Twitter Guide - Learning To Use It The Right
On May 5th, 2008 | By Rob

Ever use AIM? If you have I’m sure you’re familiar with setting an away message. Some of us are worse than others with how often we change it and if we ever mix up what it says. I’m notorious for leaving it on “around” most of the time as I don’t enjoy updating it. Twitter however, I’ve found much more enjoyment. Heres is mine: twitter.com/robmalon
Twitter vs. AIM
Twitter is exactly that. An ongoing message updater - without the chatting. You can however set messages directly to your friends (either out in the open as part of your twittering or privately).

Here’s where twitter gets good. Imagine if your AIM away messages were tracked and syndicated. And if you could get an instant update/feed of what all your friends are/were doing. This is possible through RSS feeds and 3rd party applications.

Reminders
Along with updating users on what I’m doing I also tend to use the twitter service as a reminder for things I want to do later on. More often than not, your friends/followers will be interested in those things too. Things like this and others are what can make someone interesting! This is a new unique way to reach your friends and/or your websites fan base.

Visitors are not interested in your site because you don’t update it enough?
Keep your blog updated! You can use twitter’s badges to put your more recent twitters on your site and let people know you’re active! Or you can easily pull your feed, or friends feeds and create sections like “What I’m doing right now”, “What My Friends/Fans Are Doing”.

I also like to keep my facebook updated through facebooks twitter application. This might apply to more sites (or may eventually grow to support more sites. Its nice only having to update things in one place! Updates that used to be tedious are now spent doing other, unproductive, things on facebook .

Accomplishments
One great way to keep people interested and to add some benefits for yourself… Keep a log of your everyday accomplishments! For example, One of my accomplishments today was, I “wrote 8 pages of content for sites and made some minor backend tweaks to topsites.extreme-gamerz.org“. Twitter is a miniaturized way of providing simple news like this to your fans and friends. I would never take the time to put that one liner on the site itself, so now that kind of news has a home!

Popularity
Twitter Alexa Rating
Its been rising as you can see from Alexa’s one year recordings of it. Seems that a lot of other people are finding a variety of uses for it like described here.

Motivation
A lot of my friends and followers tend to post about what they’re working on. When you feel like you’re getting off track. I read some of their twitters and it more often than not, motivates and improves morale. It works like this. When you’re in an office, and you see your co-workers working at their desks, it feels “right” to be working right along side them. When you do part-time work, or fulltime work where you are all alone (seems to happen a lot with the make money online niche) its nice to have that kind of support.

Topic Ideas
This might be considered a motivator as well, but often times if I’m stuck on what two write on, I might by chance look into something that a friend twittered and suddenly have something to write or talk about.

Variety Of Ways For Easy Access
So many applications have been created for easy use of twitter. I’ve tried several and found I like the one at twhirl.org the best. Simple to install and provides the most features in a friendly manner. Best of all, it sits in my desktops tray, sends me notifications of new twitters, and allows me to twitter directly from the interface. Twitter also provides a way to update via text message with a mobile phone.

3 Step Guide On What Not To twitter.

Twittering more than 10 times a day. If reading someone’s twitters becomes a chore, its a quick way to frustrate your followers!
Messages like “BRB eating lunch” - no one cares and I would hope people draw a line for how they use twitter versus an instant messenger. I think its obvious that the ones with the larger fan/friend lists on twitter do not do this. However, you can define how you use the service anyway you’d like. If you don’t care about a fan base, then this its probably helpful to your friends!
Overuse of @username - If you find you’re sending a lot of public messages directly to people, again, get the persons instant messenger account(s). This is speculative depending if you’re using twitter more for a fan base or friends list.

Twitter Wish List
What I’d like to see with twitter is a way to select different groups of friends which you create. This way you can follow each group individually and/or have twitter apps give you popup notifications only for certain groups.

Find Me
Hope to see you around twitter!

