Union NJ in the Snow

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Union got a bit over a foot of snow through what they’re now calling The Blizzard of 2005. Amy and I spent most of the weekend indoors, watching lots and lots of Futurama, with an occasional stroll/wade out into the wild, white, windy storm.

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I didn’t need to stay an extra day, but my train was about two hours late and standing room only till Philly — still better than I expected, though.

Photos taken with a Canon Powershot A400.

A Coming Blizzard

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I’m now in Union, NJ, where the water sphere is tall and the blizzard warnings are in force. Excerpts from today’s storm warning:

...BLIZZARD WARNING FOR THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING...
TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS WILL BE 16 TO 24 INCHES BY SUNDAY EVENING.
VISIBILITIES WILL BECOME POOR...WITH WHITEOUT CONDITIONS AT TIMES.
ANY TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED. IF YOU LEAVE THE SAFETY OF BEING INDOORS...YOU ARE PUTTING YOUR LIFE AT RISK.
THIS IS A LIFE-THREATENING WINTER WEATHER SITUATION! PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD COMPLETED BY NOON TODAY!

I think I may be forced to stay an extra day. Which I don’t think I mind. Amy and I are off to buy snow boots.

Potential Track Trouble

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Argh. I sure hope they clear up the mess from yesterday’s Amtrak derailment before I get on the train up to New Jersey tonight. Then, on Sunday, I hope the snow from the weekend snow storm will have been cleared from the tracks for my trip back to DC. This isn’t looking like a good weekend for rail travel — though it’s looking fun if you like snow, which I do. So here’s hoping for fun snow days up in NJ while I’m there, followed a quick, thorough cleanup for the trains, without any track delays. Yes, that would be perfect. No doubt everything will work exactly the way I want it to. Just so, just so.

Adding rel=”nofollow” to Refer

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These instructions are for Dean Allen’s Refer.

First off, are you still running a public referrer log without any robots exclusion? Stop right there, and add a file named robots.txt to the root of your public html directory with this:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /refer

… using the pertinent URL of your Refer directory. Alternatively, you can open up /refer/index.php and add <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> to the <head> section.

After doing that, rel="nofollow" is pretty much redundant, since search engines will be completely ignoring your Refer installation, but, that all righteousness may be fulfilled, we’re going to add it anyway:

  1. Open up /refer/display.php.
  2. Scroll down to function rHref (around line 283).
  3. It’s that return statement we want to modify. Replace this:

    return tag($content,'a','href="'.$where.$param.'"');

    …with this:

    return tag($content,'a',' rel="nofollow" href="'.$where.$param.'"');

    …removing any line breaks that this narrow column may have inserted.

  4. Save and you’re done.

The spam is not going to stop, though; spammers will keep trying to hit your weblog and referrer logs. They don’t care about the loss of results from just one site. Like email spammers, they want to hit as many targets as they can, strafing the internet wildly and indiscriminately, on the off chance that at least some of those hits will return the desired 0.01% result. Robots exclusion and rel="nofollow" cut down their chances with the search engines, but it’s still up to you to keep them off your own back. See my “Referrer Spam Attack” entry for links to tips on doing just that.

Adminshop, Reffy, PRStorm, and Referrer Log “Marketing”

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(A note to companies thinking of resorting to referrer log marketing: don’t. It’s annoying and unethical, it has little effect on your search engine rankings since most referrer logs are private, and your money is wasted on a few lines of code that any script kiddie could throw together in a few minutes. People — especially webmasters — will hate you, search engines will blacklist you, and the overall exposure to your business will be resoundingly negative. Case in point: why is this entry near the top of search listings without any help from referrer spam, and why are Reffy and “PRStorm” nowhere on the first page of results?)

The clear villain in the world of Referrer Spam is Adminshop.com, makers of Reffy, software devoted to server-intensive referral log spamming. As near as I can gather, the owner of Adminshop is an Australian white supremacist who goes by the online handle of Odin. J-Walk, Richard@Home, and Tuxedo Jack have had runs-in with him and his poor ethical outlook, and Rui at TaoOfMac has actually given Reffy a try. Not only does it clutter up referrer logs, it also consumes site bandwidth, uses GET and closes sockets to consume CPU cycles, and relies on a zombie network of trojan-infected Windows PCs to work its evil. It’s more than an annoyance; it can work like a DDOS attack, slowing or even bringing down your website or server.

This is one of the “tools” on the web which, when rel="nofollow" gets widely implemented, will become ineffectual as a marketing strategy.

On a related note, Kalsey talks about taking down the automated form spammers, in an entry which, amusingly enough, is at the top of a Google search for such scripts, thus belying the effectiveness of such unethical marketing programs.

Update: On top of things as always, Ann Elisabeth has tons more info on the Reffy spammers.

Update: Reffy has renamed itself “PRStorm,” and got sold to some sucker who thinks it’ll help his business. One may as well have thrown the money spent on PRStorm in a trash can.

Opportunity’s Iron Meteorite

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Not too far from the wreckage of its reentry heatshield, Mars Rover Opportunity has found an iron meteorite lying in the soil. My first thought was that it might just be more heatshield debris, but no part of a spacecraft looks so clearly like a shiny rock as that, and the rover scientists seem to have confirmed it as an actual meteorite. Now, a person should be lucky enough to find a meteorite on the ground at some point during his daily travels here on Earth. The chances of a slow-moving robot finding one so close to its own discarded pieces on another planet must be astronomical. (On the other hand, Mars’ much thinner atmosphere would let more space debris down to the surface intact, wouldn’t it?)

Know Your Space Rock Jargon:

Meteoroid
Rock is still in space.
Meteor
Rock is entering atmosphere as a “shooting star.”
Meteorite
Rock has landed intact on the ground, where it can be found by people and rovers.

Just Fireworks. Don’t Panic.

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Washington DC, please relax. No, those explosions were not bombs, but just a piece of that $40M going up in a blaze of pre-inaugural fireworks near the White House.

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