Back of the Envelope

A friend let me know that the RSS feed for my site is broken. I looked into it, and it appears that Powerblogs simply changed the way it does the RSS feed, but since my sidebar isn't set to the template, it didn't update automatically (eh... I'm not so sure it would have updated automatically anyway). In any case I'll try to keep on top of this from now on. The sidebar's been corrected, and please update the address if you use the RSS feed to keep track of this site (unless you use it exclusively, in which case you won't see this post).

I've neglected to clean up my trackback spam recently, which is always a mistake. There were almost 800 trackbacks, all but 3 or so spam. You know the sites. They want to sell you music, refinance your mortgage, help you with your taxes, or offer you online gambling opportunities. Their link leads back to their front page while saying something like "Poker." I delete the trackback and ban the site immediately, usually banning the domain. I had to ban all of myspace.com, since it had a whole slew of sites selling music spamming me with trackbacks, and I just did not have the time to go through and delete each trackback and ban its site separately. Meanwhile, I noticed an oddity, in the form of a lot of links apparently leading directly to Google's or Yahoo's or MSN's homepage. Since I'm pretty sure search engine's don't use trackbacks, and I'm not certain what's up with these, I banned those domains as well.

There is lots of comment spam as well, but I don't get anywhere near as much, and I get an e-mail whenever that happens.

I've been in New Mexico all week, and I just arrived back yesterday. I've been neglecting this blog for the last couple of weeks, maybe even months, but I expect things to let up soon, and I'll try to breathe some new life into this blog. For a start, we have a storyblogging carnival tomorrow. Come by around noon and see what we have!