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I know… I’m bad at updating this blog…

Anyways, enough about me and on to you!

If you have a blog that is lacking updates, or you want something creative and fun to try during April.  April is apparently National Poetry Writing Month.
It’s the time of year to be flowing with creativity, and one way to show it is to write a poem every day and post it on your blog.

I’m planning on participating (not on this blog though), and you should think about it to.

I’m not doing it “officially.”  I just figured I’d challenge myself to blog a poem everyday (to spark up creativity in me).

So I just wanted to start off by saying that February marks off 5 years of awesome hosting being provided by the Twirpin Around Network (4 years under the TyL Domain).  That’s pretty awesome, or at least I think it is, but that’s not what I’m hear to talk about today.

In the hopes of starting articles about web design and development here, I’m going to start of introducing you to my new favorite HTML editor, Espresso.  If you don’t want to be tempted to buy something, stop reading now.  If you have some money and a Mac, and you’re looking for a cool HTML editor, keep on reading.

Why is Espresso my favorite?  The design is great, it has awesome features, and it’s simple.  I would have gone with Coda if I haven’t found Espresso.  Coda has great features, but it doesn’t fit me (it might fit you though).

So it has a nice welcome screen, and an Example project.  Just by playing with the example project, I already knew I wanted it (I also started to work on the next layout for TyL as well).  You’re presented with a single window with the list of files for your site (or project) in the left column.  You can show or hide the tools using the wrench icon in the upper right.

It doesn’t look or feel complicated at all.  It’s just appears to be a normal text-editor with syntax highlighting.  To activate live preview, you have to choose “New->Live Web Preview.”  It create a preview window in the “Workspace Area.”  You can drag items in the Workspace in and out of it.  If you drag it out of the Workspace area, the page or preview you selected will appear in a new window. You can drag other items off of the Workspace into other windows and they’ll show up as tabs.  You can also rearrange the tabs

The interface alone is pretty awesome.  I suggest you download it and try it out.  The syntax highlighting is great.  It’ll auto-complete things your type and create the closing tags if needed.  It also knows more than I do about CSS, but it is from the guys who made CSSEdit.  Personally, I’d never buy CSSEdit, but Espresso changes the way I’ve worked in the past.

In the past, I’ve mainly used Notepad++ and Smultron.  Espresso has similar features to those, and then some.  The Live Preview is epic.  As I type, the preview window updates.  I don’t have to save it first, and I don’t have to click refresh.  This is a major plus for me.  Other programs that I have used that had a preview window either waited till I saved, or it needed me to hit refresh.  Out of those that had a “live preview,” if I was using a Stylesheet, then it wouldn’t detect changed that I made.

So Espresso has won over my heart in a day.  It has also become my HTML editor of choice in under a day.  I’m fairly certain I’ll still use Smultron for when I embed PHP, but for creating the template or layout, Espresso has that part of my heart.

This video below just shows the live preview and how cool it is (or how cool I think it is).  A few freeware programs have live preview, but you have to save first.  Espresso offers a live preview, and you don’t have to permanently modify the file.

I haven’t posted much since I’ve last said I was going to…

But, I’m in the works of something.  ScreenCasts and some other fun stuff.  I’ll be posting some interesting app reviews and whatnot soon.

So I’m really bad about blogging about the internet and all it’s neat happenings.
I’ll try to publish an article weekly starting next week!
So I’ll be doing some research and something (it might not be interesting though) and then share info about it.
There might also be some things we’re developing in house.
So look forward to some of those things.
My last post was in… May!…
That’s a long time ago…
Let’s start making this page more interesting

Spam, the messages people hate, and bandwidth, the thing people hate and don’t understand, seem to be going hand in hand lately. One trend I’m seeing is that people without any form of spam blocking and no moderation for comments or posting on forums or blogs. Most of my sites have a spam blocker and a moderation queue. I’ve noticed that spammers are getting smarter and spam blockers don’t seem to be keeping up. On my photoBlog I received a comment like the following:

Interesting photo! I like the concept and it turned out to be a great shot.

