Tag: blog

Monster threaten legal action and ask me to blame someone else!

I was going to hold off on blogging this but since Damien has already mentioned it I thought I’d add my experience.

I received two emails directly from Monster’s Business Development Manager John Burns today. In the emails John said

i want you to delete my name from your blog that is open to the public….

He went on to add

You are putting my name at risk and my character on your blog, remove it ASAP or i will proceed with the legal advice i was given.

You have already damaged my name and caused great embarresment to me.

Please take this very seriously.

John Burns
Business Development Manager

I received several other emails from John where he tried to recall the spam he sent out yesterday but as Michele noted, that only works with Microsoft Exchange within an organisation.

To make matters even worse, incredibly, in the recall efforts John once again exposed everyone’s email addresses by not using the bcc field.

The real kicker for me though was when John left me a voicemail on the one hand threatening me with legal action, and then on the other hand asking me to

take down what you have put up about me, remove my name and replace it with somebody else’s immediately… I will definitely be taking this forward

Remove his name and replace it with somebody else’s? Just who’s name would John have me use instead?

I’m sorry but does this guy have no sense of responsibility for his actions at all. Not once, at any point did he apologise for spamming me, not once did he apologise for harvesting the data from the it@cork members’ directory and then he asks me to put someone else in the frame while he threatens me with legal action? Unbelievable.

I’m sure John is a nice guy but if he had only put his hands up, accepted he was wrong and asked how he could right what he had done, this would never have become the growing embarrassment it is to Monster’s already poor reputation.

UPDATE – Daithi has created an hilarious re-mix of the voicemail – check it out

WordPress/FeedBurner lose my subscribers

my feedburner feed stats

Really odd but since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 the number of subscribers to my blog has roughly halved. Today it is reading 632. It hasn’t been below 1,000 in at least 6 months never mind down at the 600 mark.

I realise that this is likely due to my moving to the newer FeedBurner (FeedSmith) plugin which required me to setup a new feed in FeedBurner but as you can see from the screenshot above, the old feed is reading 0 subscribers!

I put a 301 re-direct on the old feedburner plugin’s feed from this blog but what I am curious about is that the Subscribe address for this blog (tomrafteryit.net/feed) hasn’t changed at all. Do people subscribe directly to the FeedBurner feed address?

WordPress 2.3 gotchas (or got me's!)

Phew!

Finally done with that install – ouch! I wouldn’t want to go through that again in a hurry.

I hit several speed bumps in my upgrading of this blog from WordPress 2.2 to 2.3 – many of those could have been avoided if I had followed the instructions on the Extended Upgrade page instead of the Upgrade page!

Specifically, if you are upgrading, not only should you also upgrade all plugins before starting the blog update, but you should then disable all plugins before uploading WordPress 2.3.

I use the K2 theme on this site, so I checked it out, and sure enough there is a new version of K2 (K2 RC1) available for WordPress 2.3 as well. If you plan on upgrading to RC1, be aware that Michael Heilemann says in the release notes:

Because so many things have been upgraded since v0.9.6, a lot of the code hasn’t actually seen as much usage as the v0.9.6 code, and thus you should hold off until RC2 with upgrading if you like your stability over your ‘bling’

I decided to try out the widget functionality which comes with K2 RC1 but I came a cropper on a bug in the code and so reverted to using the less functional, but fully operational WordPress Widgets.

One of the biggest advances in WordPress 2.3 is the inclusion of Tags. This is fantastic news for anyone who hasn’t used tags up to now as it provides a simple way for them to begin. However, I was using a plugin (Ultimate Tag Warrior) for my tagging and this no longer works with WordPress 2.3.

WordPress 2.3 has the ability to Import existing Tags though (Manage -> Import -> Ultimate Tag Warrior) meaning all my tagging up to now hasn’t been in vain!

Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) had two great features:

  1. UTW presented you with a drop-down of all your previous tags when writing a post so you could easily chose one you had previously. This is missing from 2.3
  2. UTW had a Suggest option whereby it would scan the text of your post and suggest appropriate tags

Christine Davis, the author of UTW has already released plugins to fill in this missing functionality!

Other features added in this release of WordPress are highlighted here.

TiddlyWiki

I have started to use TiddlyWiki a lot recently. TiddlyWiki is a wiki platform which runs on your personal computer.

