Fruit Bowling
Hopefully this post will serve as the definitive reference for fruit bowling rules and regulations as the sport progresses. If you’d like to learn more about fruit bowling, click “continue reading”.
Bringin’ the pixels
This is really sad, but I apparently have come down with a huge case of “artists block”. I can’t find any inspiration for the two ideas I have in my head. Maybe if I talk them out (and get some feedback), it’ll cure my blockage of artistic brain matter. So, here goes.
1. Generic category icons
What I really need, for both here (on this site) and at SavvyNation.com, are some generic category icons for posts. Take a look at SN and you can see where the new design there is headed and you’ll get a better idea for what I’m talking about. Basically I need 256×256 pixel, PNGs, that graphically represent things like “movies, games, music”. I’ve dug through tons of examples of generic icons and I’ve yet to find anything to inspire me. It’s really such a simple prospect that it’s driving me batshit to not come up with anything.
2. Fruit Bowling League and Team logos.
Yeah, you read that correctly. I might have mentioned in the past that I’ve helped create a new sport. No, I’m not kidding. Really. A small group of guys, including myself, were quite bored at a church Thanksgiving party last year. The owner of the house we were having the party at was trying to think of the best way to dispose of an extra pumpkin. Someone suggested why not roll it down the street. That concept seemed to funny not to try, and thus Fruit Bowling was born. I’ll post a seperate article detailing the rules of the sport, but for the moment let’s just say that it’s caught on. We have teams, we’ve established rules and requirements, we’ve tested which produce rolls the furthest and fastest. We’re actually quite good at it. Needless to say, the PFBL (Professional Fruit Bowlers League) needs a logo. I had thought something like a giant melon or gourd flanked by goal posts/orange street cones, but I can’t quite get that to gel in Photoshop. We haven’t picked team names yet, but presumably we’d need logos for those as well. Something like “Produce Chuckers” or “Fruit Tossers” or “Melon Lobbers”, I dunno. How do you make a mean looking cantaloupe?
There you have it. Any suggestions guys?
Freaked my ass out
Nagle just dropped me an email saying that he was getting a 403 error when trying to leave a comment. I checked around and I was getting a 403 error when I tried to get to the admin panel to find out what was going on. It freaked me out. I thought something/someone had blacklisted me from my own blog.
Apparently, the anti-spam plugin “Bad Behavior” likes to randomly ban IP addresses. It took the combined power of the tech-support guy at my host, myself and a heavy bit of googling to figure that out. I’ve got to hand it to the guys at my hosting company though, he went above and beyond trying to figure it out for me.
So, the solution was to FTP in, delete that plugins folder, which removes it from WP, and fire up the WP admin panel to make sure everything was ok. I tested it by installing the plugin again. Sure enough, soon as I did the entire world was banned for “malicious activity”. Maybe it’s a problem with the latest WP install, who knows. I’m just glad we got it figure out.
I don’t normally do this
Most of the time I dislike embedding video into webpages. This would be an exception. It just restored my faith in humanity and reinforced my belief that Red Sox Nation has the best fans in the world.
Pitchforks and Torches
Something has come to my attention, brought sharply into focus yesterday by a couple of revelations regarding this web site and spam traffic. It seems that my website, your website, potentially any web site that is accessible through RSS and more specifically, Google RSS syndication and reader, is potential bait for the newest, and in my opinion, lowest form of internet thievery.
The topic of people stealing someone else’s content and using it as their own has been around for a while and quite the hot button topic as of late. All sorts of web pundits have weighed in on what it is, how annoying it is, and how we need better anti-spam features to combat it. Some even offer suggestions on what do to about it. The most common answer is to contact their host and they’re ad revenue source.
I say all this because over the past week or so, I’ve been victim to this exact crime, and not by a person, but by a web scraping script.
The sad thing is that I’ve tracked down the exact person responsible and their host refuses to do anything. It might actually take legal action to resolve this issue.
I’ve decided to lay it all out for you here, in hopes that someone else might be able to prevent this from happening to them.
At the start, I received a few trackback spams, nothing out of the ordinary. I simply deleted them out of my moderation que, just like any normal person would do. Then I got some more, and I started to realize they were all coming from the same link. Being the curious sort, I followed the link to a website where, so far, three of my posts are being used, in excerpt form, to generate ad revenue for someone else. Immediately angered, I traced their site to their host, LiquidWeb. I contacted Liquidweb yesterday about the stolen content and link spamming. I made it very clear that stealing content is against copyright laws and falls under the DMCA. The “abuse” department at Liquidweb told me that they saw nothing wrong with the posts and that it wasn’t their problem. I’ve since sent even more pointed emails back to them but have yet to hear anything.
Still wanting to get to the bottom of this, I starting poking around their website further. I was being ripped off by a sub-domain, so I went a level up. It’s there that I read the following:
“Go away! This WPMU installation is private. You can’t sign up, and there’s nothing to read here. This is my experimentation blog. A place where I can test things out without any outside interference. Okay. Bye now.”
And, on a second page…
“I have to laugh a little, as I never envisioned someone bothering to read my “Go Away” post. Lo and behold, Dan of Dan Q’s Blog did and was even kind enough to link to me. So, I figured that I could return the favor.
He mentions the weird names of authors in the posts. I get a lot of comments about that. To be honest, the script I’m using for the auto-posting was not written by me, so I’m not sure where it gets those names.”
This tells me two things. First, that I’m not alone is being ripped and second, that it’s a script written specifically for auto-posting. This link to Dan’s website, which I kept in the quote, says basically what I’m saying now. That they’ve had posts duplicated and spammed by trackbacks. The website in question on Dan’s website is in fact the exact same one I’m dealing with. I won’t give them the satisfaction of linking to it.
Digging deeper, there was an update to Dan’s post:
“Apparently the mastermind behind the whole scam (handle “SEO_Mike”) explains it here.”
Well, now that’s just the jackpot in terms of information. According to SEO_Mike, there’s quite a bit of money to be made by “RSS scraping and auto blogging” as he calls it.
They even decide to run a little contest and see who can make the most money. There are quite a few interesting tid bits you can gleam from that forum:
“I’m going to participate in this as well using a WordPress mU setup”
“The blogs I just set up are off the top of my head or ideas taken from various sources. SearchEngineWatch has a good list of sites to get ideas from.”
“I’m going to be using Adsense primarily for these blogs, and some targetted CPA ads (mostly from Copeac, of course). The site is setup on a LiquidWeb VPS account, so I should have plenty of room to grow.”
“The goal of the sites is to make money. Period. So don’t get too attached to one site / one idea. Diversify. This is about numbers and doing something.”
I’m so angry, I actually feel physically ill. I haven’t felt this mad since someone threatened a member of my family when I was a teenager. I’m going to keep hounding Liquidweb, as they are directly responsible for this website being operational. I’m also going to pound on Adsense and Copeac and get their ad revenues pulled.
I can’t actually express in words my anger at the moment. This bullshit has got to stop. It’s time for the internet citizens to get their pitchforks and torches.
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