Admit it, a lot of your traffic is spambots. I know I see a lot of traffic from other countries to my blog for various reasons, and a good portion of them are SPAM. Blogging aside, what if you’ve got a community site that only a limited number of users will need access to? Well what about using that .htaccess for the purposes of keeping everyone else out!

That was the problem I ran into with one of my community sites. I was getting daily notifications of “new users” most of which were obvious combinations of a first-name/last-name dictionary attack, using out-of-country email addresses or free domain email addresses that require no invite, from IP addresses of non-community origin. I needed to remove the annoyance of these persistent email notifications. The solution was to eliminate access to the site from outside my community. (more…)

As far back as I can remember I could read, and I grew up reading the comics Sunday morning. When I entered the period in my life where I had my very own internet-connected computer I had a My Yahoo start page with my favorite Sunday Morning Cartoons posted for me to read as soon as there was a new strip. Then I came across the world of web comics, starting with Ctrl+Alt+Del by Tim Buckley (sometimes referred to as CAD). This series really enthralled me, being a video gamer and major geek the characters seemed like someone I could hang out with. If you read some early CAD comics, you’ll understand the appeal pretty easily. It was shortly thereafter I discovered Penny Arcade by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Again, this comic appealed to me with video gaming and geeky references that I would enjoy and joined CAD as one of my all-time favorite webcomics.

When Digg, and later StumbleUpon, helped me peek out of the little bubble of the internet I was aware of I discovered many new, interesting, and fun webcomics to add to my daily reads (or at least check for updates on a regular basis). Some of them even give me the feel that I could do it myself if I only had the talent of an original sense of humor (stick figures I can do). (more…)

In wake of the release of the new 3G-capable iPhone and the content I’ve been spidering about the Android SDK (Google phone) I’m going to let you in on a few of the things I use almost daily. This article also comes to you per suggestion on Skribit from Paul Stamatiou which has received some other votes. I’m adding the programs I use because to be honest, I don’t carry many gadgets around.

Firstly and most importantly, I have my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry 8830 “World Edition” phone. After using a generic LG flip phone for two years, when my contract was up for renewal I had come to the conclusion that I was ready for a smart phone or PDA. Research In Motion had a new, fairly powerful, handheld and what appeared to be the most capable for what I wanted to be able to do; so far it’s done a great job.

So what was I looking for in a new handheld? Firstly, a QWERTY keypad. You don’t understand the want for this until you’ve been using “T9″ or some other predictive text on a standard numeric keypad for two years and have a chance to toy with a friend’s QWERTY keypad. The next thing I looked for was (more…)