8 Ways to Sunday

I’ve been logging in to my blog software every morning recently. Not to post, mind you, but to see if I’ve been hit with yet another round of porn-and-gambling spam. The plugins I’m using — Spam Karma for WordPress and MT-Blacklist for Movable Type — have been doing a pretty good job at fighting the spammers off, but lately they’ve needed more manual supervision for those occasional comments that slip through.

This may be changing, however, with yesterday’s announcement of a joint venture between Six Apart and several search engine companies that is aimed at eliminating a major motivation behind comment spam: the accumulation of search engine rank thanks to all the spammed links to their pages. Introducing rel="nofollow", an attribute that can be added to any hyperlink to prevent search engines from following and indexing that link. This deprives spammers of their Google juice, and greatly decreases their incentive to spam your weblog. Six Apart’s Jay Allen, author of the MT-Blacklist anti-spam plugin, explains it this way:

The initiative is based upon the idea of taking away the value of user-submitted links in determining search rankings. By placing rel="nofollow" into the hyperlink tags of user-submitted feedback, search engines will ignore those links for the purposes of ranking (e.g. PageRank) and will not follow them when spidering a site.

For you Movable Type users, we packaged that change up into a plugin. Drop that baby into your plugin directory, sit back and pop open a beer. You’re done.

Those of you who display referrers on your site will want to modify your scripts to include rel="nofollow" to get the same effect.

Sounds great, but won’t this tactic cause the PageRank of bloggers everywhere to plummet? In a word: yes. Jay argues that this is a small sacrifice to make in order to start choking off a phenomenon that threatens to kill blogging itself, much like e-mail spam is threatening that medium:

Now, the astute will point out that because links in comments/TrackBacks are ignored by the search bots, the PageRank of bloggers all around the blooog-o-sphere will suffer because hundreds of thousands of comments linking back to their own sites will no longer count in the rankings. And that is most likely true. But that inflated PageRank, which was a problem created by the search engines themselves, is the rotting flesh that the maggots sought out in the first place. If you ask me, I say fair trade.

Jay lists Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search as being the search engine companies adopting this anti-spam measure. According to various announcements from the participating parties (check out “see also” at the bottom of this entry), the following blogware will support the new attribute value: Six Apart products (LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type), Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, Blosxom, Blojsom, and MSN Spaces.

Reaction from around the blogosphere has been skeptical and mixed. My favorite so far is Mark from Weblog Tools Collection, who thinks the whole thing might just be a conspiracy.

(see also: Yahoo’s announcement on their search blog, Google’s announcement, Microsoft’s announcement, Scoble’s post on MSN Spaces support for nofollow, and ongoing coverage at threadwatch.org)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will finally be coming to movie theaters this May. Visit the official web site and click on “larger trailer” to see a big beautiful QuickTime version of the hilarious teaser.

The new design for Little Elegy is finished, and I’m looking for a few good testers to help me squash the last bugs. I can’t afford a “real” usability test, so I’m enlisting you, my readers.

Please visit the temporary test site I’ve established, browse around, read some stories, and print a few pages. If something breaks, doesn’t work the way you think it should, or looks screwy please let me know in the comments. If you find the site’s layout or navigation confusing, tell me how you think it’s broken and how you’d fix it. I can’t promise that all your suggestions will make it onto the final site, but I can promise that I’ll consider them all. In the end, Colleen has final say over the site since it’s for her zine. The site is (finally) live. Feel free to drop in.

If you have the time, I’d also be interested in hearing your thoughts about the new site compared to the current one old one.   (more…)

A heads-up to my friends using LiveJournal: your home on the web is about to get bought out.

According to Om Malik, Six Apart — makers of the popular Movable Type blog software — are planning to acquire LiveJournal for an undisclosed amount in stock and cash. The deal is expected to be announced later this month.

I can’t figure out how this fits in with 6A’s TypePad service or their other business plans. Will they be migrating LJ users over to TypePad and forcing the mostly-free user base to pay? Will they incorporate some of the unique features of the LiveJournal community into TypePad? It’s impossible to say at this point, but this much is certain: the LiveJournal platform is open source software, and if the members don’t like the direction 6A goes with it they can easily move to another service established on the same platform elsewhere. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

(Props: Om Malik on Broadband via Chris Holland: The Blog)

Update: 1/6/2995 @ 9:05 PM — It’s official, with press releases having been issued by both companies. Stupid Evil Bastard has the details. See also Mena Trott’s (Six Apart’s co-founder and President) own post on the topic and the newly-created “Six Apart LiveJournal Acquisition FAQ.”

There’s a lot more official text on the web about this topic now, and I encourage any concerned LiveJournalers to follow the above links to learn the details. After reading this information for myself, I can safely say that LiveJournal appears to be in good hands and safe from drastic changes.

Just a heads-up, my archives (categories and monthly) are broken. The plugin I was using for archive pagination, WP-Paginate, doesn’t work with WordPress 1.5. The built-in pagination of 1.5 also doesn’t seem to work consistently in the nightly build I’ve downloaded and installed. The consensus on #wordpress at the moment seems to be “download another nightly build later tonight.” Apparently there have been several updates and patches in the last week, so we’ll give that a spin this evening. Meanwhile, please be patient.