I know there are some efforts out there to get web sites to stop using the www, but I still believe that a web site should resolve to the same place no matter if the user is entering planetmike.com or www.planetmike.com. Just now, I ran across two sites that don’t come up at all if you leave off the www. That feels like a waste of effort or laziness on their parts. Set the server to alias www to the regular site (or vice versa).

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So, the Alexa thing is kinda geeky, but useless. What other metrics can I find? Google’s pagerank of course. I found a cool Firefox extension SearchStatus that shows both the Google PageRank and the Alexa Rank in the status bar. PlanetMike.com is a PageRank of 6.

Booya. lol.

ESBN 97339-060224-890526-68

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Wow, Alexa thinks PlanetMike.com is ranked #690,887. Does that mean that there are only 690,886 web sites that get more traffic than I do? Wow, that’s actually kind of impressive. Here’s a traffic button/ad thing for Alexa:

If you don’t see it, that’s because it is a javascript thing.

Someone just signed up for a mailing list on my day job’s web site. Our system uses Mailman, which sends a confirmation email back to the email address given to get confirmation that the address should be added to the mailing list. An AOL user filed a spam complaint about the confirmation message. Now, that is an interesting conundrum. For years, we (the anti-spam community) has been railing that all mailing lists should be confirmed opt-in. An email address should only be added to a mailing list if the email address has been confirmed through some kind of tagged email. This is usually done with a hash of some sort that can only be read by the owner of the email address. This prevents an attack on a victim by signing them up for zillions of lists without their permission.

Of course, now what could happen is the attacker attempts to sign them up for zillions of lists. The victim still gets zillions of messages, but these now are the confirmation messages. The flood of mail will stop very shortly after the attacker’s computer stops generating the requests. The victim will have no choice but to either ignore the list requests, or to file a spam complaint on the requests.

What’s the answer? Do list managers (who are mostly all using confirmed opt-ins for new subscriptions) now need to start using a CAPTCHA to protect themselves from abuse?

In the specific example above, I will chalk up the abuse report I got from AOL as being from an idiot AOL user who did not understand that by submitting their email address they would be getting email from us.

I always register with a unique email address whenever I need to register somewhere. It makes it very easy to track spammers or other companies that choose to violate their privacy policy. Just today, I received an email from PC Magazine.

They lie: “You indicated that you want to receive special Ziff Davis offers when you provided your email address to PC Magazine. If you prefer not to receive this type of special offer from PC Magazine, please use the following link:”

This is the first message I have received using that email address since it was created on September 15, 2003 at 1:46:07pm. You think if I had opted in to getting email from PCMagazine, I would have gotten at least one message in the 879 days (almost 2.5 years!) since I gave them an email address. So, I have blocked both pcm-marketing.com and omessage.com from my mail server. And of course, you should never opt-out of stuff you didn’t sign up for.

An interesting idea for a SpamAssassin rule: If a domain name mentioned in the headers of an email mesage does not have content on a web page at the same domain, give it a couple points. So this message would have scored at least four points, as both omessage.com and pcm-marketing.com do not have a web site. I also wonder why omessage.com doesn’t have any information in their whois records?

Yesterday during the Super Bowl I ran the web traffic logs for PlanetMike.com. And discovered that dozens of people at MySpace.com are leaching images from my web site for use on their profile pages. So I am now changing those images to be an ad for my web site. I wonder how long my images will continue to be leached? And I hope that people learn that using other people’s images isn’t cool. If I have to I’ll put in some mod_rewrite rules tot ake care of the traffic.

My updated log reports are at visits. You can see a nice spike starting up in September. The August spike was a spider running amok in my blog pages. It looks like it got caught in a Blosxom loop.

OneWebDay What are you going to do for the Web on September 22?