The comment looked sort of legit at first, but the words concept and great shot baffled me when I looked at the photo commented on. Then I saw the e-mail address of the commenter and the URL and knew it was spam. So if the IP address, e-mail, or name isn’t the Akismet or Defensio’s database then it’ll pass and be displayed on the site, or placed in the moderation queue. Other comments that are clearly spam consisting of 12-186 links to porn sites or free male enhancers are traditionally blocked and worry free. Some posts of interesting videos and photos of celebrities sometimes make it through. So 80% of spam is usually caught by a spam-defense shielding service.

One of the main things I try to tell people when they want to start a blog or forum is to find a script that has built-in spam blocking techniques, or has plug-ins available to prevent or hide spam. Many just leave it at that, ignore this common piece of advice, or attempt to dive in deeper. Those who walk off without diving in deeper believe that CAPTCHA’s are enough.

CAPTCHA’s are the little images with squiggly text, sand, and grids applied to an image which humans making legitimate posts or comments are expected to read and enter into a box in order to verify who they are. It was great at first, but now their are programs that can read most of them, and there are the ever cleaver human spammers. This is one of the main issues I’m seeing with sites. They install Cutenews or something similar and just have a CAPTCHA as “spam prevention.” There is no moderation queue or spam-shield. So people with the “Ctrl + V” are able to post the 186 links and have it published on a site. When multiple spammers start doing this time after time, the page starts getting very large. One of the sites I host was loosing megabytes of bandwidth per visitor due to thousands of spam comments for each of their posts. So as the mean and evil host, here’s what I did. Back up the comments file (in case they want to filter through it for legit comments) and disable commenting. Then I sent them a nice e-mail suggesting finding a plug-in or switching to something better. I also suggest enabling a moderation queue if the script has one.

MODERATION QUEUE’s are probably the best way you can combat spam. It doesn’t really work on high traffic sites, so a spam-shield is required for those, or disabling comments all-together. Some scripts have better moderation queues that others, but the basic concept is that a post is hidden until one of the high-ups on the site approve it for display. Some are more advanced remembering the IP address of the poster or marking a registered user as a legitimate poster and no longer requiring them for moderation. That great, but one problem I’ve come across is a spammer getting the IP address of someone who used to post on my site and spam now gets through, but a spam-shield can somewhat help against that. So I always recommend to people who ask about preventing spam on their blogs to use a moderation queue. But some people (definitely not me, though I wish) get hundreds or thousands of comments a day.

SPAM-SHIELD’s or more commonly called spam filters (I think spam-shield sounds much cooler though) are usually services offered by another company that helps in finding spam and preventing it from being displayed. There are 2 common ones (and only 2 I know of so far) which are Akismet and Defensio. I’m trying Defensio now, but Akismet was easier to setup on most sites. Akismet blocks most spam on the TyL Status page and on the forums. But on my photoBlog, it doesn’t seem to work as well. If you want to know, the TyL Status page and forums only get about 25 spam comments a day, while my photoBlog gets about 40-50 a day and the Akismet plug-in for PixelPost doesn’t seem to work that well. Defensio’s site (in my opinion) is more user friendly than Akismet. You go there, sign-up and login. Then you enter in your site’s URL and it pops out an API key. Akismet on the other hand requires you to go to wordPress.com and register there. Then in order to get your API key, you login and have to view your profile. Defensio is newer though; so it might not have as much experience catching spam.

Defensio vs Akismet Defensio is more advanced and feature rich when compared to Akismet, but Akismet has a larger background and it older and “more wiser.” Or at least that’s what I’ve been told. One thing I like about Akismet is it integrates right in with many different blogging platforms, and it is used on wordPress.com and made by the people behind wordPress giving it more of credibility just when you here about it. Defensio on the other hand doesn’t appear to be developed by people who do blogging for a living. But it has levels of spam and allows you to set how loose it is when filtering out spam. I don’t have an opinion on which one is better yet, but I do know that they both say not to use both at the same time.

So back to the problem at hand. The best way to save bandwidth due to spam is to keep comments hidden until you know their safe. If you’re okay with a few spam messages showing up on your site and then deleting them as they appear, then a spam-shield with out the moderation queue might be right for you. But if you want to conserve bandwidth, make sure that the 186 link spam comments don’t make it to your page.

So my spam solution is a spam-shield with a moderation queue. It might not be the best, but it works for me. Until there’s a 100% spam-proof filter, I probably will stay with the queue+shield until I write my own spam-shield.

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