Technology – Page 108 – MeisterPlanet

Fighting Blog Spam at the Server Level

Tom Raftery has an interesting blog entry on how use your web server’s .htaccess configuration file to help reduce the amount of comment and referrer spam your WordPress journal receives.

While Tom uses the excellent WordPress plugin Spam Karma to protect his page and provide information to assist in his spam monitoring, his advice on how to use your server’s own filtering features will work with most web sites, regardless of content.

The developer of Spam Karma also has another tool called Ref Karma that works along similar lines and can be used to protect most websites with a spot of PHP scripting.

None of the advice above is overly complicated, but does involve some experience with scripting and server configuration, so be prepared to do a little background reading if this is new to you.

Hide-n-Seek Clock Bot

The MIT Media Lab has a potential new product for those of us over-sleepers who’ve developed the skill of being able to hit the snooze button on the alarm clock multiple times without actually waking up.

Clocky Clocky is a prototype product in the shape of an oddly amusing little two-wheeled, brown carpet encased robot alarm clock that patiently sits by your bed until you hit the snooze button after the alarm goes off. The plucky little robot then springs into action, taking off as fast as its little wheels can take it and uses various bump sensors to find a random hiding spot in your room to wait until its built in alarm goes off again.

By finding a new spot to hide every time its snooze button is hit, the over-sleeper is forced to either deal with the alarm going off, or get themselves up out of bed to go hunt the little device down. While this sounds annoying, it could be just the thing needed to get many of us out of bed and onto our feet when we need it most.

While still in the prototype phase, Clocky’s developers think they can eventually produce an actual product priced at just under $20.

Trend Micro HouseCall

If you find yourself needing an anti-virus, anti-spyware available anywhere there’s an internet connection, consider Trend Micro’s free HouseCall online scan.

While it won’t auto-protect your computer like an installed anti-virus program, it’s a godsend for infected computers that need an outside scan and cleaning utility that’s current.

Thunderbird’s full text RSS settings

Thunderbird RSS settings

For those of you using Mozilla’s free and open source Thunderbird email client to read RSS syndicated feeds from various websites, you may have come across many sites which send only a summary of an article, rather than the full text.

If you want to get around this manually, at the cost of a slightly longer download time due to the inclusion of the site’s graphics, consider going to the RSS Account Settings by clicking on the Edit menu, followed by Account Settings and selecting News & Blogs. There you’ll be able to uncheck the box next to By default, show the article summary instead of loading the web page.

Firefox Greasemonkey

For those looking for even more customized web content through Mozilla’s Firefox and aren’t afraid of installing a few plugins to do so, consider taking Greasemonkey for a spin.

This extension for the web browser allows the end-user to inject javascript into any viewed web page, allowing complete customization in any manner you wish. Since Greasemonkey allows the use of third-party scripts, a growing number of community-created Greasemonkey scripts are being made available. Some of the features in the user scripts include removing particular ads from individual sites to adding search boxes to others.

It’s an interesting idea and should make for some really useful scripts as time progresses.