors resurface. And what do I discover: Gedankenschnipsel is now also running on WordPress.

Bloglines sold to Ask Jeeves

Bloglines has been sold to Ask Jeeves - so how do you see this now in terms of using your feed in Bloglines? Is that still just as okay as before? Or is there a difference now that suddenly bigger money is flowing?

Tagging at blogg.de

blogg.de now also does tagging - and after I asked, now in the same way as Technorati. So with the category tag in the RSS feed if one is present there. Since I've always used categories like tags on my blog anyway, that's extremely practical - my posts end up in the right section on blogg.de. Nice. By the way, in my opinion that's also the smarter alternative to the easily set up group blogs as they should be implemented via Topicexchange - simply a central ping service and corresponding entries in the RSS feed.

NZZ Online archive no longer freely available - and with that, the NZZ is no longer present on the Internet. What the heck is online availability supposed to accomplish if it's only available on the day of print publication? Ridiculous nonsense from those oh-so-professional media outlets, who are once again revealing themselves as complete amateurs on the Internet …

Trackback Thinking

A Whole Lotta Nothing: No one can have nice things! - Matt is disabling trackbacks on his site. Interesting is his observation that a few test trackbacks came through first, and only after these were still there 8 hours later did the big wave arrive. This aligns with the experiences of others - the spambots are probably still semi-automated at the moment.

At Phil Ringnalda there are more thoughts on trackbacks and whether they're even relevant anymore - and whether the way they're usually used even makes sense. His main point is the fact that many trackbacks are rather pointless - they simply point to a post that ultimately just contains a classic "me too" and points back to the origin. He would prefer context-based pings - you've written something on a topic that's being discussed elsewhere? A manual trackback to that post connects these two sites. This topic-based trackbacking was also the main idea behind the Internet Topic Exchange - basically just a trackback address and an attached wiki. It got off the ground to some extent, but it never really caught on widely. Similarly, LazyWeb - a post with a problem, a trackback to LazyWeb and maybe someone finds a solution - never really took off. Okay, it's running, but you would have expected more response.

These connections are exactly the sort of thing that's not so easy to do with Pingback - Pingback is based on bidirectional linking, whereas trackback would be interesting in these examples precisely because of its decoupling from actual links.

On the other hand, I constantly see poker spam on TopicExchange topics - and with that, such a system eventually just dies, unless enough gardeners are found to pull out the weeds.

That's enough from the self-referential techno-babble corner for now.

First Fallout of rel="nofollow"

Rogers Cadenhead made some comments about Wikipedia marking all external links with rel="nofollow". I find it particularly unfortunate that Wikipedia typically only links to external sources that actually have subject matter quality - or at least are considered to have such quality by the Wikipedia author. Precisely a link monster like Wikipedia has improved the positioning of other pages through its links - which surely would have been particularly helpful for information websites about obscure topics. After all, who else would link to them?

Huh? Media numbers in January ...

Actually, I don't usually mention these things, since they're kind of trivial. But I was a bit surprised today:

8210 visitors 15413 visits 73858 page views 1.96 GB traffic

That's significantly more than I usually get. Strange. And that's not even including the first week of the month, when the whole thing was still running on PyDS. By the way, I'm also getting more comments than usual. Strange. I'm not writing any better than I normally do...

Away with Trackback

Isotopp is pondering trackback spam on the occasion of spam day and presents several approaches. One of them uses a counter-check of the trackback URL against the IP of the submitting computer - if the computer has a different IP than the server advertised in the trackback, it would probably be spam. I've written down my own comments on this - and explained why I'd rather be rid of trackback today than tomorrow. Completely. And yes, that's a complete 180-degree turn on my part regarding trackback.

The IP test approach once again comes from the perspective of pure server-based blogs. But there's unfortunately a large heap of trackback-capable software installations that don't need to run (and often don't run) on the server where the blog pages are located - all tools that produce static output, for example. Large installations are Radio Userland blogs. Smaller PyDS blogs. Or also Blosxom variants in offline mode (provided there are now trackback-capable versions - but since they're typical hacker tools, they definitely exist).

Then there are the various tools that aren't trackback-capable, where users then use an external trackback agent to submit trackbacks.

And last but not least, there are also the various Blogger/MetaWeblogAPI clients that submit the trackback themselves because, for example, only MoveableType in the MetaWeblogAPI allows triggering trackbacks, but other APIs don't.

Because of this, the IP approach is either only to be seen as a filter that lets through some of the trackbacks, or it's a prevention of trackbacks from the users mentioned above. And the latter would be extremely unpleasant.

Actually, the problem is quite simple: Trackback is a sick protocol that was stitched together with a hot needle, without the developer giving even a moment's thought to the whole thing. And therefore belongs, in my opinion, on the garbage heap of API history. The fact that I support it here is simply because WordPress implemented it by default. Once the manual moderation effort becomes too high, trackback will be completely removed here.

Sorry, but on the trackback point the MoveableType makers really showed a closeness to Microsoft behavior: pushed through a completely inadequate pseudo-standard via market dominance - without giving even a thought to the security implications. Why do you think RFCs always have a corresponding section on security problems as mandatory? Unfortunately, all the blog developers faithfully followed along (yes, me too - at Python Desktop Server) and now we're stuck with this silly protocol. And its - completely predictable - problems.

