by manatee on September 14, 2008
Like many bloggers, I have been using SiteMeter’s free counter service for quite awhile now. A couple months ago they had an outage, which brought down thousands of blogs. Now they have “improved” their services and people aren’t very happy about it:
5XMom.com - “Sitemeter has changed its format and it sucks! Whatever happened to those stats? Plus it takes a million years to get the information.”
TechNudge - “As you can see if you click the image, it’s turned into a steaming pile of useless crap.”
AftNews - “I have also paid accounts at sitemeter. Probably i’ll cancel them. Even statcounter is better than new sitemeter.”
I’m TOTALLY DONE with SiteMeter. Once a site starts acting assinine like eBay, I’m done. Another reason to leave them is I don’t trust them. Does anyone ever stop to think about what they are doing with all of that search data? Hmm…. I’m sure it isn’t helping you, that’s for sure.
Goodbye Sitemeter. For those interested, here’s a link providing some alternatives to SiteMeter.
by manatee on August 1, 2007
For the last few months, one of my blogs has been the target of a splog attack, or whatever you want to call it when an idiot steals every blog post you make. Of course, his splog (combination of spam and blog) has no contact information and if you look it up in the whois, the contact info is anonymous.
Today I came up with an idea to hopefully make this idiot scrape someone else’s RSS feed instead of mine. Basically, I make a degrading post that will make his splog look really ridiculous. An example is above. The splog in question is using a WordPress plugin called Auto-Blogster that checks RSS feeds of other blogs every so often with cron and automatically posts those posts to his blog.
I don’t want to keep the crazy post on my blog very long, so what I do is post the degrading article on my blog and click on the script located in the plugin folders on the splog site. If you have the same problem, look on their site… it should be somewhere like: theirsplog.com/wp-content/plugins/auto-blogster
Look for a script in that folder called: ajax_auto_blogster.php and click it.
This should then post the embarrassing post to their splog - and now you can delete it from your real blog. Good times, eh? I don’t expect splogs to go away any time soon. Email spam is still around. Comment spam is here to stay. There will probably be more and more splog problems like this - so be sure to bookmark this article in case it happens to you! If anyone out there knows a better way to combat splogs (with WordPress), please leave a comment! 
UPDATE! Check out this article… this technique seems to work.
