It is hard to go very far without running into a site with entries in Darren Rowse’s latest group writing project; it was a huge hit with close to 900 entries. While it is great that people are linking to one another from this thing, it seems that many involved in the project are simply linking to the entire list of submissions. While I did participate (on another blog) and don’t ever mind new backlinks, I’m a bit disappointed that people haven’t really broken this thing down a bit.

Why link to every post? While many were good, there were some really bad posts in that batch. Do you really want to link to (and give your support to) blogs that don’t make the cut? I went through the entire list a few times to pull out posts that I thought would be interesting or helpful for the readers of this blog.

Here are a few that I felt were actually useful and worth a read (yes, I actually read every internet related post on the list!):

AdSense
• Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos
  Blogging

• Top Five Ways Blog Carnivals Make Blogging Better
• Top 5 Tips to be the next Darren Rowse
• Top 5 Methods to Increase Comments on Your Blog
• Top 5 tips for beating blogger’s block
• Top 5 Best and Youngest Bloggers
• Top 5 Tips for a Successful Link Train
• 5 Things You Should do Before Launching Your Own Blog
• 5 Tips to Break Free From The Blogger’s Bubble
  Blogging Tools

• Top Five Little Known Wordpress Plugins
• Top 5 Must-Have Blog Monitoring Tools
• Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments
• Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use
• Top 5 OS X Dashboard Widgets for Bloggers
  SEO

• The Top 5 Free Search Engine Optimization Tools
• Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO
  Assorted

• Top Five Challenges Newbies Face Online
• Five Ways to Grow Your StumbleUpon Network: An Ode to Altruistic Stumbling
• Five Tips for Running a Successful Online Giveaway

What I thought was most impressive was that many of these great posts were written by fairly unknown bloggers. This is another sign that there will always be great new talents emerging in the blogging world and you must keep exploring to find them!

I make it a habit to support my fellow bloggers through both socializing their posts and visiting their advertisers when appropriate. Make sure you do the same! While linking is great, these things are just as important!

Finally, I’d like to mention that many of the blogs I went through were still using Blogger or some other hosted blog solution, and many others were making some of the most basic blogging mistakes. If you haven’t already, read the The Top 77 Mistakes New Bloggers Make so you’re not out there making some of these yourself!

Failing to Stop Comment Spam

For the past week I’ve been getting a ton of comment SPAM, and it doesn’t want to stop. I’ve got the Akismet and Spam Karma 2 plug ins up and running, and SK2 is set on MEAN! Unfortunately, as you can see:

I’m getting hit by MP3 Ringtone spammers. The problem is that I’ve gone and put this spammer’s domain on the blacklist, but it doesn’t seem to be working . . . they are smart enough to be using multiple IPs to post the messages, and seem to be using some kind of exploit on the Share This plugin:

If you look at the above image, you’ll see that the posts aren’t trackbacks to an outside site, but to my site’s “Share This” pages. Of course the author’s link goes back to bla-bla-bla.us.

Tracking Down a Spammer

When I did a WhoIs search on the domain, I got what seemed like a nonsense profile, until I saw the contact email domains@sslpayments.com, which is run by Andrew Kartashov, a SPAMMER out of Moscow, Russia. (Thanks to the Spam Huntress for the info on this guy)

Domain Name: BLA-BLA-BLA.US
Domain ID: D12017577-US
Sponsoring Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registrant ID: DE8A82A65637B3F3
Registrant Name: Tamara Larsen
Registrant Organization: RX-PHarma
Registrant Address1: Cordova
Registrant City: Cordova
Registrant State/Province: AK
Registrant Postal Code: 99574
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.34578905
Registrant Email: domains@sslpayments.com

Technical Application Purpose: P1
Technical Nexus Category: C11
Name Server: DNS1.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server: DNS2.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server: DNS3.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server: DNS4.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Created by Registrar: ENOM, INC.

It looks like the domains are registered and hosted by eNom.com. I put in a message to them to see if they’d be helpful at all in dealing with this.

What about the ShareThis PlugIn Exploit?

I’m not sure. If anyone has any ideas about what I can do from here, let me know. I’ve always been able to handle spam on site with the 2 plugins I mentioned earlier, but this is just geting annoying now!

If I have to stop using the plugin to handle the situation, I guess I’ll have to . . .

Any thoughts?

While many of the experienced webmasters out there probably know about this, I wanted to share this with the newbies. There is a great plug-in for the Firefox browser that allows you to easily track your Google AdSense revenue without a lot of effort.

The Adsense Notifier simply shows your adsense stats on the status bar and will automatically update itself several times per hour. You get to see page impressions, number of clicks, click through rate (CTR), total revenue generated for the day and other information anytime you want, right in your browser. In addition, if you place the mouse over the Notifier stats, the tool will even show you when the next update will occur. If you’ve got several accounts with AdSense, the Notifier will show you the stats for the account which you logged into last.

I’ve found that this simple extension helps to keep me on task and stay a bit more productive, as I’m not out there logging in to Google every 20 minutes to see how well I’m doing for the day.

Looking to consolidate all your feed traffic to Feedburner, but aren’t sure how? Steve at OrderedList.com just released his new Wordpress FeedBurner Plugin v2.1. It redirects all traffic from your various feeds to the FeedBurner feed to help you track all subscribers.

I saw a 100% increase in my subscriber count on another blog after installing this plugin! This should be a very helpful plugin for the rest of you who know you’ve got more feed traffic then that little counter says.