Over the last few weeks I’ve had to work on a Wiki. Overall the experience has been quite challenging, and I have had to adjust somewhat to the limitations of the Wiki script. While I do like the benefit of being able to quickly edit a page or section, I also find myself editing more and more, because I either hate the way my information is presented, or can’t decide on how to organize it. In other words, I find myself being more of an editor than actually authoring content, which over time frustrates me, because the whole reason I am using a wiki in the first place is to create content. The more I use wiki, the more I am beginning to think that I really don’t like wiki as a creative tool. Perhaps it is because I am now too comfortable with regular HTML, or because I use WordPress so much, or maybe because in the end, wiki tools are boring.

I have started to insert more HTML and CSS within the wiki entries to make them look nicer and I am somewhat satisfied with the results now. However I still can’t escape the notion that wiki is as limiting as using Microsoft PowerPoint, which I consider to be one of the worst pieces of software to ever be invented. I hate when people reduce complicated ideas into bullet points. Real life can’t be reduced to just an unordered list of points, it has to have meaning and sadly I think the wiki tool is just one step better than PowerPoint, which is to say it is mediocre. Not bad, but not great.

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If you are thinking of starting up an eCommerce site or simply want to secure part of your website, then you probably are shopping around for an affordable SSL certificate. A few years ago there was no such thing as an affordable SSL cert. Every certificate would cost hundreds of dollars and the ones that did not were not officially recognized by the major browsers. Today, you have better options unless your eCommerce business is significant, in that case, you are still better off using a more expensive certificate. For the rest of us who can’t afford a 100% recognized certificate, there are options. The following sites all offer certs at reasonable prices. Our site, WebKeyDesign uses a RapidSSL certificate.

• EV1Servers offers affordable RapidSSL certs and higher end QuickSSL certificates. EV1Servers is a major reseller of certificates, so that is why their prices are lower than other resellers and the certificate authority.
• GoDaddy.com sell their own branded Turbo SSL and High Assurance certs. These certificates offer 256-bit encryption which is twice the encryption of most SSL certs.
• Registerfly.com is another SSL reseller. They include custom Registerfly SSL logos with their certs.

You should be able to purchase an affordable SSL cert for around $20 from any of these sites. Although most older browsers will not officially recognize this type of certificate.

Before purchasing the certificate, you should decide before hand what url the certificate should be installed to. Most webmasters select a subdomain, like http://secure.yoursite.com, but you can use your regular site url (http://www.yoursite.com). For Windows servers, double-check before hand that the certificate you are purchasing works on Windows and your particular webserver software. Most of these certs should work on your standard cPanel based server (Apache + UNIX based OS like Linux).

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By far the biggest problem with using the Internet is the massive amounts of spam that is clogging up the works. The most common is the spam you get in your email inbox, but increasingly there are tons of junk sites with nothing but useless content. If you run a forum or blog, you have to constantly monitor things due to the comment spam entries you get daily. Of late, I decided to start fighting back. Though I am not sure how effective the FTC is these days, I started to forward any and all spam emails I get to any of my email addresses.

If you get spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email.

I found out that Mac OS X has a really handy feature, unique to the 10.4 release. Regardless of the program, if you hold the pointer over a URL link, the operating system shows you a tooltip window with the actual URL that the link is redirecting too. I am not sure this would work for shorturl redirection urls, but it does help quite a bit with many phishing emails.

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With all the talk of Google Analytics and Mint, it was easy to forget about about Tom Dyson’s tiny Peastat. If you need quick stats without a lot of graphics and without having to login to some other site, then try looking at Peastat: A small Python based script, it gives you plenty of information and it does it quickly.

Peastat is divided into four sections. The top section is a quick summary, while the next three sections are what most webmasters would be interested in. The Recent Popular Pages, tells you what pages are the most popular right now, the Recent Refferrers clues you in on what sites are sending traffic your way, and last, the Recent Popular Search Terms give you the all important key words that vistors are using to find your site.

Learn more about Peastat on WebKeyDesign’s Forum.

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Last year, Charles Arthur interviewed a link spammer for The Register, detailing why and how, link spammers target weblogs. The entire story is interesting in that the spammer describes how most sophisticated comment spam is actually done through proxy machines so that the spammer is not penalized by his own isp. However, the story of link spammers is no different than most other stories on the Internet. It all eventually leads to the idea that the ethics of committing such actions are very debatable, but that due to lack of consequences, the strategy continues to be very popular. This reminds me of something I read a long time ago about how locks on doors are not really for thieves, but for everyone else; meaning that a thief will break your window to get inside and rob you, while a normal person will only be tempted if you leave your doors unlocked. This is the same reasoning for spammers. If they can make money by spamming you, without being penalized, they will. In the business world marketing is everything and the temptation to view link spamming (or any type of spamming) as legitimate marketing is so great that many spammers do in fact view themselves as any number of labels, such as: affiliate, search engine optimiser, advertising consultant, or simply marketing.

The Webmaster’s Spam Problem

Regardless of what the ethics are, Comment Spam, is in the end the webmaster’s problem and no one else’s. This means that just as the link spammer invests lots of time in tweaking his arsenal of spam tools, the webmaster must invest in some counter initiatives to protect his site and content. For WordPress users, the WordPress Codex has lots of helpful information on combating comment spam, but while browsing a blog myself, I noticed a completely different strategy. The webmaster for a blog had added a warning to the bottom of her blog that warned spammers that any comment spam would result in their domain being reported to Google as a spammer.

Google actually maintains a Report Spam page, in which you are encouraged to report domains that are using deceptive practices to achieve higher search engine rankings. I am not sure if Google would accept link spammers and the domains they market as actual spam domains, but ultimately it is up to Google to decide this. I will note that Google is known to check the sites of the person who submitted the complaint as well, so Google does not take these complaints at face value.

A while back Google worked with MSNSearch and Yahoo!, to implement the nofollow attribute for links, which was suppose to prevent blog comment spam by giving no emphasis or weight to comment links, but obviously this has not totally deterred link spammers. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is implemented in WordPress 1.5 and other major blog scripts, yet I still receive many comment spam entries weekly.

It is evident that dealing with spam is going to be an ongoing task for webmasters, and that this is just one of many problems we have to deal with as the price of having a space on the Internet.

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