The World of Stuff .com

The first of July

It’s July again, and so I’ve decided to duplicate last July’s feat of posting every day. Why? Because I have nothing better to do. Well, that’s a lie. I have plenty of things to do. But that makes it all the more challenging, and I like a good challenge. (I don’t like a bad challenge, though. For example, eating a dozen raw eggs is a bad challenge. In fact, anything that carries a risk of disease is a bad challenge. Well, almost anything.)

I’m a sucker for statistics, so here’s a weird coincidence for you. I’ve noted these first two figures previously, but they bear repeating.

• Posts from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2004: 227
• Posts from January 1, 2005, to December 31, 2005: 227
• Posts from July 2, 2005, to July 1, 2006: 227

See? Creepy! I don’t plan this or anything. At least, I don’t think I do. By the way, if I post 227 times in the next 365 days, I’ll have made exactly 900 posts.

Let’s see. Was I going to say anything else interesting? Nope. Just a comment about the ever-present trackback spam. I get lots and lots of it just like anyone else, and (to me) there has never seemed to be a simple equivalent of the quesca, which eliminates automated comment spam by adding an extra required field that robots don’t know what to do with.

Sure, Akismet is probably very effective at eliminating both comment and trackback spam, but I’m too lazy to register for a WordPress API key. I read about a WordPress plugin called Mod_Rewrite Trackback Spam Blocker, which basically stops trackback spam before it starts. It seemed good, but I shied away from trying it out because it apparently hadn’t been tested with WordPress 2.0.x. Today I did some research and found that some people were using it with versions 2.0 and higher with no apparent problems. I looked at the code itself and it seemed simple enough, so I installed it. I’ll just have to see how it works over the next few days.

If anyone sent in a questions for Ask Jordon, they would go here.

Here are 10 Things You Might Not Know About Google. For example, how many pages do they have indexed? It’s not very clear, but the number is well over the 8 billion they used to claim.

From the Know-Your-Roots Dept.: How to Pirate a Vinyl Record. Let’s see Big Music try to stop that. (Disclaimer: Don’t make copies of your copyrighted records… only your uncopyrighted ones?)

One year ago: “I started to apologize for trying to kill him and all, and right then and there he died.”