New content below this post.

Feedback is always appreciated.

Thanks to Carol Browne for the photo[s].

Found this today in my moderated comments section:

I read similar article also named About, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me

Yeah, right. Nice try “Daniel” of flowers mybestkeptbeautysecrets net

Pick a blog post, any blog post…

“I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Changing telco providers - how to get in touch with me., but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.”

Busted!
-30-

Okay. I don’t even know what to call this.

I have found this is my Firestats logs a few times now:

24.75.91.18
2007-07-02 11:22:37
http://www.bokashiman.com/2007/03/a blog entry

.neurosaudio.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID= 7386

24.185.91.42
2007-07-02 13:27:10
http://www.bokashiman.com/2007/03/a blog entry [same as above]

.rhd.gov.bd/Forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID= 707

Hey! My blog was mentioned in a forum post. But when I visit the site, I see a spam ad for [insert drug here] with no reference to my blog of course. How do they do that?

All other topics in all categories were spam too. Obviously they set up the forum for that purpose.

I cannot find the forum URL in other site stats programs I am using.

This is the way my blog looks in Internet Explorer 6.0:

I get some kind of validation error:

Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 623 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication. “The error was: utf8 “\xBB” does not map to Unicode”

that I cannot figure out how to fix.

In trying to solve this, I have

1) Disabled all plugins
2) Removed all widgets
3) Written the theme author

That’s why there is a note that says “This blog looks great with Firefox.” in the top right column.

As it appears that many site visitors are using IE, I thought I would attempt to get it fixed.

Suggestions welcome and appreciated.

Al

Melor binti Mohd Daud from Perak, Malaysia started a blog - Bokashi Farmer - on WordPress and links to this blog, Susan’s article about me on her own blog and an article on Path to Freedom that I commented on a while back.

Thanks Melor. Here’s a link back you….

Within hours of writing my Sourcing Splog post, the incoming links disappeared from both technorati and my WP Dashboard page. Nice.

Jessica, I noticed that the number comment spams I received went down a lot when I added Spam Karma as a plugin in addition to Askimet.

Here are the anti-spam/splog Wordpress plugins I am using on this blog:

Akismet
AntiLeech for my RSS feed.
HoneyPot for use with Project Honey Pot which requires a bit of setup.
Simple Trackback Validation - I changed the settings on this today to make it harder for sites to link here without being moderated first.
Spam Karma 2

This last one is not a WP plugin. You can see it in the “Extras” section of the left column.
Spam Poison

[Spam Poison] will redirect email harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses, mostly on known spammer owned domains! This will render their harvested lists pratically useless and of no commercial value.

[Added 08Apr07 0527] Again, this is not a plugin: I use gmail to filter my own domain emails.

email@mydomain.com is forwarded to email@gmail.com then sent by gmail to a second mydomain email address. Gmail deletes all spam after thirty days so I have time to check for mistakes. Since I use more than one email address for this purpose, gmail is protecting me from receiving 500 - 700 spam emails a month.

-30-
Technorati Tags: splog, splogiverse, wp, wordpress, plugins, anti-spam, anti-splog, tools, spam

• How to get a $30 Water Rebate on a Bokashi Compost Bin at James5
  “Having just moved into a new unit… we have been spending a lot of time debating what sort of compost bin to get….[and] had heard good things about the Bokashi composting bucket
  (tags: 1Maven bokashi compost composting australia 07jan)
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• “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” All the nutrition information you need in 7 words.
  (tags: food advice nutrition essay history agriculture sustainability 2007)

Update: Categories added to match applicable content

• Darfur Awareness - We blog for Darfur
  “Attention to the media, especially Arab media” is one of the taglines on the banner of this site. Multiple authors listed
  (tags: politics media activism online blogging darfur 2007)
• del.icio.us search for “wordpress”
  Everyone’s bookmarks = 54,279 including four of my own
  (tags: del.icio.us search wordpress reference 2007)
• Lucy Siegle offers 36 positive suggestions on how we can reduce carbon emissions | Magazine | The Observer
  Don’t despair about global warming - do something.
  (tags: environment green culture uk news composting 1Maven 2007)
• Could simple apple pieces be probiotic carriers?
  “Apple pieces are promising carriers for probiotic bacteria and may be used in the production of probiotic fermented milk and/or other food products, as well as in the prolongation of their shelf-life,” wrote lead author Yiannis Kourkoutas
  (tags: Lactobacillus+casei probiotic bokashiman news 1Maven 2007)

I’m not new to blogging but I am to WordPress. And I really like blog themes that are 3 columns. As I was looking at the WP template options available, this one - Anaconda - really stood out as one I liked.

My first blog on diary-x.com before it went dark used a theme from Eris Free called Light Industrial My next [and previous] blog has the same format, but the custom template made labels [why couldn't they call them Categories?] difficult to configure. That is one of the reasons I decided to switch to WordPress. More on that process in another post.

Now that I’ve got it up and running, I decided to take a look at what other people are doing with their themes [I still want to call them call them templates] to see how I can make mine look and work better.

So here is a Google search of some people using the Anaconda theme. If I skin or switch themes, I will write a similar post about that one too.

These appear in order of ranking - first seen, first posted - although it is not always the home page that is listed in Google’s results.

The first two from Australia and New Zealand . Interesting.

http://gorey.com.au/
http://lits.gen.nz/blog/

If anyone can show how to tweak WP and the Anaconda theme for SE Optimization, Douglas will. I’ll be reading his blog regularly.
http://www.douglaskarr.com/

http://www.etechnoid.com/

http://www.yesh.com/blog/

I could be wrong, but this one looks like a splog to me.
http://www.techblogy.com/

http://www.trueloveofcoffee.com/technicaldisaster/

Scoop likes 3 column websites too.
http://scoop0901.net/Blog/

http://www.saylows.com/

http://surfingthechaos.onevoicemm.net/

http://blog.andrewparker.net/

http://www.jsdstat.com/Statblog/

Tweaked a bit to dark for my eyes.
http://www.freshdv.com/

http://www.frinktank.com/

http://funkeemunkeeland.com/

The last one is from the top of page four in the search of 233,000 results. Good work Simple Thoughts.

Enjoy
ooo

Technorati Tags: anaconda, blog, theme, wordpress