Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Humans are somehow obsessed with dates and numbers.

Since the early days of cave-dwelling, counting the goods we owned has apparently instilled a certain level of instinctive focus on numbers: how many, how often, when.

When it comes down to domains and domain portfolios, renewal dates are effective timestamps that tell us it’s time to fork out more money to extend their lifespan, or drop them and take a loss.

But how can you effectively leverage your domain portfolio’s worth?

Every domainer is more or less biased when it comes down to determining the worth, the value, the moolah related to their domain portfolio. Often times, we are partial to a domain because of a sudden plan we had – often under the influence of alcohol, chocolate, coffee or other stimulants. We are not as objective as we should be regarding our domains’ worth, simply because like during those early days in the caves, we are counting the beans as ours and we’re refusing to give them up.

The solution: give your portfolio list to someone else to evaluate.

Although it sounds very simplistic and bears a certain degree of embarrassment – perhaps due to adult names or completely crap names – getting a second opinion on your group of domains will take away the heavy load of commitment to bad names. By having a second – or third – opinion over your domains’ worth, you’re letting go of the weight of obsession over certain names you’ve held onto for years, for no apparent reason other than to tag as *yours*.

So find a respectable domainer associate and share your “family jewels” with them; it will save you a lot of money at renewal time.

Want more? Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/acroplex

I’m often amazed at the type of content slated as “development” with the usual tags of “minisite”, “stores” and “portals”. Often a euphemism for graphic headers slapped on an interface that lacks intuition, those design atrocities are presented to domainers as money-makers that would beat parking and PPC revenue.

Stop for a second and think – why would any visitor click on the AdSense content you flaunt in those “minisites” when the rest of the content is so poorly and distastefully done?

Are domainers truly on a shoestring budget, or is it because nobody has taught them better?

The subject of taste in everything is related to one’s background, education and exposure to alternatives. When you’re shown a bunch of poorly done skeleton sites as the cheap, better alternative then you’re getting what you’re paying for.

Having been a web and graphics developer for the past 15 years, I simply shake my head at the acceptance of poor quality as a quick, economic solution to domainer needs. Quite often, domainers fall flat into the pitching trap of fly-by-night individuals with no design credentials, no portfolio and no ethos; because whoever tells you that money will be flooding your pockets when you slap that “minisite” onto your long-tail domain, is lying through their teeth.

What is the solution to this disease permeating through the domainer halls?

Simple: choose the top 5 domains from your portfolio and hire a professional for the job. Invest in a true design that delivers not just the eye-candy but also incorporates an intuitive user interface, effective call to action images and custom-written copy that wasn’t ripped off Wikipedia.

Lose the bad taste, gain from the experience of true developers that live and breathe what they do.

Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/acroplex

A month ago I wrote about how you can effectively remove unauthorized content from web sites, under the threat of a DMCA notice.

The process is simple, straightforward and as long as you provide the necessary information to the legal department of the host providing the server space, it will work regardless of content.

The idea, however, is not to shut down an offending web site, unless they do not comply with the notification delivered by their host. Often, it’s not even necessary to notify the offending web site to take your content down – you can go directly to their web host and complain.

Such content-scraping web sites can sprout like mushrooms all over the place.

The main problem is not the scrapers but rather, the specialized web sites that portray themselves as magazines or portals in the same niche market that you are. These, are the ones worthy of a DMCA notice and in the past week there have been two such instances I dealt with, both successfully.

The bottom line is this: nobody should be copying your content due to lack of writing skills or in order to benefit from material you wrote. Publishing content on the Internet gives you the copyright and the offending copycats can be effectively taken down.

Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/acroplex

When I sent my first email while in college in the late 80′s, we didn’t even call them such. They were “network messages“; few of us had access to the gateway that would send these messages outside of the local network and into the wild unknown. In fact, there was nothing of interest out there, until the early 90′s.

But enough with these old tales. Roll forward a couple of decades and email is as common as picking up the phone. At times, it’s faster to communicate via email than by phone, as it can be delivered through several media.

The problem is of course, spam - the sheer amount of junk email that ends up clogging your mailbox. Nowadays, there are several methods to block email spam effectively, including filters and even forwarding through Gmail that seems to catch a lot of it.

But what about comment spam on blogs?

For blogs that run WordPress, you should enable Akismet as soon as you set up your blog, although unfortunately it doesn’t keep the spammers away; the comments are sent to your spam queue along with several false positives. You still have to go through the queue to read them.

On a given day, I get 75 to almost 100 spam comments sent to the spam queue. I used to skim through them to see if anything was caught by mistake but after a while it became tedious.

So I tried installing various captcha plugins that were forcing commentators to enter a jumbled up code into a form field along with their message. Aside from being an extra inconvenience to those wanting to leave a comment, the captchas were cracked in 3 days by various spambots peddling cheap pharmaceuticals, flooding my mailbox like wild jellyfish in an old port’s waters.

The solution?

The single most important WordPress plugin that will effectively block all spam from ever reaching the queue, is called WP-SpamFree and it works wonders. It has various parameters to do what you ask it to do; you don’t have to worry about how it does it, but it works.

Having tested WP-SpamFree at the recent traffic onslaught of DomainGang.com after a post made Digg’s homepage, the plugin logged no less than 350 spam comments that never made the spam queue. These blind spambots released their scummy digital farts into the air, never reaching the DomainGang.com database. Not a single false positive!

Download it, install it, and forget about comment spam for good. And while you’re at it, follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/acroplex