Have you ever read an article somewhere and realized that it looks too familiar?  That’s because you probably wrote it a year or so ago, or read it on someone else’s blog.  “Splogs” are usually fake (and some legitimate sites) blogs that harvest your blog’s content via script, then mirror it on their own sites in order to boost pagerank and ad revenue.

Honestly I was unfamiliar with this term until a few months ago when I started getting emails about my posts ending up in various places on the Internet.  Some people were accusing me of stealing, others were just looking out for a fellow blogger and letting me know that my boobs weren’t the only thing going around the web.  I think the act of someone’s website being duplicated around the Internet is like web herpes — it spreads around and you can find it all you want, but there’s no stopping it.

When it comes time that you find one of your posts lingering on an unfamiliar website, don’t just ignore it!  My first brush with splogging was back in April when a ton of my tutorials ended up on some web development site — no credentials, links, or anything.  When I tried to contact the author I pleasantly found out that the blog contained no contact information or even so much as a contact form or ‘about’ page.  So, I did a whois to find out who the guy was and he obviously denied stealing the content stating that he runs a feed site that wasn’t crediting articles properly.  A load of bullshit, but it brought up a good point.

So what can you do?

If you notice that some lowlife is stealing your posts, the first thing you should do is call them out on it.  I’ve gotten more in the habit of leaving comments on the blogs with a link back to my article, and by the time the site owner is able to remove it, the credibility of their site is already ruined.  If you’re not the blatant confrontational type and the idea of content stealing doesn’t horribly disgust you, try contacting the splogger privately. While most blogs will have some kind of contact page or obvious way to get ahold of whoever owns the site, splogs usually do not.  This is because splogs are usually not maintained by actual people, but rather scripts that spider around the internet and collect content.  If that is the case, you can try to contact them in other ways, or get the site shut down:

• If the blog is hosted with a blog service like Blogger or WordPress.com, you can flag or report the blog as spam or questionable.  Most services will immediately remove splogs
• You can do a whois on the domain name, which may contain the splog’s owner and contact information.   Since most registrars provide domain privacy and domain owners can easily fake information, the information you get may not be reliable.
• Find out who hosts the site, and email their abuse or legal department.  You can find out who hosts almost any site by going to whoishostingthis.com .
• If all else fails, run a whois on the IP address of the site, which will usually give you the collocation provider who owns the IP space so you can complain to them

Most all hosting providers (usually hosts in the U.S.)  have strict policies against copyrights and plagiarism, so don’t be worried that your complaint will not be taken seriously.  Since splogs are also considered as spam, most hosts will be happy to get rid of them as they are just a waste of space and bandwidth.

My Good Luck Pineapple broke today and I’m very upset….it’s the very first pineapple I bought when I moved out of my parents’ house three years ago, and it’s been in my freezer ever since.  Man, the last time I was this upset was when I bought Capone a fish named Charlie…and then he ate it.

And I use the word “released” very loosely. Yes, I just upgraded my blog to use WordPress 2.2 after this guy made it sound delicious. No, I don’t regret it, but I do think it would be best to wait for a bugfix. I shall start with the positives:

- It’s optimized a bit more to help your site load faster. This may or may not be noticeable to you, but it probably is to your webhost

- It’s harder to break your site by enabling a botched plugin. I tried to enable Staticized-Reloaded and I got what I interpret as the “WordPress Screen of Death”:

This is also a shame because this happens to be one bad-ass plugin.

Now for the bad, which outweighs the good:

- Don’t be surprised if your plugin database disappears. From some odd reason, WordPress could only find it after I created a new plugins folder and copied over my plugin files again….and yes, I had to re-enable all 30 of them.

- WP-Cache no longer works (at the time of this writing), and you’ll find that enabling it will cause some strange behavior on your blog. Oddly enough it also caused my plugin database to be erased yet again

- TinyMCE (the WYSIWYG editor) malfunctions, esp. in Firefox when trying to use certain functions.

- You may need to tweak your theme a bit. I had to make several code modifications to my sidebar and header files.

