Pingoat is currently down, with this message:
Pingoat has been taken down temporarily because of heavy DDOS attacks. Will be back soon.. (08:35 PM GMT - Feb 12 2006)
Until it’s up again, if you’re using it (either manually, or through RPC pings), you should switch to another multi-ping service, such as Ping-o-Matic or BlogFlux’s Pinger. Remember, pings are good.
You can get it from the SK2 page. I’m using it now.
Dr Dave of Spam Karma fame thanks everyone for the donations of $800 in a week (which I still think is way too little in return for one of the most useful WordPress plugins).
He also includes a link to the SK 2.2 beta, which I’ve just upgraded to. He says it should be more compatible with weird WordPress configurations, and should handle some recent breeds of spam bots (which were able to go through SK 2.1, sometimes) better.
“I believe in coincidence. Coincidences happen every day. But I don’t trust coincidences.” - Garak, “Star Trek - Deep Space 9″
Just a couple of days after my randomizing ads tip, Darren Rowse mentions a WordPress plugin to do exactly that. Funny how the universe works. 
The plugin may be useful to some. However, I find my method much simpler and quicker - the plugin has 4 pages of instructions! I’m not saying it’s badly made, mind you. But, to me, the point of a WordPress plugin is to make things simpler, to prevent one from having to do things manually. Yet, I don’t think the plugin actually saves work or time, or is easier to use for non-technical users.
Looking at it was useful in a way, though: just like that plugin, “my” method also works for anything made in PHP - not just WordPress -, and isn’t limited to AdSense ads - indeed, it’s not limited to ads at all. You can use it to rotate between any kind of content - Chitika ads, static images, static text, a blogroll, whatever.
No, this isn’t my “brilliant idea” - Chris Garrett of Performancing mentioned it first. But, while he gives a PHP example on how to get a simple random number, I’ll go a bit further…
The idea, as Chris says, is to randomize a particular AdSense ad (changing formats, colors, etc.), and have different channels for each version. Doing it, you can easily learn what works best, and what doesn’t, instead of having to wait for a couple of days while you test each format. This also allows you to focus on a single change - one ad - without being affected by other factors, such as the time, the day of the week, and so on - as at any day, any time, every single ad version has a chance of appearing.
This is just an example in PHP, which works for WordPress blogs, for instance. There are, of course, many other ways of doing this.
1- pick a particular ad. Replace that ad’s AdSense code with <?php include 'adsense-ad.php'; ?>.
2- on the WordPress directory for the theme you’re using, create a file adsense-ad.php with the following:
<?php
$i = rand (1,8);
$script = "adsense-ad" . $i . ".php";
include $script;
?>
Replace the “8″ with the number of ad versions you’re going to test.
3- go to the AdSense options, and generate code for the first version of the ad. Remember to set a unique channel. Save it as another file, in the same directory, named adsense-ad1.php (note the “1″, it’s not the same file as before - that one had no number).
4- repeat the previous step for the other ad versions (changing the channel, and the digit in the file name).
Easy, wasn’t it?
I don’t want to re-post such a huge article here, but if you work in IT, you’ll probably find the story called The Sacrificial Worker (written by yours truly) familiar.
On Asymptomatic, there’s a recent post called Statistics, anyone?, where the author gives his impressions on a lot of stats packages, including Google Analytics, AWStats (which I use), Mint and others. Nice details concerning the pros and cons of each one.
The ensuing comments are useful as well - it’s always nice to have more opinions.
I think I’ll keep using AWStats, though I’m curious about some other stats options. The ones I’ve tried so far, however, have disappointed me - including Analytics.
Of course, AWStats isn’t an option if you don’t have access to the server logs…
(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)
Thought I’d forgotten about this one, didn’t you?
Ready to make SpamAssassin actually use MySQL for the bayes database?
Start by creating the database itself:
mysql
CREATE DATABASE bayes;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on bayes.* TO bayes@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on bayes.* TO bayes@10.0.0.1 IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
EXIT
changing password to something else, of course
Next, I know you’ve already installed SpamAssassin using CPAN, but go to www.spamassassin.org and download it manually; you’ll be needing a file from the distribution, and while it should still be in /root/.CPAN, it’s simpler this way. Uncompress the .tar.gz and go to the sql/ directory. Then type:
mysql -u bayes -p < bayes_mysql.sql
It’ll ask for a password, which is the one you used when creating the database.
Now, edit the file /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. Add the following lines:
bayes_store_module Mail::SpamAssassin::BayesStore::MySQL
bayes_sql_dsn DBI:mysql:bayes:localhost
bayes_sql_username bayes
bayes_sql_password password
(again, replace password with the proper one.)
SpamAssassin is now configured to store bayes data on MySQL. Wasn’t too hard, was it?
Use “Check for Updates” in the Help menu, or simply wait for it to warn you. If, for some reason, you are not using Firefox, you can get it from Getfirefox.com.
Just bugfixes, so should be a peaceful update for everyone. I’m already using it on XP, at home, and will update it on Linux, at work, tomorrow.
I’m a couple of days late, as I don’t use it myself; however, in those couple of days, I’ve seen, or read about, several people who do use the Mozilla suite, yet hadn’t known about the name change.
So, if you want to keep using Mozilla (not Firefox), it’s now called SeaMonkey, and the 1.0 version is out - which includes many engine improvements from Firefox 1.5 (but it’s still the suite, with the same look and feel, not a stand-alone browser like Firefox).
Informit has an article titled BSD: The Other Free UNIX Family, which goes into some detail into the story of the main 3 open source BSDs, and the differences between them. I especially recommend it for Linux people who never tried “the other side”.
Incidentally, this very site runs on OpenBSD.
“Dr Dave”, the author of the excellent Spam Karma WordPress plugin, has a long but (IMO) fascinating post about how the “war” against comment spam goes. I direct you to The State of Spam [Karma].
He’s also asking for donations, and for once I think he deserves it a lot - SK has already stopped a lot of spam comments in my blogs. So, I’ve already donated. I hope more people do the same…
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