I’ll have to remind myself where I got that title from[1], but it seemed appropriate for this story. Man names his cabin cruiser Titanic II, and guess what happens the first time he takes it out?
Ooops
[1] It was a definition of science fiction by Brian Aldiss, but it seemed appropriate in this case
One of the hazards of running a website that has comments enabled is, of course, spam. Now Akismet does an excellent job of blocking most of the nonsense – false negatives hardly ever happen to me, and when I do find a false positive, it’s quite an event.
But I do take the occasional flick through the spam queue to make sure things are working nicely. Most of it is the usual stream of links to sites offering naughty pictures or chemicals of dubious legality, but the entertaining ones are the ones that try to look like real comments – sometimes they’re even quite grammatical, but they’re usually easy to spot, as they have some common features:
Now often the text of the comment is flattering – presumably they think that if they say Nice Things about you, you’ll publish their comment. You know the sort of thing:
Thank you for sharing excellent informations. Your site is very cool. I’m impressed by the details that you have on this blog. It reveals how nicely you perceive this subject. Bookmarked this web page, will come back for more articles. You, my pal, ROCK! I found just the information I already searched everywhere and just could not come across. What a perfect web site.
Err, wow. 
Ahhh, hold on – that was on a brief post about an old version of Lightroom. And the commenter has the unlikely name of “instyle hair straightner”. Good catch by Akismet.
Then there’s the comic relief from people trying to persuade me that if I give them money they can generate squillions of links back to my site. Presumably by using spambots like the one that tried to comment here?
But now, there’s something new! This is fun! Yes!! The spam is now getting abusive!! How about this little gem:
The next time I read a weblog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I imply, I do know it was my choice to learn, but I actually thought youd have one thing attention-grabbing to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you can fix should you werent too busy looking for attention.
Leaving aside the total disdain for the apostrophe, that is quite harsh, especially as it was attached to my quite positive comments on the Dirk Gently TV adaptation. Another good Akismet catch. That one was linking to, err, I’m not sure what it was. Made no sense at all.
But my favourite so far, is this little gem, purporting to come from someone with an AOHell email address, and linking to a site selling interior design stuff, including really expensive coloured toilet paper, or “toiler paper” as the page title has it:
How is it that just anyone can create a blog and get as popular as this? Its not like youve said anything extremely impressive –more like youve painted a quite picture around an issue that you know nothing about! I dont want to sound mean, right here. But do you really think that you can get away with adding some pretty pictures and not actually say anything?
I’m not sure what the aim is here – maybe the spambot operators think that if they post something contentious to a blog, the comment will be published so the site owner can argue with it? Or are they just grabbing random comments from elsewhere and copying them?
All good fun, but it does make me grateful for Akismet.
Readers with long memories, or a bizarre tendency to dip into the voluminous Losing it[1] archives[1] might vaguely recall me getting quite excited about something called “tags” at the end of 2005. The idea was to smother each post in keywords, or tags, which would make it easier to find related posts.
Well, I did keep tagging things until quite recently, when it occurred to me that I was doing it wrong. I had used something over 600 different tags, many of which had been used precisely once[4], which made them a bit pointless. Then I realised that apart from having a tag cloud on show in the sidebar that I no longer have, I hadn’t actually had any means for visitors to use the tags, which meant that they were even more pointless. So when I found that rendering that honking big tag cloud stopped the otherwise well-behaved Cross-references plugin from working, I decided to kill them off altogether. It’s one less thing to think of when I’m typing posts, and as I’ve trimmed categories down to a General one for pretty much everything and a Gallery one for, err, galleries[5], it’s all a lot simpler. I find the Search box at the top of the page[6] is a quicker and easier way to find individual posts on the site, or for that matter using Google[7] with the useful
site:losingit.me.uk
value does the job quite nicely too.
More changes may follow…
[1] Hint: the calendar thingy at the bottom of the page[2], or the Sitemap, which you will find under the About thingy in the menu at the top of the page[3] will lead you to the full horror…
[2] Assuming I haven’t redesigned the site again before you’ve got round to reading this
[3] Assuming much the same as the previous footnote
[4] Some of those were only used once because they were typos. Transposed letters and the like.
[5] And that’s just to make it easy to have a menu item pointing at them
[6] Assuming much the same as [2] and [3]
No change today, which is better than a rise, so there.
Today’s picture is a preview of something I’ll be posting about in a day or two. It’s also a nice exercise in shallow depth of field with some nice shadows.
Getting ahead, or is it a head
The excellent What the Duck, still quite possibly the best photography-themed, duck-starring webcomic that I’m aware of[1] comes up with a nice variation on an old joke:
Quacks me up every time…
[1] OK, it may also be the only photography-themed, duck-starring webcomic that I’m aware of. But it’s still really good.
Not exactly surprising, but good to hear that the BBC have commissioned a further 14 episodes (series + Christmas special) for next year. Also not really surprising, but bloody marvellous to hear is that Matt Smith is signed up for the lot. 
Mr Moffat says he has a PLAN. Now that’s the least surprising non-surprise of the lot.