I’ve been lazy the past couple of days.

Blame it on Hulu. Before this service came out I hated most online video services, but this thing is great.

Curse you Hulu - for taking up all of my time!

5 Content Theft Myths

Over at The Blog Herald, Jonathan Bailey wrote about 5 content theft myths. I’ll admit… I’ve been getting a bit lazier when dealing with sploggers. I’m tired of chasing after their hosts, instead I’ve been sending letters to the registrars. In the comments Jonathan mentions contacting the advertisers - but unfortunately most of them use Adsense, and I have ZERO luck when dealing with Adsense. Literally every time I’ve sent a DMCA I’ve gotten back the lame “we see no infringement” letter. That is one reason I suspect Google loves spam - it is what made them rich.

France To Block P2P?

P2P is one of those issues that I used to be in the “well only criminals use it” bandwagon - but I have recently started using it for things like distributing scripts and programs and downloading kernels and linux ISOs. Apparently France is still in the “well only criminals use it” group. As I have said a million times, go after the unloaders - not the downloaders. I personally suspect less than 1% of the P2P users do any uploading/seeding of warez- and I suspect less than 1% of those users do it enough to cause any major issues.

Mark Cuban Wants ISPs To Block All P2P Traffic?

I personally can’t stand reading about Mark Cuban… it seems like every thing he says is 100% yuck. His rant about P2P is no different. Then again - you have to give the guy credit for being able to get publicity from major blogs and news sites all the time.

Syria Blocks Facebook?

Apparently Syria may be blocking Facebook. Hah, and many anti-American bloggers claim the US censors websites. At least the US doesn’t act like Syria, China, and North Korea by blocking their citizens from communicating with the rest of the world.

Massive Comment Spam Attack

A massive comment spam attack is underway. This blog as well as others, like Plagiarism Today, have been getting hit hard by the spammers. For a while I was getting close to 400-600 per day, but it has slowed to a more manageable 150-200 per day. Akismet has held up really nicely for me - all in all only 15 or so spams made it through - and 10 of those went to moderation (instead of being posted) - out of a total of 3000+ spams. That means less than .5% of them made it through. Not bad at all…

Instead of doing the normal weekly “Cool Links” post I’m going to try something a bit different - random thoughts. In a nutshell, random thoughts posts will basically include some links I find interesting, as well as my thoughts of current news and trends. If you have any questions or whatever just contact me and ask. Odds are I’ll answer it.

So, let’s get started, shall we?

A New Computer Shop

One of my long-time online friends has started a computer biz called Claudio Izzi Computers up in Montreal, and I agreed to give a bit of free advertising. Truth be told I’ve thought about starting something similar here in upstate NY, hmm how does “Steele Computer” sound?

Anyway, good luck with your new biz!

CAPTCHAs And The DMCA

Apparently bypassing CAPTCHAs can be a violation of the DMCA anti-circumvention laws. This is really interesting because you could technically go after spammers who use software to bypass CAPTCHAs. Unfortunately this will probably be abused if it holds up in the courts.

Login Required!

Digg is so unique - it links to Apple news, Linux Junk, and panties with login screens. What’ll they think of next?

I’m curious though… what happens if you get the login wrong 3 times… does it chop something off?

Blog Reviews

Someone IMed me and asked why I’m always so negative with the blog reviews. Well, simply put - giving positive advice really doesn’t help at all. Which is more helpful? “Great site” or “well… it could use different colors… maybe be skinnier… etc” You be the judge.

It Is Snowing!

Yep that’s right - we got about 3-5 inches of snow yesterday, and today we are cleaning it all up. Don’t know why but I just love winter. I guess it is because I don’t really mind cold that much - I can go outside in -20 degree weather with shorts and a t-shirt and be perfectly fine. In fact, I did that 2 winters ago when I shoveled my driveway by hand. Kept sweating so I said to hell with it and got on some shorts and spent about half an hour in freezing cold temps. And the experts claim you get frostbitten in -20 degree weather in a few minutes… liars.

My poor cat stuck one foot out the door into the snow yesterday and came running back in… then he sat by the sliding glass door and looked out… then looked at me with sad puppy-dog eyes and had that “I just want to go out!” look on his face. Then last night he was sitting up on a chair and looked absolutely bored to death. Poor little cat.

Safari 3!

