I needed a way to embarrass trolls on one of my sites. I was going to try Disemvoweler, but when I tried to enter an IP into the array, it broke everything. Don’t ask me why.
I finally found Troll Cap, which is cracking me up. That’s the instruction page - to download it, you have [...]

I needed a way to embarrass trolls on one of my sites. I was going to try Disemvoweler, but when I tried to enter an IP into the array, it broke everything. Don’t ask me why.

I finally found Troll Cap, which is cracking me up. That’s the instruction page - to download it, you have to go to WP-Plugins.net and search for "trollcap". The plugin takes some fearlessness of MySQL to put together, but there is a way to use it if all that table creation stuff scares you (just input the troll tag manually).

End result: it puts an image into the comments of people you add to the troll blacklist. The image can be anything you want. The default it a dunce cap with the word "troll" on it (two available sizes). Other options include that image with a black box that says "This is a Troll" and a blue background. It also inserts a "What is this?" link for people to click if they’re wondering why the image is there.

It’s a good way to let your readers know someone is being stupid and they should feel free to ignore him.

Click fraud’s up. Rather than address the problem and cut into their stats, Google prefers to sabotage text link competitors by scaring everybody into not using them anymore.
People seriously need to figure out that Google only benefits itself. It’s not that awesome for searchers. It’s of little use to webmasters, except those who enjoy gaming [...]

Click fraud’s up. Rather than address the problem and cut into their stats, Google prefers to sabotage text link competitors by scaring everybody into not using them anymore.

People seriously need to figure out that Google only benefits itself. It’s not that awesome for searchers. It’s of little use to webmasters, except those who enjoy gaming the engines to make AdSense money. And they’ll steamroll over anybody that gets between them and profit.

We don’t need them.

Seriously. What if all the SEO/marketing blogs online just didn’t talk about Google. For, like, a day. Two days? Is it possible?
What good is talking doing, anyway? Very soon, Google is going to patent You and send you a cease and desist notice (to stop being You) and you will be forced to go live [...]

Seriously. What if all the SEO/marketing blogs online just didn’t talk about Google. For, like, a day. Two days? Is it possible?

What good is talking doing, anyway? Very soon, Google is going to patent You and send you a cease and desist notice (to stop being You) and you will be forced to go live in the fringes amongst the other displaced people Google now owns. A robot that looks vaguely like you will be inserted into your life. It will go about your daily business, interacting blandly with the people you called loved ones. There will be a three AdSense banners on its face, and every time someone speaks to it, the ads will rotate and reload.

Meanwhile, you and the other displaced people will travel to Seattle to meet up with the an eccentric wizard known only as The GatesKeeper. There you will all work with the GatesKeeper to forge an army capable of vanquishing the dreaded GoogleBots. You will have viruses, trojan horses and magic dust that causes power failures, but in the end you will find that your most effective weapon against the GoogleBot is Spam. You will plant what looks like a clever form of paid links in the Spam. The GoogleBots will be unable to keep themselves from coming to Seattle to see what’s going on. You will pretend to be devastated that the GoogleBots have caught you and seized your Spam. But as the GoogleBots eat the Spam, they will also ingest the very deadly ingredient you’ve mixed into it:

Eye of 14 year old php scriptmaster!

Which, everyone knows, is like kryptonite to GoogleBots. Slowly, they will all go blank as they shut down.

In the sequel, The GatesKeeper turns evil and the stakes are even higher because the only person willing to help you oppose him is the Yahoogian, who’s grown slightly mad trying to figure out how to keep a free email service up and running more than 50% of the time.

Okay, so my title doesn’t quite dance to the tune of "Video Killed the Radio Star", but on a particularly busy week in the who’s-buying-who sphere, it’s tempting to think Google’s determined to leverage everything in existence. SEObook points out that as soon as eBay bought StumbleUpon, Google released its own stumbling bookmark tool

Google can [...]

Okay, so my title doesn’t quite dance to the tune of "Video Killed the Radio Star", but on a particularly busy week in the who’s-buying-who sphere, it’s tempting to think Google’s determined to leverage everything in existence. SEObook points out that as soon as eBay bought StumbleUpon, Google released its own stumbling bookmark tool

Google can buy out or clone any service that threatens their ad market and media dominance.

Since StumbleUpon was an AdSense publisher, Google saw their growth rate, and had better market data as to their value than eBay possibly could have. As soon as they started talking about sales, Google could make the best offer, or decide if it was just cheaper to clone something in-house, then overshadow competing news by adding the feature to the Google suite ahead of the buyout news.

It’s so tinfoil hat, but there’s no speculation involved here. Imagine if those pet rocks that were so ubiquitous a few decades ago had all had spy equipment inside them, tracking our every move. The person monitoring the rocks would have the option of recruiting you or stealing your ideas - whichever is easier.

The money AdSense has made so far - off click fraud, too - may pale in comparison to the value of it acting as a bit of stats tracking code 97% of the web has stuffed happily into its pages.

If you use Spam Karma 2 and you also want to use WP-Cache to keep your website running when it gets dugg, there’s a fix plugin that corrects the problem of cached files not getting flushed after a comment approval when you run those two together.
It was news to me, anyway.

If you use Spam Karma 2 and you also want to use WP-Cache to keep your website running when it gets dugg, there’s a fix plugin that corrects the problem of cached files not getting flushed after a comment approval when you run those two together.

It was news to me, anyway.

If you blog, you should probably read this article from Stuntdubl on ways to blog badly so no one will link to you. I have to admit I’m guilty of some of the things he mentions (like not rechecking my work) . Only when I do those things and no one Diggs me, I figure [...]

If you blog, you should probably read this article from Stuntdubl on ways to blog badly so no one will link to you. I have to admit I’m guilty of some of the things he mentions (like not rechecking my work) . Only when I do those things and no one Diggs me, I figure that’s as it should be, LOL.

One thing I was pleased to see mentioned was “never use bullet points”. I’ve been using those more and more lately, just on instinct. They do make a difference with the way we read: we scan for visual soundbytes. Bullet points can jump out and make you wonder what else the article says. Or they can make people link without reading the rest of your article. All because you spoonfed them a point.

Another thing I’m working on is keeping posts short. If you have a ton of great stuff to say, go long. But I tend to ramble, and that’s annoying.