TiddlyWiki

TiddlyWiki runs entirely out of html and so simply by visiting the TiddlyWiki site, you have downloaded the application! Chose File -> Save As… to name it and save it to an appropriate folder on your machine.

TiddlyWiki is blog-like in that new articles (Tiddlers) appear like posts in a blog. But it is unblog-like in that they are not displayed sequentially, but rather called by links or searches on the page.

It is very handy for notes-to-self – especially when you are offline. It can be hooked up to an online version and synched but I haven’t tried this yet.

The application was written by Jeremy Ruston who was taken on by BT as head of Open Source when they saw TiddlyWiki

Technorati resurrects the Marquee tag…

Technorati have overhauled their site completely. Some of the changes are great and some we could do without, frankly!

The best change is that they have drastically sped up the site. I dunno did they add more servers or simply optimise their queries (I suspect the latter) but the site and particularly searches are now running a whole lot faster.

The next great change is that they have moved the blog searches to a page of its own. You can now find blog searches at s.technorati.com. The searches return relevant results and make subscribing to searches a whole lot easier than heretofore.

On the downside, on the main Technorati page they have a scrolling bar of tags along the top – make it stop! I thought we had killed of the Marquee tag people!!!

New Technorati homepage

Overall, the new design seems to be getting the thumbs up from most reviewers. This can only be good as with the rollout of Google’s excellent Blogsearch tool, reasons for using Technorati were becoming fewer and fewer.

Blog training course discussion area

Paul O’Mahony is one of the people sitting in on the Blog Training Course I am running for it@cork. Paul has been blogging for a while now and I first met him at the Irish Blog Awards earlier this year.

Paul made a suggestion in the comments on his own blog that I put up:

something up on your blog about the course, so that people on the course can have a place where they could comment. I’m thinking that I may not be the only person on the course who would like to keep track of how I’m getting on with loading RSS for example. If there was one central place where we could put reports on progress, we could thereby learn from each other. I don’t mean set you up in a Q&A situation – that would be outside the remit of the course – but give everyone an opportunity to experience social networking

Initially I thought a wiki might be more suitable for this purpose but as this is a blog training course, let’s do it through the comments of this post. So, as Paul suggests, if you are on the course and want to share thoughts, suggestions, criticisms, whatever about the course, use the comments of this post to do so.

Eamon O’Brien – great to meet you again!

Eamon O’Brien was a neighbour of mine as a kid. Eamon is a couple of years older than me but we knew each other well. Before yesterday, I hadn’t seen Eamon in around 15 years but his mother and mine were very close so I was always kept up-to-speed on Eamon’s goings on.

In the way that these things happen in a country as small as Ireland, Eamon O’Brien was at the Events Day Conference I was speaking at yesterday and we managed to have a chat, catch up and swap contact info so it won’t be another 15 years before we meet again.

Now, can I get Eamon to blog or join Twitter, or Second Life or some other Social Network so we can stay in closer touch from now on? That’s what this medium is all about, building and fostering relationships.

Pat's in trouble – continued

A couple of days ago I posted that Pat Phelan was in some trouble. This evening Pat confirmed it:

From Pat’s blog:

Our allfreecalls provider in Iowa today took flight due to increasing pressure from a large USA based carrier.
We are working on getting a new number up.
We expect to be back in business on Monday afternoon.Please watch the site for the new number and this blog for updates
So much for FCC rules in the USA.
I would like to personally apologize to all our customers and can assure you that we are working as fast as humanly possible to rectify this.
Unfortunately it is timed to perfection as we have issues with access to engineers over the weekend.

Spam Assassin on Direct Admin problem

As I mentioned previously, I have rolled out a new server for my blog (and a couple of sites I host) in the last few days. I am now being hammered by spam! Spam Assassin is installed on the server.

The hosting software on the server is called Direct Admin and in each hosted domain in Direct Admin I have set Spam Assassin to 5.0 (which I thought would be low enough to catch most spam).

I also configured it to allow all spam through but labelled as ***SPAM***.

I haven’t received a single email labelled as ***SPAM*** but I have received lots of spam. 🙁

Spam Assassin setup

There’s obviously something simple missing in the config of SA on the server.

I know it is probably an impossible question to answer without more info but if anyone can think of something I might be missing, could you let me know?

UPDATE: A Direct Admin support staff member emailed me the fix – it is available at http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=36