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.11 and thus got Safari 3. All in all I am really pleased with it, I especially love the new “inspect element” feature! It is great for grabbing .flv files Basically you do “inspect element” and it pops up with a kickass DOM view of the HTML page and then selects areas on the web view that you have selected in the element viewer. It is really really awesome, and is by-far the best feature I have seen since tabs. Here’s a pic of it:

The only thing that ticks me off with Safari 3 is it still hasn’t fixed a bug with clearing all cookies (you have to do remove all cookies, close preferences, then reopen preferences for it to save changes and remove the cookies), and it has an annoying “you are about to close a tab with text entered” alert if you close a tab that has text entered into a text box on the page. It is nice and all, but they need an option to disable it.

Another cool this is it works with WYSIWYG editors - which was greatly needed. It also seems a bit speedier and doesn’t slow down when I open my long bookmarks menu (has around 200-300 bookmarks. The last Safari version (2.0) would slow to a crawl - the new one opens it without a problem.

Just in case you doubt the fact I am a geek - just reread this whole section and you will understand the extent of my geekyness.

Here’s some links you might find interesting…

Super Cache - A new WordPress caching system has been released that is supposedly much faster than WP-Cache. I don’t have it implemented here, but many other blogs (like Plagiarism Today) use it. The install is quite complicated and may not work depending on your setup.

Thank You Firefox - Heh, I love popup blocker.

Funny 1994 “24″ Pilot - I’m probably one of the few people who thinks “24″ is an absolutely boring show, but I still found this little parody clip to be mildly amusing.

Bad Facebook! - The Facebook privacy concerns continue.

RBN Is Offline! - The Russian Business Network has mysteriously gone offline. The RBN is a major crime hub and hosts pretty much the worst stuff on the Internet, including: malware, child pornography, software exploits, etc.

Prince To Sue Fans? - Must I really ask the question? OK fine… who the hell listens to Prince? Seriously… go get a better taste of music.

Terms Of Use Updated - I just updated the Terms Of Use, for the most part it is the same but is written a bit cleaner.

Before we get into all the links - I’d like to send a big “thank you” to all Nusuni Dot Com readers and anyone who has linked to it or otherwise helped it grow. During October, Nusuni Dot Com experienced some absolutely AMAZING growth! It is quite astonishing - and it won’t be long until it starts to compete with some of the big blogs out there. Ok… fine… it’ll be a while until that happens - but this month has definitely given me a bunch of hope as a blogger.

And, all of this occurred despite the fact this month really hasn’t had my best posts. I apologize for being a bit… errr… lazy. Basically I’ve been finishing up a content management system which I am thinking about either selling or open sourcing. In addition, my personal life has been a bit hectic and such. In November you can expect to see much higher quality posts and I will be going all out with promotion.

I really don’t like posting raw numbers, so here’s some charts. The first one is the feed circulation chart, and the second is for page views and unique hits:

I like the direction that is going

That is probably one of the ugliest traffic charts you’ll ever see - in a nutshell in March I got hit with several high traffic stumble attacks, and July and August were inflated due to social media as well (September was pretty much 100% non-social media traffic). October… well… heh. It basically towers over every other month.

So, please keep linking to articles, subscribing, etc. November will definitely be a harder month to keep the growth going since I don’t have any major script releases planned for it (which accounted for roughly 20% of October’s traffic). I’m also getting busier with other projects as well, so all help is greatly, greatly appreciated.

My overall goal with November is to start monetizing it more, promote it better, write better, and to start more engaging conversations. My guess is it will have 30-50% more subscribers (it’s a big range, but very achievable), and it will have a traffic increase of 50%.

So, without further delay - here are some of the best posts from October:

• 5 Ways To Make Your Computer Use Less Energy And Last Longer
• 2 Weeks Of Blocking Google Image Search - The Results
• End Of Back To The Basics
• The Four Dimensions of A Link Portfolio
• 9 Ways To Improve Your Link Portfolio (thanks again for those two excellent posts, Ryan!)
• Three Unique Uses Of WordPress Tags
• How I Overcame The Fear Of “No”
• 5 Of The Biggest Blog Promotion Mistakes I’ve Made
• Is It Possible To Succeed Without Google Search Traffic?
• How To Become A Lean, Mean, Writing Machine
• A Little Bit Of Info About Myself… (those are serious questions people have asked me via e-mail and IM)
• Last Minute Notes On Blogging In General