Dinner at Chinoise

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 26 Jul 2005 21:55:15 GMT

I’ll have to call this a personal first: I had dinner at Chinoise yesterday with a group of people that I’d never actually met in person before, all arranged at the last minute via blog trackbacks.

Besides finally meeting Boris, I got to meet Chris, Lee, Kris, Amanda, and Silas. I’d never been to Chinoise before, but I’ll be back soon–great food, wonderful presented. The conversation was enjoyably geeky; Boris and I double-teamed Lee and Chris on the “you need a Nokia N91” front while the other half of the table discussed photo management software and backup strategies. Here are a couple pictures from Boris’s Nokia 6630, uploaded directly to Flickr during dinner. I really need to get a better phone.

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My first trackback blog spam

Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 12 Feb 2005 15:58:27 GMT

I received my first three pieces of trackback spam overnight. By blog receives tons of comment spam, most of which are blocked by MT-Blacklist, but I haven’t seen any trackback spam before, even though I’ve been expecting it for over a year. Since trackback is designed to be automated, it seems like it’d be easier to abuse then comment spam. Fortunately, a few relatively simple steps should help stop trackback spam. A quick verification step would probably stop most of it–if you hand me a trackback URL, and I go fetch it, is there a link to my page anywhere on the trackback page?

One quick-and-easy suggestion for stopping comment spam–add </a> to your blacklist. MT 2.6 allows HTML in comments, even though it’s not supposed to, and comment spammers always try to stick links in there. Since my comment page isn’t supposed to allow HTML anyway, this does a great job of blocking spam.

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