Month: April 2008

I used to battle spam here on this blog and was able to fight the good fight on my own for a while, but it got to be too much and when Akismet was released (and even before it was supported in Subtext) I signed up and configured it. Like any good service of the kind, I basically forgot about it. I thought for sure I mentioned them on this blog already, but search says no.

Akismet uses a variety of techniques to fight spam and works fantastically well.

I didn’t realize how well until it was pointed out that one of my posts was “spam central” and I realized that for a period of about 18 hours a couple of weeks ago, something happened and my blog software wasn’t talking to Akismet’s servers (could have been me, could have been them) and nearly 10,000 erroneous comments and trackbacks were allowed in. Indeed, Akismet has blocked nearly 12 million spam messages so far today (5pm right now) across their network.

Naturally we added Akismet support in the Notches Blog and I was happy to pay the $5 pro blogger fee (defined as: you make more than $500 a month from your blog) — for most personal blogs Akismet is free.

Not only is it highly recommended, I don’t recommend running a blog without it.

I need new trail shoes. My friend Tim B, a serious trail runner, suggested the La Sportiva Slingblade, which is being replaced by the Skylite. I’m into very lightweight shoes, so these at 250 grams look perfect for me.

The only place I can find them online is a place called Moosejaw. When I first looked at them in late March, the site had the “estimated ship date” as 4/1/2008. I almost bought them thinking “hey, that’s just a couple of days away, cool”. Except something told me to just wait until they showed as actually shipping/in stock. Good thing. Every two or three days since then they’ve just moved the estimated date back a couple of days.

This is not cool.

Nobody else has them, so it is clear this is just a ploy. I dig more and there are other things that smell-bad about this place. They registered a fake company called AAA Outdoors Online so they would show up first in searches that just links directly to them. The page itself is loaded with SEO keywords at the bottom of the page.

I totally understand they are trying to compete, but it is a big turnoff and I’m not going to be buying from them if I can help it. Remarkably Google’s product search (formerly Froogle) has 2,066 reviews for this place with an average of 4.5/5.0 stars. Needless to say, given the tactics I’ve seen, I’m suspicious of those.