Entrepreneurs,
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5 Spam Blocking Posts - A Fight For Future Free Time
On April 30th, 2008 | By Rob

What does your front line of spam protection look like? Still spending more than 5 minutes a day weeding through it? I’m not… Over the past month or so I’ve been posting about spam prevention and automated methods for putting anti-spam techniques in place. In them I pass on my ideas, experimentations, and existing samples when implementing anti-spam techniques. Here is a summary of the articles in this series:

5 Ways To Catch And Prevent Website Form Spam - The basics. Checking data using conventional methods such as:

An introduction to CAPTCHA.
$_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] - (Script/domain execution check).
$_SERVER[’REUEST_METHOD’] - (POST vs GET).
Escaping data input.
Use of regular expressions.

Enhanced Numbered Equation CAPTCHA - Killing Web Spam - A different approach to creating a CAPTCHA. And this time you don’t need GDlibrary or image generating software. Its actually a very simple script that seem to throw off spammers quiet well. You can easily add on to this script to create something much more complex.
Automating PHP Forms - Spam Filtering and Data Cleansing - Data cleansing doesn’t have to be so time cosuming. Automate your field usage throughout many forms, or a single large form. Validating unique fields such as Email, or a URL or a Name field, are all just as easy and can be modified on the fly for all instances through a site or on a case by case basis. The function I created here utilizes regular expressions. (ya, its hard to get away from them and still keep the code just as short).
Automated Anonymous Spam Filtering and Validation - Focusing more around a comments system (or anonymous input), here’s a few ideas that I’ve tested out in the past. Categorize your needs based on acceptable posts, questionable posts, and posts that are clearly spam.
How Akismet And Defensio Create Another Line Of Spam Defense - When all else fails, a last line of defense might mean the integration a 3rd party service as a last line of defense. Here are two good free options which will help you control spam on a blog, or when you develop your own site. This goes through some of the quirks of using Akismet vs. Defensio.

Spam will only be a problem if you let it be. If your starting a project, always consider the precautions you’ll need to take which will save you endless amounts of time in the future.

Entrepreneurs,
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How Akismet And Defensio Create Another Line Of Spam Defense
On April 27th, 2008 | By Rob

All the data validation and CAPTCHA’s in the world sometimes wont save you. If its too much work for you to manage your own filtered IP’s, and emails that have spammed your site in the past, then you might want to seek yet another automated line of protection: Defensio or Akismet. Each have their strong points and quirks.

One thing holds true for both. If you’re developing your own software, its pretty important to have a CAPTCHA form and data validation in place since you want to limit your requests when integrating these into a 3rd party spam application. Why? Because usage of Defensio and Akismet have commercial limits on them. Akismet states two things on their commercial use page:
-”Commercial keys have higher priority over free ones”.
-”Service is faster and more reliable” (for commercial keys).
Defensio also states that you can be a “Developer” for free as long as you only call their API 15,000 times or less a month. With new sites or sites which have additional anti-spam systems implemented BEFORE it sends a call to the anti-spam apps, you’re probably safe without having to pay for a special license.

Akismet is not lying. I’ve done enough development with Akismet on non-blog integrated sites to see the significant slow ups that often result in some funky page renderings on your standard “Thanks for your comment” page. I have not tested Defensio to the extent that I could say one way or another on this. However, Defensio does not appear to discriminate between the priority of the calls to their API. They also don’t mention any difference like this between their Professional, Enterprise, or Developer usage rules. Defensio wins this one for me but this is really dependent on your use (and usage there of).

From personal experience, I have continued to use Akismet for spam protection. Mostly because its quick and easy. Defensio does claim to have a better spam catch rate, however, most of the research I turned up from Google showed that Defensio seems to be “spam flag happy”. Marking several items that are not spam, as spam. This can be corrected via Defensio’s personalized filtering in which you “train” it, telling the system what is and isn’t spam in some cases. Yet that would require more of your own time dedicated to spam.

Defensio also seems to be more widely praised for their UI (user interface) more than Akismet is. When it comes down to it you can build any kind of UI you want if you’re not using it on a WordPress site. (Also note that as of right now you need WordPress 2.0 or higher to use Akismet and Wordpress 2.1 or higher to use Defensio).

At the end of the day, you really cant go wrong in implementing either of these systems. Just make sure they’re you’re last line of defense and that you always have a backup place to push data through if a 3rd party script fails (service timed out). You can check for this easily with both scripts just as you can push data to different tables dependent if it is or isn’t spam.