Blast from the Past

Have I mentioned that this migration to a new platform and design has been a royal pain? I could never have imagined all the little things that crop up. Just today I noticed a bunch of pages that existed solely for my old site. I zapped 'em and rejoiced. The new design is up and mostly complete.

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My Favorite Spam Comment

The last few days here at Common Craft headquarters have been a mix of elation and dismay. We've been working hard on the next version of our website. Now, this isn't just a design change - it involves a completely new platform, new host and new design. I had high hopes of a smooth transition, but those hopes were dashed in the last couple of days by DNS server geekery.

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The New Common Craft

After 3+ years, Common Craft has a new design and a new platform (Drupal) - Yay! We hope you like it, we sure do.

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Is This The New Spam?

In preparing my last post on MyBlogLog giveaways, I came across a few "make money online" kinds of sites. Specifically, I ran across John Chow who has been quite successful in monetizing his blog - he made $7000 in February. John has become popular among beginning bloggers and SEO (search engine optimization) people.

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The Most Expensive Spam

Spam has been around for a lot longer than computers or email, but we’ve gotten used to it. Ever since I had a real world mailbox, it’s been filled with spam every day. A percentage of my phone calls are spam. Some might even say that billboards on the side of a highway are some sort of road spam, or maybe not.

Mailbox spam is expensive. It wastes resources to print all those brochures that I just recycle immediately (which takes time). Phone spam costs a little of my time and there is a certain annoyance cost.

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I'm so honored

It's a big day at Common Craft headquarters. Today this site received it's first wave of good ole trackback spam. I'm surprised it took so long and I seem to be very popular among the comment spammers.

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I Really Want to Trust Technorati

For those of you who may not know, Technorati is a web site that tracks links between web sites (among other things). Webloggers use it to find out who is linking to their blog by putting a URL into the box on this page. The site just passed the 3 million "weblogs watched" number.

Now, I admit that I'm a habitual Technorati user- multiple times a day sometimes. It's a feedback and discovery system for me- and I really dig it. And, I admit to having some selfish pride in the number of sites linking to my weblog.

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Comment Spam Fighting Strategy

As you know, I've been been pretty fed up with the comment spammers. I have now chosen not to be a pawn in their silly game any longer.

I have now closed the comments on all but the most recent posts on this site. As it is now, any post that is over 15 days old has the comments "closed". So far, I haven't seen comment spam at all since closing these comments.

I'm betting that the lecherous spam-bots focus on archived posts more than current ones. Perhaps their system looks for posts that are over 30 days old. I'm hoping to find the sweet-spot where I can keep posts open for a maximum amount of time without attracting spam.

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Inspiration from Navin R. Johnson

It's exciting to see some folks tracking-back and talking about the contest. I'm reminded of the movie "The Jerk", with Steve Martin as Navin R. Johnson. Particularly, I laugh about the part where he's trying to make it on his own by working at Hartounian's service station- and the new phone books are delivered. To quote Navin:

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Using NewsGator and MT Bookmarklet to Post Faster

This may be old news, but I just realized a way to use Movable Type's Bookmarklet feature and NewsGator in Outlook to post weblog entries more quickly.

First, you need to know about bookmarklets. From the MT tool: "Setting up a bookmarklet to post to Movable Type allows you to perform one-click posting and publishing without ever entering through the main Movable Type interface."

Once you create a bookmarklet (from the main MT menu), you can go to any web site and click on your bookmarklet and an MT page will be generated that automatically contains an html reference to the site you're on. I use the Bookmarklet in the "Links" section of my browser for quick posting.

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