Oscar Trelles

Since spammers got around my anti-spam defenses, I’ve been getting more and more comment spam. Visitors might have noticed the presence of all that garbage during my short vacations (sorry about that), and it is becoming such a burden to clean up every time those bastards attack my site. So, from now on I am moderating the comments here.

Putting themselves in the bloggers’ shoes, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are proposing a long-term solution for all kinds of linking spam. By adding a rel attribute to any hyperlink tag and assigning it a value of "nofollow" will indicate spiders to ignore the link for search ranking purposes. As you can see on this Google blog post, there are a number of blog software developers already implementing this new feature.

In the long run, it may actually render useless all spammers’ efforts for getting better ranking for their pages, but it doesn’t solve the defacement of blog entries everywhere today. That’s why I’m advocating a short-term solution, by moderating the comments on this blog. There’s no better filter than a human being.

I still don’t get as much spam as Moveable Type users, but the attacks are becoming increasingly frequent and annoying. On the other hand, I am very busy with work, so I don’t have the time to implement a more transparent solution to the problem. Right now, I have installed an administrative module for comment approval in this site, and soon I will do the same at Flashstreamworks. So, when submitting a comment on these sites you might have to wait a few minutes to see it online.

Happy New Year! I’ve been catching up with work since I returned from my holiday break. 2004 has been very good for me. In a way, I am still surfing that wave, although 2005 is going to be an exciting year too! Around here we have lots of plans, both professional and personal, and we are ready to make the best out of this whole new year we have in front of us.

If I had to choose a single word to describe 2004 it would be “contact”. Last year I was able to get in touch and create relationships with a lot of people, most of them from within professional circles, particularly the Flash community. Participating in conferences and users groups gave me the opportunity to share experiences and points of view with lots of different people.

Unfortunately, my plans for this year will somewhat limit my mobility, at least with regard to conferences and stuff. I guess I would like 2005′s keyword to be “expansion”. At this point I am still debating on how I will continue to do my work, looking to the future. I guess we will find out soon enough.

Have a great year!