I am looking at some spam I received at LinDesk. These are not your average spam - they are real good. I even let one through before I understood they were spam.

• spartan300 | tcssey@aol.com | dolcemp3.com | IP: 64.12.116.138
  Hhmmm,, this sounds good. but I not yet into upgrading my Fedora7 to 8. i’m not that afraid of changes, but I might incur another error with my linux. I still have lot of work to do, maybe i’ll try this later next week. Thanks though for this blog.
  In article Sound Issue in Fedora 8
• 2cool2sexy | tcssey@aol.com | dolcemp3.com | IP: 64.12.116.138
  Have you checked on its system requirements? You should try checking of their site. http://banshee-project.org/
  I believe there are helpdesk there that can support you.
  In article Banshee - Music Management and Playback for GNOME
• audio-fanatic | tcssey@aol.com | dolcemp3.com | IP: 64.12.116.138
  another nice review here Lin. You really adore using Linux-based software? I think this mp3 software is the one fit for my notebook.
  In article Audacious Media Player

First of all, do you agree with me? Are these spam?

The reason why I think they are spam are the following…

• Same URL and Email - but different names.
• Zero content comments - they add no value to the post.
• My previous experience has taught me that comments with @aol.com email addresses are often spam.
• This guy has only commented on MP3 related posts - his URL leads to an MP3 site.

The reason why they may not be spam are just as valid.

• These comments are written by humans - not bots.
• The writer of the second comment(about banshee) has obviously read the post.
• The commenter has at least a passing knowledge of Linux and Linux softwares.

So, have you received any spam like this - comments that you are unsure about? These three comments are still in my moderation queue. I need advice on how to deal with them.

I could let them through - if no one looks closely, they will think these are actual comments. That will give the articles an appearance of popularity. It is a good thing for me. But I have a zero tolerance policy towards spam. If the comment is a spam, I will not allow it on my site. Its a matter of principle.

Article Templates wordpress plugin lets you create templates that can be used when writing a new post or page. This will be very useful if you are writing many post with the same structure.

Download Article Templates 1.00.A Beta

This is my first WordPress Plugin. It was easier to create than I expected.

My plugin used the principles used in Post Templates plugin. It is another plugin to do the same thing - create templates for the post.

My plugin have a few advantages over the other plugin…

• Easier to use
• The templates created by each user is accessable only to them

There are a few disadvantages too…

• Javascript must be enabled for my plugin to work
• Beta release - expect bugs

FeedBurner has a feature called ‘clickthrough tracking’. If a feed has this feature enabled, FeedBurner will track the number of clickthrough from your feed. You will be able to see how many users have come to your site after reading the feed. But there is a problem - they do the tracking by modifying the link URL - this could hurt your Google PageRank in the long run.

The problem happens as FeedBurner changes the URL in the feed to point to their site. It is not a FeedBurner issue - that is the only possible way to track clicks in a feed. This becomes an issue because google will not credit these links to you.

For example, this is the URL of my last post…

http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2007/05/jus5-light-weight-cms/

In the FeedBurner RSS feed, this link becomes

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/bin-blog/~3/114722273/

Both points to the same location - but in case of the FeedBurner link, the user goes to the FeedBurner server and is redirected from there to my site. This link is counted as a link to feedburner by google.

How this Affect Google Page Rank

This system is designed for humans - not for machines. But these feeds are are harvested by bots and used on other sites. I have seen my content being swiped and used in other sites. Earlier I used to get angry about it - now that phase is over. I have accepted the situation. Like people accept spam and ads, after a while you learn to accept the fact that others are using your content without your permission.

There is one good thing about this - most people link back to the the original page when using the content. And as all bloggers know, links are very important. Recently I found this page…

http://www.fixmood.com/indian-college-students-face-bleak-prospects/2006/12/11/

This is an exact copy of one of my blog post over at BinnyVA.

Like many others, this site links to the original article - but to my horror, it uses the FeedBurner link…

Original post by <em><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/BinnyvaBlog/%7E3/59866721/” title=”" onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker(’/outbound/feeds.feedburner.com’);”>BinnyVA</a></em> …

Google will not count this link as a link to my site. The only advantage of others using my content is lost.

Another problem is that people copy the URL right from the feed reader into their blog - and if they are using a WYSIWYG editor when creating the post, they will not notice that they used the wrong URL.

Turn ‘Clickthrough Tracking’ Off

The benefits of ‘clickthrough tracking’ are not worth the problems caused by it. Fortunately, it is easy to turn it off. If you are not using FeedBurner to publish your feed, you don’t have this problem. Even if you are using FeedBurner, chances are that you don’t have the problem - you have to explicitly turn this option on. If you have turned it on here’s how to turn it off…

Login to the FeedBurner site and elect your feed. At the bottom left side of the Feed page, there will be a link called ‘Standard Stats’.

See the checkbox ‘Item link clicks (clickthrough tracking)’ - make sure its off.

Click ‘Save’. Do this for all your feeds.

Welcome, one and all, to my new ..er.. old blog. Well, new location of the old blog. Liked the theme? All the WordPress themes were kinda beautiful. So I took the default wordpress theme(Kuberic, I think it was called) and, for the lack of a better term, desecrated it. You are viewing the results.

The Past

For those who are new to this blog, a bit of history - I have a blog at http://binnyva.blogspot.com/. I recently decided that I should move the blog to one of my own servers. I did not import the old posts to this site due to the issue of duplicate content.

The Future

From the next post onwards, the post will be duplicated here and in my Blogger site. At the end of this month, I will abandon the old blog and focus on this one.

Abandon does not mean that I will delete the blog or its contents - that will stay. I will stop posting there. I will still carry out some maintenance tasks like weeding out the spam, repling to comments etc. However, from next month, no more new content will appear there.

The Present

In short, Welcome All!