An interesting development: after comment spam, I seem to get targeted by Referrer Spammers.
Until today, I was totally clueless about this phenomenon. Comment spam is the practice of adding comments with commercial content to popular weblog postings. As with email spam, the content is normally utterly unrelated to the content of the original posting, but people wanting to read the comments are forced to skim over the fake comments. This practivce does not really happen on my blog, because I'm not popular enough. Spammers don't really expect anyone to be reading the comments on my posts. I did receive some comment spam (twice actually), but it is easily removed manually.
Referrer spam is a whole different story. To see if other people are linking into my blog, referring to my postings, I occasionally have a look at the referrer stats as generated by .Text (the blogging engine of this weblog). To my surprise, I found that a number of strangely looking URLs where listed. I inspected the content of these sites (which would normally include links to my posting), but found only unrelated information about cheap webhosting, good mortgage rates, etc... Referrer spam. Of course, when I Googled for the term, I found 58.000 hits including this very good explanation of the phenomenon. It seems that everybody but me was talking and cursing about their referrer stats being spammed for ages.
What I still cannot get my head around is this: why? Nobody sees these referrals but me. It is annoying to me, but I would normally not click a referrence from yourbestmortgagequotes.com. It's probably the same story as with email: the cost for spamming is soooo low that they don't care about effectivity. As with email, the solution is probably not in banning specific domains or IP addresses, but in checking the content itself. That would involve not only logging the referrer of a request, but requesting that referring Url and validating it's content. Pfew.
Whenever I play a puzzle-like game, I cannot resist thinking about how to build this game in software and how complex the AI should be to create interesting opponents for human players. Luckily, I can resist most of the time, but every now and then, I sit down coding to give it a try.
This time I got down to make it into an interesting game for my PocketPC. WordBlock is a word puzzle game you can play in a group. Its actually a lot of fun to play and all you need is a piece of paper and some pens. Oh yes: and good company. When you do have a PocketPC, but the good company is lacking (or not interested), you can now enjoy this game digitally.
This article describes the game
Go here to download the installer (you need the Compact Framework)
This article is still to be done, but will explain how you can modify the characters (changing the pictures, renaming them, assigning different AI strategies to them). If you would like to, you can also create your own AI and plug it in, because the strategies are loaded through a provider model. Just implement the right interface, copy your dll into the programs folder, tweak an XML file and there you go.
