Pascal van Hecke recently caught some spam that was sent to a unique email address he gave to Performancing.com. Read the details. One problem is he used a very simple tagged address that could be easily guessed. For example, I would guess that his MyBlogLog email address is mybloglog.com[at]vanhecke.info. So what’s to stop the spammers out there from bruteforcing popular domains at other domains? For example, amazon.com@whatever.

That’s why I use a bash script to create unique email addresses when I register at a new site. The script uses the MD5 function to create a unique 32 character email address. Then it adds the address to my mail server’s virtusertable file. Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bashdomain=example.compassword=pick-a-strong-passwordts=`date`echo $tsecho $passwordecho $1echo $password $1 | md5sum -echo $password $1 $ts >> listing.txtecho `echo $password $1 | md5sum - | cut -c 1-32`@$domainecho `echo $password $1 | md5sum - | cut -c 1-32`@$domain >> listing.txtecho  >> listing.txtecho `echo $password $1 | md5sum - | cut -c 1-32`@$domain pm-list >> virtusertable-list.txt

This is much safer than simply using “their domain name”@”your domain name.” See Bruce Schneie’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter for May 15, 2003 Unique E-mail Addresses and Spam for similar thoughts.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This allows you to read my newer articles without having to visit the site again. Thanks for visiting! Mike

In the last 3 weeks, my spam-only domain at Gmail has collected 216,031 pieces of spam. I’m interested in selling the domain. If you’re interested, email me privately.

In Better badware notifications for webmasters, Google mentions they may send email to generic addresses (like webmaster@ and admin@) to help alert webmasters that their site has “bad” stuff on it.

Please don’t send alerts to “generic” addresses. Those get only spam for me. It would be great to let us webmasters to set up an address for notifications.

And why in the world does Google make it difficult for people to leave a comment on their blog? You have to be a registered user of Blogger to do that. And their trackback mechanism is not intuitive. They want you to again sign into your Blogger account, who knows what happens after that. You know, I would think that Google would be aware that there are other services out on the Intertubes that aren’t affiliated with Google.

Fitting into the “Doh! Why didn’t I think of that?” category, Powered By WordPress - PoweredbyWP.com launched recently. It’s a directory of the zillions of blogs and web sites that are operated by the WordPress CMS (Content Management System). I’ve started submitting my blogs to it, hopefully they will be approved.

A very cool video explaining how and why the Web is so important.

On one of my other sites we run advertising, a banner ad. Because I haven’t had time until today to figure out how to get the ad to appear after the first posting on a page, we’ve been putting the ad on every page of the site, except the home page. The include code is in the footer of the page, so the ad ended up down at the bottom of the page. Not really an optimal place for visibility. So I’ve been digging through the WordPress docs and found the way to do it.

I tried adding an if statement inside the loop, using next_post_link(). But that variable is the same for the entire page. So then I looked for a “first_post” variable, but there isn’t one. So I created one.

In index.php in my template, I added this code:

<?php $ppl=$ppl+1;if ($ppl==1) include("ad-block.html"); ?>

just after the <p class=”postmetadata”> section, and before the <?php endwhile; ?> section. So now when the $ppl variable is equal to one, the ad-block.html file is included, at other times, nothing is. You could easily use this to have a different text (or included text) show up after different posts. For example, after every second post. Or a different piece of text for the 4th posting on a page.

You can see this on my DC Area Theater information blog, ShowBizRadio.net.