- Your boobs might shrink in size. Oops, wait…that’s what happens when you stop taking birth control.

Anywho, those of you who are thinking on upgrading, be prepared to spend a few minutes messing with your site and testing your plugins and such. It may be a good idea to wait for a bugfix, which by WordPress history will probably be out within the next few days.

It takes a real ego to turn down $2 BILLION dollars. That’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder/CEO of Facebook, did when Yahoo and Viacom offered to buy him out. I was reading this in Fast Company this morning and I was couldn’t believe that two of the largest marketing firms in the world would want to buy a MySpace wannabe. I can’t really blame him for turning it down, though…since in a couple years his little business might be worth twice that much. According to Fast Company, the worth of Facebook is based these facts:

• It consists of over 47,000 college, high school, employee, and regional networks
• It handles over 600 million searches and mor than 30 billion page views a month
• It’s the 6th most-trafficked site in the U.S.
• It’s the biggest photo sharing site on the web, with 6 milling being added daily to it’s database of over 1 billion
• It grows at an average percent of 3% a week, which is a lot faster than my boobs grow.

Even though this kid could probably buy all the pocket protectors he wants, I’m still not sure of what he was deserving of a 7-page long article in FC. There’s nothing interesting enough about this kid to hold my attention for 7 pages, considering that in high school I ordered the cliffs notes for the Joy Luck Club, then ended up hiring some guy to write my paper because it was still too long.

You can read the online version of the article here.

By: Jason O’Connor

I believe some people create and publish websites for the sole purpose of tormenting their visitors. Browsing various websites and navigating the Web can often be like trying to read on an airplane while a kid kicks the back of your seat and the baby next to you alternates between screaming, crying and drooling on you. There are some excellent websites out there to be sure, but there are also a lot of dreadful ones too. The latter are the bane of so many people’s existence, especially those who use the Web regularly.

The Net continues to grow in popularity and importance for consumers and businesses alike. Therefore, the quality of sites needs to keep pace. Creating and maintaining high-quality websites is more important now than ever. Higher quality equals more revenue.

The following lists the top ten ways that a website misses the boat and contributes to hair loss and nervous breakdowns. Notice the common thread that runs throughout each of these. Namely, a bad website neglects to consider the site visitor’s experience in some fundamental ways.

XP and Vista users, you might want to hold off on the new Firefox 2.0.0.3 update until it gets neutered. Yes, Firefox violated my CPU today. No, not once, but 12 times. Yes, 12 times in the last half hour. Talk about stamina. My poor AMD now has performance anxiety and refuses to play my illegal mp3s, movies, and porn bible movies.

For those of you who have had issues with Firefox being a CPU nazi in the past, you might want to check out Justin’s article on optimizing Firefox.

If your site has ever been hacked, it will have most likely showed up in the zone-h database. This is the site where all the little script kiddies get together to brag about their “hacking” skills and such. Basically, whenever they deface a site they report it to zone-h, who then check to make sure they aren’t full of shizit. Well, in efforts to keep the script-kiddies from getting credit, I’ve devised discovered a way to make sure that zone-h’s bots can’t check the submissions. All you have to do is add this to your root .htaccess file:

<Files 403.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>

# zone-h
deny from .zone-h.org
deny from .zone-h.com
deny from 213.219.122.

# cyber-warrior.org
deny from .cyber-warrior.org
deny from .cyber-security.org
deny from 80.237.211.8

Just when we all though the world couldn’t get any worse, it seems that Google, O-Reilly, and Wired Magazine got together to name David Hansson (the creator of Rails) the Hottest Hacker on Earth. It’s like they just decided to come up with a new award that no one’s ever heard of. What now? Is this kid going to get a scholarship to Harvard? Is he going to land a gig with a top technology firm? Hardly not. You’ll most likely find him sitting on his couch wearing a wifebeater and chucking mustard at the TV. He is kind of cute though, but I could never marry a guy who’s middle name sounds like a penis metaphor.