| LED Digest 2123: The Comeback of Javascript |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 23, 2006 Issue #2123 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== The Javascript Comeback & AJAX ==-- ~ Viggie Bala --== Real Estate Databases ==-- ~ Paul Dobie ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Dealing with Blog Spam ==-- ~ Linda Buquet ~ Dan Eskelson ~ Joseph Taylor ~ Dejan Bizinger --== To Bounce or Not To Bounce ==-- ~ Kurt T. Francis ~ Jeré Matlock ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Have I Been Scammed? ==-- ~ Donald Nelson ~ Alex Hughart --== Sites for Mobiles ==-- ~ Tim Mullen =========== NEW ================================== From: Viggie Bala Subject: Comeback of Javascript in AJAX We recently had a long discussion on drop down menus. JavaScript for links & drop-down menus does not help SE indexing, and have a negative image (particularly for SEO people). Fear of stealth attack also worked against javascript. Javascript can be turned off at the browsers and it is a big disadvantage if we rely on it for site structure or activity. But javascript had strong advantages. Over the years, Javascript entrenched itself as the default method for validating form submissions, slide shows & image roll-over effects. It is true that Flash can do these things much better, but have it's own disadvantages. JavaScript plays pivotal roles in emerging technologies such as Web 2.0, Ajax, Ruby and Prototype, etc. Of this AJAX seems to be arrived already. Google uses it extensively for Gmail & Map. The speed and convenience of AJAXed sites are mind blowing. The usability style promoted by AJAX seems to be the way to go. Some features might not be apparent for a layperson. We do remember the old usability dictum: links must be blue & underlined etc., but we have come a long way and the layperson is also catching up. The current crop of mobile phones crammed so many menus & features using the same no. of buttons as available 5 years ago. And the average non-technical layperson seems to catch up. Fuelled by Gmail & Google Map, the instant response style of AJAX may also catch up with general public quickly. The trouble for web developers is, while the technology is not new, making them work together is not easy and needs experience. Should we start to get ready for this? Would like to know fellow LEDers opinion on the usage of AJAX in websites and it's disadvantages. Viggie Bala -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Paul Dobie Subject: Real Estate / Property Rental Listing Database Wondering if anyone out there has any ideas about where I might find a database suitable for Real Estate / Property Rental Listings. Slick searchable databases displaying a product (with several other thumbnail images) seem to be a dime a dozen everywhere but I cannot locate an off the shelf product. At this stage I don't have a budget from the client for it but I am not looking for anything too sophisticated. And I figure if I can show him a potential solution and give him a costing I might get a budget. The sort of thing I am looking for similar to that used on http://www.teneriffeforrent.com.au/rent.shtml Any help appreciated. Thank you. Best Regards Paul Dobie pdobie, accessjapan.com.au ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Linda Buquet Subject: Blog spam > Recently my client started using B2Evolution > for her blog. She is spending about half an > hour to 45 minutes every day deleting bogus > comments / links... - Joanne Glasspoole, LED 2122 I was being interviewed for an article by the editor of Revenue Magazine the other day. They use B2 on their blog as well and she said she she was spending HOURS some days deleting all the spam. So your client is lucky! B2 just happens to be a huge spam magnet and is incredibly short on protection. Since I do lots of blogging, own a blog directory and also have an RSS marketing forum I see it all the time. I think B2 has a forum so you may check with some people over there, but last I heard they had very weak spam protection if any. I use WordPress on my blogs and one of the important reasons is the wide variety of anti-spam and other plug-ins that are available. My blog is #1 in all the search engines, so it's highly visible. My anti-spam programs catch everything except for a rare one that gets through. Then the software warns me by email and asks me if I want to delete it. I would recommend your client start a new WordPress blog and let the other one die. Linda Buquet Blogger and Affiliate Management Consultant http://www.5staraffiliateprograms.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Dan Eskelson Subject: Blog spam Hi Joanne, I had the same problem with B2Evo... daily removal of obnoxious comments was necessary. I finally changed to WordPress and my problem is solved. Spam comments are caught by the Akismet module before they are posted. I can look through them at my convenience to verify before I delete. I was able to move all posts from B2Evo to WordPress. Best regards, Dan Eskelson Clearwater Landscapes, Inc. http://clearwaterlandscapes.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joe Taylor Subject: Blog spam Hi Joanne, We had the same problem and recently updated our blog software. We now use Movable Type version 3.2 which handles comment and trackback spam, internally. Meaning, spam never makes it to the blog itself by setting up a "holding pen" for comments / trackbacks. It sorts most spam out automatically and you can "teach" it that certain posts are spam. Here is the link to our Water and Wastewater blog http://www.waterandwastewater.com/blog/ It works really well and I am no longer tearing my hair out fixing spam problems. Also, it seems as though most spammers have stopped trying to spam us because of the newer version of Movable Type. I have no personal involvement with Movable Type or any other blog software company, I am a LED long time subscriber and hate spam. Very Truly Yours, Joseph Taylor Water and Wastewater.com http://www.waterandwastewater.com/ -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Dejan Bizinger Subject: Blog Spam I have been using for some time b2 Evolution. It is quite a nice software, but now I'm using also open source NucleusCMS. You should install a CAPTCHA modul for preventing comment spam on your blog. Here is a forum thread about that: On b2 Evolution support forum go to Plugins & Hacks where you will see a Fighting Spam thread. Also here is another link for that: http://snipurl.com/o0ed [village-idiot.org] Another solution for preventing comment spam is to require that a visitor has to be log-in in order to post comments. HTH, Best regards, Dejan Bizinger http://www.bizinger.biz -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Kurt