Monthly Archives: August 2005

Technorati Number One

Posted on by

When checking my stats for the last week, I noticed a spike in the number of visitors on Friday. My daily unique visits has been slowly growing to an average of 800 to 1000 per day. But Friday saw a record breaking (for me) 1556 visitors!

I looked through the logs to see if I could see a pattern and noticed lots of referrals from this story at Google Blogoscoped.

According to Technorati, this [zed1.com] is currently the world’s most popular blog.

Rather strangely, Philipp Lenssen there pointed his link at my terribly dull main site index, rather than this blog which Technorati indexes.

Being one of the links on a default WordPress installation means that there are automatically thousands of links into my blog. But Technorati removed the WordPress sidebar folks back in October 2004. I can only think that they must have been making some kind of adjustment and accidentally enabled the WP sidebar folks for a short while.

I remember that someone had mentioned it Wow, you’re actually the Technorati #1 blog on Friday. But at the time I only looked at my Technorati profile. I saw I was indeed ‘Technorati Rank: 1’, but within a short time that had changed to ‘Technorati Rank: 0’. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to look at the top 100 list, otherwise I might have got a screenshot.

With any luck some of those extra visitors might come back. I know I’ve had a fair bit of activity on my theme pages this weekend. Maybe it’s related.

WordPress Version 1.5.2

Posted on by

A new version of WordPress ‘Strayhorn’ is available for download. This is a bug fix release that includes a security fix for users hosted on a server with PHP’s ‘register_globals’ setting turned on (a potentially dangerous configuration).

There are several other bug fixes and minor changes too. Owen has put together a plain English version of the changes.

As an aside I noticed that WordPress Strayhorn’s download counter is rapidly approaching the half-a-million mark.

Poorly Jamie

Posted on by

Poor Jamie, my soon-to-be-11-year-old daughter, has developed Chicken Pox! She’s not very happy about it — she’s had to miss out on a sleepover. The spots started breaking out yesterday, which means she probably got infected in the last few days at school.
She’s not too ill with it, thankfully, though off her food somewhat. She’s currently lying on the sofa watching CBBC and checking for new spots in a mirror. As each one erupts, she’s been giving it a name! I think Trevor was the first one, and we’ve had a Bob and a Tessie. Sadly Trevor has now expired and gone crusty!

We are all hoping she’ll be OK in time for her birthday on the 21st!

Gmail Spam Filter Getting Worse

Posted on by

I’m sure it can’t be just me but I think Gmail’s spam filter is deteriorating. Over the last few weeks, I have noticed a few more spam mails ending up in my inbox. Then a couple of days ago, I noticed a few false positives. Now it seems like its an epidemic!

Yesterday, I had to rescue at least 50 emails marked as spam. Most of these were regular mailing list mails I’ve been getting for ever.

I’m finding that most, but strangely not all, my blog comment notification emails are marked as spam. Note that this is not the moderation notification. That gets through ok. But when I approve the comment here on the blog, the notification email proper gets flagged as spam and I have to rescue it.

What gives Google? When I mark a mail has ‘Not Spam’ are you learning? Thunderbird does! It seems you do not.

Update:
I’m expanding this post to clarify my grumble somewhat.

I know that Gmail has to deal with millions of spam emails a day, they do a very good job. I also know that the spammers adjust their spam. I can see that when a new mass mailing gets through for a day (sometimes two), but then stops as Google adjust their filters to catch them.

My big, big, big concern is that almost all of the false positives are from senders I’ve been receiving mail from for more than a year.

I don’t mind the odd false positive, but more than 50 in one day!

For those who mentioned it, I do use thunderbird, for exactly the same emails and more: Gmail only gets copies of my mail. Thunderbird hasn’t given me a false positive for six months. Not one! To be fair I get more spam in my inbox with Thunderbird.

For me the tool not catching enough spam and having to deal with it by hand is a nuisance, but if I accidentally delete just one legitimate email because it got put in my spam folder as a false positive is unforgivable.