StvOR!

The Buzzword Firing Squad Copia has a list of often missused(and milssunderstood) words.

My favortie is:

“Yes, that’s very nice and all, but does it scale?” !*&%#@@$!!!

Chris Prillo has some interesting ideas on how to stop spam on blogs.

I especially like:

Employ a blog spammer. Beat them shitless once they’ve been hired (hazing spammers isn’t illegal), but then employ them to help you figure out what all those asshats are doing. After they’ve told you the secrets, beat them shitless again.

< Joke > Can I just beat them ? I mean at least here (Slovenia) hiring a person is nontrivial bureaucratic task (hmm, can we beat bureaucrats as-well?) </Joke >

Problem is that the cat is now out of the bag. I mean look at email spam, its more or less nonissue anymore thanks to different spammfilters (SpammAssassin, Spambayes, etc), but looking through my mail logs, amount of spam hasnt droped, I just don’t see it anymore.

My guess is that tools for blocking spamm will get better on server and client(aggregators) side, search engines will get better at recognizing and defeating splogs, but their amount will not drop.

google hits - Do it yourself trend analyser

google hits From the site: Track the amount of google search results for keywords you define.

This is a nifty python utility by Ricardo Niederberger Cabral that tracks number of hits (or estimated hits) google returns for your keywords.

It makes it easy to make trend analyses of keywords (tags) you are interested in.

It would be even better if we know how google estimates number of results since as Kevin Dangoor points out that doesn’t necessary show number of actually results.

It would be interesting to see weather we could plug in other search engines or blog searches.

I have been running my own linux email server for a couple of years now, but i am seriously thinking about switching to online email provider such as gmail.

Reasons why I have been running my own server till now was:

• Control: I can control everything, from spam blocking to number of aliases to web frontends or size of mailbox (only limited by hd space)
• Backup: I can be sure that none of my email gets lost by making regular backups. You would be surprised how many ISP’s that offer email in a package, don’t backup mail.
• Its on my own domain name. This has little practical use but it has some cool factor.
• IMAP, so your server does the hardwork, and you have all your mail accessible from multiple pc’s

Of course there are downsides like , hardware failures, making backups, verifying backups, keeping up with security alerts of server software you are running.

Setting up mail server and everything that goes whit it (postfix, cyrus, dns, firewalls, spammasassin, clamav), is not simple either, but then again it is very educational experience and something I don’t/didn’t mind doing.

I started thinking about switching after reading Jeremy Zawodny’s 30 day Gmail and Yahoo! chalange

Reason’s to switch:

• They offer enough storage space to last me a while (its not 160 gb though ;))
• Good searching, but i will miss grep
• tagging == better folders
• Decent spam control
• google itself proved to be reliable host, despite some problem recently
• Interface is finally responsive thanks to AJAX

Perhaps the most important thing is availability of broadband internet. If you see computer somewhere, there are good chances that its connected to the Internet. I can’t remember last place i couldn’t connect to the internet, but it was few years ago.

Important for me is that that there are libraries like libgmail , gmail.py and gmail file system whit which i can access my mail if i ever need to.

For starters i will switch my mailing list subscriptions and I will see how it goes from there.