I think I’m getting a new kind of Referrer Spam on my piddly liddle blog. Wikipedia’s entry describes referrer spam as aimed at sites who make their referrers public. I don’t. I publicize search engine keywords that people used to find me, but not the actual referrers.
What I’m seeing in my site stats is a handful of sites that claim to link to me, but are really porn sites that seem to be hoping I’ll click through. Have porm spammers figured out that bloggers tend to be a self-satisfied lot that want to know just how popular we are? Well then, what better way to fool us than let us believe we’ve been linked by some new web page.
Incidentally, I’m not going to mention the URLs in full because I don’t want them to see their site mentioned anywhere. If you are interested, the base of the URL looks like this, without the @ signs.
http://i@s@m@y@m@o@v@i@e@s@.@c@o@m
There was more to the URL at the end, but I assumed that the last bits were just for tracking who gets clicks through, kind of like embedding a special code in a graphic so that they know you viewed their spam e-mail. If someone clicks through, their site will suddenly be on the list of “suckers” who will click through anything.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much I can do about it. I do look at my incoming links, but now I’ll have to be more skeptical if the name doesn’t seem to make much sense or have any relevance to my site.
Update: it turns out that every fake referrer that I’ve received has come from the same IP address: 87.118.120.23. I think my next PHP script will be a WordPress plugin to always give that IP address a 50 MB file of garbage….
I’m always interested to see how people come to find my site. Of course, nearly anyone who blogs is a link whore. I also like to monitor how people found me via search engines. The Wordpress plugin Firestats does a very nice job of showing me the search terms used. But I want to brag to the world how other people are finding me.
My web host allows me to enable AWStats on my sub-domains. I have it enabled on journal.nearbennett.com, and I check all the stats periodically. For example, it was really fascinating to see a bunch of hits come from Stumble Upon for my hard drive clock post. AWStats has a lot of good information that I’m not sure I want to share with the whole world, so I have the whole directory structure protected. But I want people to be able to see what search terms are leading people to my site. So I created a very small PHP script to by-pass the protection, and allow someone to view My Influence on the World.
Here is that PHP code for you to enjoy. #!/usr/local/bin/php4.cli
< ?php
include_once("../../awstats/journal/awstats.journal.nearbennett.com.keyphrases.html");
?>
Yeah, I know its not much to be proud of, but hey, it works. And its like the third thing I’ve ever done with PHP (the first was of course ‘hello world‘).
I’m pleased to report that if you search Google for hard drive clock, my post is the third on the list behind Make. Yes, I did that a while ago, but please allow me to bask in my glory a little while longer.
There is a lot of noise about how slow the NSLU2 is. The real question is, Is it fast enough to do the things you want to do? I present as an example that the NSLU2 is “fast enough” this situation:
One of my computers was downloading some large files to the NSLU2’s drives taking up my full DSL bandwidth.
Simultaneously, on another computer I was watching a video that had been previously stored on the NSLU2. It was a 42 minute video, at roughly 350MB. There were no hiccups or interruptions.
What is the total bandwidth of these two activities? Who cares!?! The point is that it did what I needed it to do.
