Ganesh Swami

I came across a pure Tamil URL today: http://உதாரணம்.பரிட்சை/முதற்_பக்கம். Searching for such website is hard if ones doesn’t know how to type these.

In other news, lack of WiFi at my hotel encouraged me to walk around downtown SF. I should have gone earlier and rented a bike (shop closes at 6pm.)

The official TED blog makes a list of 100 websites that you should know and use. I know what I’ll be doing when I have time to spare.

The Web is constantly turning out new and extraordinary services many of us are unfamiliar with. During TED University at this spring’s TED2007 in Monterey, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, offered an ultra-fast-moving ride through sites in many different areas, from art, design and illustration, to daily news, blogs and curiosity. Now, by popular demand, here’s his list of 100 websites you should know and use.

Here’s the deal:

• Google lists the post on my favorite wordpress plugins as the second hit for my name.

• Spammers target this highly visible post for all the spam (about 90% on just this post.) Fortunately, akismet blocks almost all of them.

• I have a plugin installed that organizes the dates in my sitemap by the most recent updates. The amount of spam causes the last modified date on the post to be updated regularly.

• Google uses this information to repeatedly crawl the aforementioned post, thinking it’s a highly active page.

• Positive feedback ensues.

I was unhappy with the default wordpress pagination style, until I found a plugin that did exactly what I wanted. You can now do non-consecutive jumps between pages. The plugin is called wp-pagenavi.

You can find tons of styling with CSS here.

In the few months that this blog has been running, akismet (”the collaborative effort to make spam a non-issue”) has caught about 4000 spam comments.

Most sites use CAPTCHA to determine legitimate users. A friend recently told me about a new method that spammers are using to circumvent CAPTCHA. A site with high demand content (like free music or porn) harvests CAPCTCHA on demand from another site and displays it to a user. The user is able to decode the text and types in the correct text, which in turn is used to spam the site where the CAPTCHA is taken from.

This is incredible.

A more useful version of this technique is reCAPTCHA. Instead of posting spam, the user is presented with words from a book that is currently being digitized, some of it correctly recognized by software and some incorrectly. This is compared with what others have typed in, and if correct, your comment is posted and the words added back to the database.

I’m trying to figure out if the evil way or the good way was thought of first. I’m guessing evil.