Change Of Scenery

MtDewVirus realy needs a change of scenery…I just haven’t wanted to spend the time on a new design though. WordPress 1.5 has entered the gamma stage, so it shouldn’t be long before the final release. Maybe that’s when I’ll work on some changes around here since there are some new features that I’ve planned to […]

Let the Cream Rise to the Top

As many of you may know, back in September, I launched pokerchiptricks.com, a site dedicated to tutorials on doing poker chip tricks. The site has been very successful and has opened a few doors for me. One thing that bothers me though, is that the site is still not listed near the top of the Google results when searching for “poker chip tricks” so I think there are many people missing out if they don’t search through the three or four pages of results before finding the site.

I hate to do this, but I’m going to ask for some help on this one. As many of you know, the more links, the higher a site ranks with the search engines. Some of you already link to the site and I THANK YOU! For those of you that don’t currently link to it, do me a favor and check out the site. If you like what you see, throw a link up on your site with the words “Poker Chip Tricks” as the text of the link. If you’d prefer to use an image and link to the site, I have a few different sized images that you can use. If you link up, feel free to leave a link to your own site over at that post.

Thanks for your time on this!

Stop the Comment Spam

Hopefully comment spam is a thing of the past. I want to apologize to anyone who has attempted to comment recently and has been redirected to the FBI’s site. I think my comment spam checking system was going a little haywire from all of the spammers and it was flagging some of you that were attempting to leave legitimate comments. I hope the new system I’ve implemented will fix the problem. Please let me know if you ever have any problems commenting on any of my sites.

Copy….Right?

A few months ago I found a site that had copied some of my content word for word. Well, yesterday, I found a few auctions on Ebay where a guy was using several of images from Poker Chip Tricks in order to sell what looked like a list of links to poker sites around the Internet. I turned him in to Ebay and also sent him a message. He wrote me back…

Cool your jets. You sue me and you will lose money. I don’t think I make as much a year as it would cost to even just call your lawyer.

Cool my jets? This guy clearly doesn’t understand copyright laws. At work yesterday we had our yearly division meeting and the guest speaker was an attorney. She talked to us about copyright, patent, and trademark laws. Pretty fitting for my situation. I found out that copyright violations are subject to $150,000 + lawyer fees per incident.

Blogiversary

1 YEAR!

It was a year ago today that I made my first post here using WordPress. I want to give a special thanks to Matt who suggested the little known project of WP to me when I asked him about his web site. Also big thanks to the other main developers and contributors that make WP possible. I still remember installing version .7x. It didn’t have multiple categories, plugins…in fact, I can’t even really remember what it did have so much has changed since then. All I know it’s a great piece of software.

Thanks to all the readers who stop by to read my words and thanks to those that voice their opinions and make this enjoyable to do.

Here’s to many more years…

WordPress Comment SPAM Plugins

I’m now using two plugins to help me combat comment SPAM. The first is Kitten’s Spam Words, which gives you an easy way to delete comments and mark them as spam at the same time. This helps to create a list of comment spam words in WordPress so that further comments will automatically be held for moderation. The second plugin is Mark Ghosh‘s Three Strikes Spam Protection. This plugin will automatically delete a comment if it matches a certain number of criteria (default is 3 strikes) so that I don’t even have to moderate them. It’s configurable so that you can set the number of “strikes” to delete a comment with.

SPAM Comments

After some recent flooding of SPAM comments on all of my blogs I’ve started to take some preventive measures. I have much mor work to do, I’ve started flagging a few things. In the future, if you notice that when you comment it doesn’t show up right away, you’ve probably used a word or something I have flagged and I’ll approve your comment as soon as I can. I’m actually suprised I went almost an entire year without running into a problem, besides one or two a month. Let’s all wish a slow and painful death to all spammers, but a quick one to their SPAM!