Ass-Kissing Blog Comment Spam

Recently, I have been receiving a large amount of a different kind of comment spam on my Wordpress blog.

In an effort to get around the Akismet spam protection, they have created several variations of the same kind of poor English, brown nosing comments… that effectively mean nothing.

The whole point of them, is to allow their URL to be posted in the “Website” field of the comment.

I recently had one on this post, to which I approved the comment, and later realised it was actually spam – so simply edited the comment, removed the URL, and left a reply underneath.

Here are the kind of comments (complete with spelling errors and bad English)

I’ll edit this post when I come across some more…

Advantageously, the post is really the freshest on this laudable topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your incoming updates. Just saying thanks will not just be sufficient, for the exceptional lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Admirable work and much success in your business enterprise!

Considerably, the article is in reality the freshest on this worthw hile topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your next updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the great lucidity in your writing. I will right away grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Fabulous work and much success in your business endeavors!

Comfortably, the post is really the sweetest on this noteworthy topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your approaching updates. Just saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the wonderful lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay informed of any updates. De lightful work and much success in your business efforts!

Tags: Blogging spam

Twitter User underdog100 gets 300% increase in followers – in 10 minutes

At 23:00, Jo Combs (twitter.com/underdog100) had just 37 followers
5 minutes later, Graham Norton had featured her tweets on his show, albeit poking fun at them, but, now, her followers had swelled to 110!

Every time I hit F5, her number of followers increases

By 23:10 the count had grown to 130… around a 300% increase in 10 minutes!

I got bored at about 23:20, but by then, the follower count had grown to 140!
Not bad!

Tags: twitter

Using JoeBlogs -metaWeblog API Wrapper

Step 1

Download the latest release of JoeBlogs from Codeplex
(Click the Downloads tab, and select the latest download)

Step 2

Unzip the contents of the downloaded zip file.
(I usually copy DLLs I am going to use into a “lib” folder at the root of my solution)

Step 3

Add a reference to BOTH CookComputing.XmlRpcV2.dll AND JoeBlogs.dll

Include AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs in your class, with using / Imports:

C#

using AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs;

VB

Imports AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs

Step 4:

Instantiate a new Wrapper object.

So far, the available wrappers are:

MetaWeblogWrapper

WordPressWrapper

C#

WordPressWrapper wrapper = new WordPressWrapper(Url, Username, Password);

VB

Dim wrapper As New WordPressWrapper(Url, Username, Password)

Please note -

The above example has the Url, Username and Password strings omitted. Simply replace them with the relevant information.

Step 5

You can now take full advantage of all the methods on your instantiated wrapper.

C#

string Url = "www.alexjamesbrown.com";
string User = "MyUser"; //enter your username
string Password = "MyPassword"; //enter your password

var wp = new WordPressWrapper(Url, User, Password);

//a few test functions...
var userBlogs = wp.GetUserBlogs();
var tags = wp.GetTags();
var categories = wp.GetCategories();

var authors = wp.GetAuthors();

Tags: .net, Blogging, c#, JoeBlogs

Auto Tag Generator Plug-In for Windows Live Writer

Auto Tag Generator is a plug in for Windows Live Writer that enables tags to be generated from a block of text (or the whole of the post)

Download:

Project can be downloaded from Codeplex here

Usage:

To generate tags, simply highlight all of the text (or a relevant section) and press “Inert Auto Generated Tags” in the Insert menu on the right hand side.
The tags are then displayed in a list (shown below)

You can delete any tags generated by pressing the Del key, or right clicking, and clicking delete (the list is sometimes a bit random… but this is due to the Term Extractor API)

Hit Ok, and the tags are copied (comma separated) into the clipboard, for you to paste in to the Tags section in Windows Live Writer.

The tags generated for this post were:

auto tag
relevant section
wlw
tag generator
target
single day
clipboard
comma
codeplex
source code
open source
ip
address
yahoo

 

Limitations:

• Currently, the post text has to be selected before selecting “Insert Auto Generated Tags”
• Due to the limitations on the Yahoo Term Extractor API, only 5000 requests can be made in a single day from each IP address. I can’t see anyone reaching that limit… but I just thought I’d mention it!
• You need to manually paste them into the tags section on WLW… this is something I’m working on. (feel free to help… it is open source!)

Source Code

I’ll be posting full details, and a little tutorial of how what and why etc…. shortly.
Until then, the project is on Codeplex, with no documentation.

 

Tags: auto tag, clipboard, codeplex, comma, ip address, open source, relevant section, single day, source code, tag generator, target, wlw, yahoo

C# WordPress Wrapper

Ok, I’ve barely finished this as a stable release, but I thought I’d post this up any way….

A little open source project I’m working on – Joe Blogs.

In a nutshell, it allows easy communication to your WordPress (or other blog) via an xml-rpc interface.

Big thanks to the work by Charles Cook at http://www.xml-rpc.net/

Joe Blogs is currently hosted on CodePlex – http://joeblogs.codeplex.com/

I’ll be posting more info, tutorials, documentation etc… in the coming days and weeks.

Update

See here for usage instructions:
http://www.alexjamesbrown.com/geek/using-joeblogs/

Tags: .net, Blogging, c#, JoeBlogs, wordpress, xml rpc