brandondawson.org

Amusing little site taking the mangled “lolcat” verbiage and examining its suitability to become a programming language: [link]

Recently, I’ve been having major problems with zombie computers from a Russian ISP doing a lot of comment spamming. This has occupied a very large segment of my time across the last week, resulting in a very tired and very fed-up sysadmin.

Ordinarily, such spammers are comparatively polite; they hammer you from one or two IP addresses, which, when you block them, they move on.

Not these guys. Near as I can tell, they’ve got control of a large part of the entire Caravan.ru IP block(s), because everytime I’d ban an individual IP, or even an IP range, using hosts.deny or iptables, they’d just pop right back up on another IP range.

Caravan.ru seems to use a lot of non-consecutive IP ranges, which has made my work considerably more difficult. So, I decided just to ban Russia altogether for a few days. Here’s the tool I used: [link]

So the Mothership is fully selling its own branded wireless……again. Ma Bell is determined to cement brand recognition behind its own name ahead of the release of the hotly anticipated iPhone. [link]

Billions of dollars have arguably been wasted as AT&T has spun off its wireless assets again and again, only to buy them back up and do it all over again.

The article states that AT&T will be carefully measuring customer identification of its brand identity, vowing to “make sure that every drop of equity from the iPhone accrues to the AT&T brand”, according to an AT&T spokesman.

Continue reading…

Dear Wendy’s:

When you stop wrapping your sandwiches in non-microwavable foil, I’ll stop trying to microwave non-microwavable foil.

My life might depend on it, so I’d appreciate it deeply if you made this important safety alteration today.

The Register recently ran a poll, asking it’s readers, What is Web 2.0?

In the initial article, author Andrew Orloski cites “Transcendental Tim” O’Reilly as nebulously defining “Web 2.0″ as:

“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”

I’d say that’s really just been pushed back to Web 3.0, as the hype and hyperbole surrounding “user generated content” has reached simultaneous highs (YouTube) and lows (MySpace) while the hard-won common sense that prevailed post-bubble is lost in the foggy ether of “emergent paradigms”. But the results of The Register’s “What is Web 2.0″ poll were still a bit alarming, nonetheless.

In the poll, the respondents absolutely savaged “the new paradigm”, using phrases such as “mutual masturbation” and a “great big shit sandwich” to describe the “600 million unwanted opinions in realtime” that is often the effect of giving unrestricted, interactive soapboxes to the entire world, half of which, we must remember, is of below-average intelligence.

A kinder way of putting it is as old a story as humanity itself: The technology is neutral; it’s the usage that people put it to that determines its ultimate moral, economic, and cultural value to society. And to judge by sites like MySpace, that value ain’t real big.

My editors thought my section on banner advertisements went into too much detail. Specifically, they felt that explaining the differences between different banner ad formats, as well as different banner ad compensation schemes (CPM, CPC, and so on) ran against our concept of a quick-read oriented book. I tried to write the book explaining all the things I would’ve wanted to know when I first started as a webmaster. Accordingly, it is my pleasure to be able to publish the excised section, with a few brief paragraphs lifted directly from my manuscript, free to all, on my companion website, JoomlaWarrior.com.

The excised section runs about ten pages, which are somewhat boring and cover familiar ground for experienced webmasters, but those of us who are new to the idea of publishing a money-making website will find this information relevant and informative.

Do bear in mind that I am still (yes, still) completing final draft revisions to the book itself, so the companion website is still, as of this posting, very rough and unfinished. I’ll be turning my attention to the companion site as soon as my editors sign off on the book’s final draft, and will be adding even more excised sections, as well as limited excerpts from the actual published book pending permission from my publisher and editors.

Here’s the link to the Banner Advertisement Tutorial.

As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I was (G)oogling around a bit today for information on the etymology of my surname, Dawson.

A simple Google search on my surname places Wikipedia in the first several results, many of which are redundant entries from Wikipedia’s numerous “local language” sub-sites, including the English-language Wikipedia.

Are all of these results equally relevant? Of course not. And I can understand how the entry for “Dawson’s Creek” can be ranked so high in a pop-culture obsessed world.

But multiple Top-10 results, in multiple languages, for “Dawson County”? This is nothing more than a trickle-down effect from the massive amounts of inbound links that Wikipedia boasts. And the results are now clearly skewed in favor of these inadvertently spammy results.

The machine is broken by good intentions.

Since always ppc advertising has been a quick and easy way of getting started in search engine marketing. However, with time, cpc is losing its value. Due to the increased awareness regarding webhosting, even more marketing strategies are being devised. With different web hosting services, one can experiment with web design as well. This freedom of web design matters a lot in sem.

Apparently, this time they’re really, REALLY gonna fix CSS. Really. [link]

Please, Microsoft, on behalf of the world’s website designers….make this one not suck. We’re begging you.