Michael Gracie

There were 607 posts in this blog with broken links, due to the migration of Spamroll and Thoughtmarket posts over here. I didn’t have existing, running blog platforms with which to apply custom export scripts, so I tooled with raw databases…

• 517 posts were repaired by extracting their contents using MySQL, and matching link titles with the titles from this Wordpress install. The matches were imported into Excel, where concatenation was used to create a long list of UPDATE/REPLACE sql statements. The updates were then run against the database.
• Of the remaining 90 posts, 75 were modified by hand to replace links that were lost in migration, including links to site search strings and uploaded documents.
• 13 posts were deleted because broken/missing links were so relevant to the post that not having them made the post useless - most of these were cross links between blogs.
• Two posts were deleted for personal reasons, having provided me with such extraordinary lessons in human behavior that I no longer wished to share them.

Total time spent on this endeavor was approximately four hours, done mostly in the wee morning when fresh caffeine was still in the bloodstream. All should now be well with internal links here.

PS: All link targets to new windows were also permanently removed (as I know having new windows pop up when clicking web page links has to aggravate more than just myself).

According to MessageLabs, spammers are growing bored with POP/SMTP and are shifting their marketing time to web-based venues. Instant messaging (nothing new), blogs, and social networking communities (it “comes with the territory”), makes this kind of a bore in the way of announcements.

Not even kind of.

Nobody ventured to guess where the p0ker related spam feed I found came from, and I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to be associated in any way with this site either. Nonetheless, I’ll tell you: I found it on Topix.net under the subject “Spyware.” How the heck did that leak through? More spammy sites fighting for attention.
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Watch those blogs. ZDNet reported that new blogs are popping up that contain malicious code like keystroke logging trojans. According to the report, many of these blogs are on legitmate hosted sites (I assume the free ones). As a platform for blogging is just a few clicks away, and with thousands of new blogs being created each day, this comes as no surprise. Note that most of the sites in question, which according to Websense number just a few hundred at last count, are using disquised email lures from popular instant messaging services to attract attention.
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