T. Francis Subject: Bouncing > We all get spammed, some worse than others. On > a slow day I get 10,000, on a busy day, it hits almost > 20,000... Should I start bouncing these e-mails...? - Scott Marino, LED 2121 Scott -- I'll say right off I'm very militant about this. I run a one-horse buggy, and when on my worst day I received over 6.400 spams in about 18 hours, I nearly had a heart attack. It took me hours to get them deleted, since I couldn't be *certain* every e-mail was spam -- about 30 weren't -- and I deeply resented being thrown behind in other work. IMHO, the spammers can watch... the... bouncing... bouncing... bouncing ball. Bounce away, with some sense of satisfaction. A few years ago I kept getting maybe 30-40 identical e-mails per day from the same spammer, obstensibly in New Zealand. I finally decided, "What to heck, I'll try writing back." I did, in the form of a cease-and-desist e-mail. I got a whiney e-mail [much to my astonishment] in reply moaning, "I'm just an honest guy trying to make a living!" Intrigued that I had received a response, I wrote him back and asked, basically, why he thought it appropriate to send a single individual 30-40 copies of the same e-mail for months on end if he were so honest. I got the same sort of self-pitying reply. So I wrote him a last time, with a complete, total, utter lie and said I was working as an expert (ha ha) for a major firm seeking to develop software that not only would bounce such e-mails to the sorry senders but would turn the "Fry-alator" loose on their machines, physically destroying their hard drives. Lie it certainly was. Equally certain is that I never heard from him again -- no more spam, no more exchanges. Oh, BTW, during our exchange, I continued to receive the Daily Dose of Crap. Kurt T. Francis, Web Master Bangkok's Voice On The Web http://bangkokatoz.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Jere Matlock Subject: Bouncing vs. deleting spam Do not bounce them. That will put them in your outbound mail queue, where they will sit while your server tries to deliver them many times over the next five days. It just adds to the problem; it will slow your mail server down considerably. The mail server will try to send every message in the outgoing mail queue every time it sends mail. Most of the "from" addresses on these spam emails are bogus anyway; they can't be "bounced" because the "sender" does not exist. You'll wind up getting more emails from the bounced messages, saying, "No such email address on this server." I host about 50 websites for my clients on a Unix (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP, or "LAMP") server I lease. When I was debugging some slow mail deliveries, I was shocked to discover I had about 50,000 "bounced" emails sitting in my mail server's outgoing mail queue. The server was trying to deliver each one every 10 minutes, and chewing up a lot of processor time doing that. It kept trying for 5 days. That's my understanding of it, anyway, from reading up at various forums -- I'm not trained as a Unix tech support person. Instead of bouncing spam, you should set your mail server to have such spam "fail". That way the server won't try to return them back to the sender, nor will it forward that mail to a "delete" box where you then need to handle them again (delete them). The spam just dies right there. One good program to use on a Unix server is "SpamAssassin", open source software available here: http://spamassassin.apache.org/ It uses Bayesian filters to assign "points" to an email and make a determination based on how many points an email gets, whether or not it is spam. (10 points for using any variant of V-ia-G-ra, etc.) You can tweak SpamAssassin settings and to require 20 or 50 points before it labels something as spam, or you can be very aggressive and tell SpamAssassin only 5 spam points and it's spam. It then modifies the headers of the email, marking it as spam, based on your settings. Then you can either send it all to a spam box (recommended when you first set it up so you can check the box and make sure valid emails aren't being marked as spam) or have it "fail" such emails. Then the spam just disappears and your server doesn't waste any more effort trying to bounce it. My spam problem pretty much disappeared after I set up SpamAssassin to "fail" such spam. (I have no affiliation with them -- just a satisfied user.) Best, Jere Matlock http://www.wordsinarow.com Website Design & Marketing | SEO ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Donald Nelson Subject: Scam Dear All, Bev Hanna wrote (in LED 212) about how she was scammed. If she paid by credit card then she should immediately start charge-back proceedings. It sounds like she will have a good chance of recovering the money. Last year I took a chance at purchasing a bargain domain name for $5.95 from a fly-by-night company and ended up being charged for $600 with additional costs for "hosting" which I did not need and did not order. I was not able to contact the offending company but was able to recover the funds by starting a chargeback case against the vendor. It took a few months to process but it was worth it. Inquire with your bank about how to go about it. Sincerely, Donald Nelson www.a1-optimization.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Alex Hughart Subject: Scam > I went ahead and bought the mentoring package to the > tune of $3,000.00, assuming that this was a legitimate > upsell... Have I just done something remarkably stupid? - Bev Hanna, LED 2121 Bev, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you - and for others to see www.bevhanna.com - how beautiful your art is. I enjoyed immensely going through the site - I can't decide whether I like better visual art or little stories that accompany every picture. I hope you make far, far more than those bastards took from you. Regards, Alex Hughart www.bonsavon.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tim Mullen Subject: PDA / Cell Phone HTML Hello LEDliens, Cell phone pages are absolutely new to me for web designing. Question One: Where is a resource for just the basics? Question Two: Are there reliable PDA user / usage statistics? Question Three: Can we brainstorm alternative design ideas?... .. such as the feasibility of a CELLPHONE LINK or pda link on each page of a website to simple low graphic, text pages that are actually 'ole reliable' HTML pages... would such pages of 'repeat information' cause any search engine problems. Any other creative ideas are welcome. Thanks LED for a very useful resourceful forum. Tim Mullen P.S. One friend's site I wish to experiment with is http://displayhq.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them." - Kahlil Gibran |