Better to develop and push a better alternative now - for example PingBack. With PingBack, it's defined that the page that wants to execute a PingBack to another page must really contain this link there exactly as it is - in the API, two URLs are always transmitted, its own and the foreign URL. The own URL must point to the foreign URL in the source, only then will the foreign server accept the PingBack.

For spammers this is pretty absurd to handle - they would have to rebuild the page before every spam or ensure through appropriate server mechanisms that the spammed weblogs then present a page during testing that contains this link. Of course that's quite doable - but the effort is significantly higher and due to the necessary server technology, this is no longer feasible with foreign open proxies and/or dial-up access.

Because of this, the right approach would simply be to switch the link protocol. Away with Trackback. You can't plug the trackback hole. PS: anyone who looks at my trackback in Isotopp's post will immediately see the second problem with trackback: apart from the huge security problem, the character set support of trackbacks is simply a complete disaster. The original author of the pseudo-standard didn't think for a minute about possible problems here either. And then some people still wonder why TypeKey from the MoveableType people isn't so well accepted - sorry, but people who make such lousy standards won't be getting my login management either ...

Interview with a link spammer | The Register - of course this could be fake, but the guys from The Register claim they conducted an interview here with a blog spammer.

How do you stand it?

Phil Ringnalda recounts his dream about the history of RSS, in which he finds himself in a conversation with early RSS developers discussing the technical choices and philosophical debates that shaped the format.

In the dream, Phil is asked by one of the developers: "How do you stand it?" — referring to the frustrations and complexities that came with RSS adoption and the various competing standards that emerged.

The post reflects on the tensions between simplicity and functionality, and how different visions for what RSS should be led to fragmentation in the ecosystem. Phil uses the dream narrative to explore the human and technical dimensions of this important web technology.

Note: The original source link appears to be from Phil Ringnalda's blog from 2005, discussing RSS history through a dream sequence narrative.

Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper

Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper is a very interesting approach to comment spam: it simply asks one of many pre-configured questions that a human can answer very easily, but a spam bot cannot. Similar forms are already being used in various blogs, but here it's nicely worked out (although in my view it could also be completely realized as a plugin). The basic idea is essentially that of a CAPTCHA - but a textual CAPTCHA. A human can easily answer the question what is 1+1 - a spam bot won't get anywhere with that. Sure, spammers can create databases of questions and answers. But if everyone sets up their own collection of questions, it won't get them far. For comment spam, it should be a very usable solution.

Unfortunately, there's no such simple solution for trackbacks...

Update: since I find the idea somewhat amusing, I'm currently writing a corresponding plugin. So it's possible that my comments might behave a bit strangely tonight.

heute.de - The Unequal Brothers. A good summary of the blogosphere and its relationship to journalism.

mit dem Link-Kondom rel="nofollow"

MT-Blacklist -> Hijacked comments.cgi

MT-Blacklist -> Hijacked comments.cgi - anyone using Moveable Type should disable the comment script. The email verification that checks whether the sender address input doesn't contain junk is broken - which allows you to sneak in additional recipient addresses by separating them from the actual sender address with a line feed. And with that you can happily use MT to spam other people.

A real beginner mistake - the email validation is done with a regex that doesn't match the end of the string and uses dotall - so it only goes up to a possible line feed and ignores everything after it. Really stupid.

nofollow no do

Shockwave Rider doesn't particularly like rel="nofollow" and it's come up in various other blogs too. The open letter from the S9Y developers to Google on the subject is also interesting.

I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it either - simply because it's the wrong approach. You can't repair a broken system by telling curious people to look away. Comment spammers won't be deterred one bit by the whole thing.

I can only agree with Phil Ringnalda that rel="nofollow" is something like the monster disclaimer of people on the web. Ultimately just as strange as the link distancing that many have on their websites - if you're distancing yourself, why link at all? If you're generally distancing yourself from your commenters, why have a comment function in the first place?

In any case, I won't be using rel="nofollow" - at least not by means of a large bucket that pours over everything just because it's a comment or trackback. Comment spam is addressed differently. If necessary, by putting everything in a moderation queue that then has to be cleared of spam using appropriate means - the same techniques used for email spam apply here. That's a far more worthwhile field of activity.

WordPress : Tackling Comment Spam is a fairly comprehensive compilation of various approaches to combat comment spam and trackback spam in WordPress.

Got New Spam Tactic Figured

Asymptomatic » Got New Spam Tactic Figured reports on a new tactic used by blog spammers. Relatively harmless comments appear on blogs that don't contain a single link. When spammers find these comments again via Google, they know they can likely post further comments there—bypassing the filters that automatically approve comments from visitors who have previously had a comment approved under their email address. So it could be that after a "Hey, I think your site is great" comment, a flood of blog spam suddenly appears...

RSS 1.1: RDF Site Summary (DRAFT)

RSS 1.1: RDF Site Summary (DRAFT) - how sensible. Someone designed an update to RSS 1.0 (yes, that unloved RDF-based format that hardly anyone really knows). Because, there aren't enough feed formats yet, so you definitely have to add one more.

Along those lines, I also stumbled upon the HTML Syndication Format - another thing like that, where someone thought it would be a good idea to deliver the feed as specially tagged XHTML source.

And unlike RSS 3.0 (which is based on YAML instead of XML), the other two seem to be more or less serious (with the HTML Syndication Format I'm still hoping it was just an elaborate April Fools' joke ...)