Antony’s Personal Opinion

I have been using Akismet to protect my blogs against spam. It worked almost perfectly until yesterday. It has caught 5026 spam comments in my blogs in the last 3 months.

Surprisingly a lot of spam comments have been coming to my mailbox since yesterday evening (PST). They arrive like crazy, every a few minutes, I get mail from WordPress, “Please moderate comment, bla… bla….”

It seems some other bloggers have the same problem too:

• Spam passes Akismet filters
• Spam attack
• Akismet goes down…
• and many more…

Any hints what is happening in Akismet service?

I have installed Captcha! yesterday to prevent more spams coming to my mailbox.

Update (27-Aug-06): The problem has been fixed by Akismet team. Read their comment on their blog. The problem was caused by a small bug in their latest code.

We have seen that Web 2.0 and Google’s AdSense is one of the hottest topics these days. Google with their AdSense program has been monetizing many Web 2.0 companies. This includes $900 million dollar deal between Google and MySpace.com about three weeks ago.

Honestly, I am not a “big fish” in Web 2.0 booming. I am playing Google AdSense just for fun and to monetize my blogs (mostly to cover web hosting fee).

So, what am I going to write here then? I just want to share my experience with AdSense optimization. I have been tweaking my most popular blog, S60Tips.com, in the last three weeks. Mostly, I was inspired by several posts from Google AdSense’s blog team in past weeks. Here are some of them:

• Optimization Month, Week 2: Designing Your Ads

…Did you know placing a traditional banner at the top of your site can be less than ideal for AdSense cost-per-click ads, but great for site-targeted CPM ads?…

• Colors that make cents (and dollars)

…Blending your ads in with the color scheme of your site decreases ad blindness and in most cases can increase revenue…

• Phoebe’s ad design tips

…Make sure you place the ads where your users will see them. This is why “above the fold” is so popular, because most users will not scroll below the fold line…

• Christian’s Tips: Getting the most out of AdSense

…If you’re only successful with the standard AdSense ads, it’s time to expand. Try link units, referrals, and AdSense for search and track the results. You might be surprised what your next success will be…

How is the result of my optimization? I will share CTR and eCPM of my AdSense before and after optimization.

As you can see here, both CTR and eCPM increase more than 200%.

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine, Jo Stichbury, the author of Symbian OS Explained book, sent me a link to an interesting post from Rob Wailing, Personality of the Best Software Developers.

Rob highlighted that most of phenomenal developers share a handful of personality traits. What are they?

Pessimistic

…The best developers anticipate headaches that other developers never think of, and do everything within their power to avoid them….

Angered by Sloppy Code

…The worst nightmare for a great developer is to see someone else’s software gasping for air while bringing the rest of the system to its knees…

Long Term Life Planners

…The best developers I know have stable family lives, save for retirement, own their own home, and eat an apple a day (ok, maybe not that last one)….

Attention to Detail

…I have never, ever, ever seen a great software developer who does not have amazing attention to detail…

I am not an expert in psychology or a phenomenal developer, but I have a feeling that most (if not all) of his points are right.

Rob has another interesting example of his colleague who forced anyone to indent using two spaces instead of tabs. Guess, what did he do when he found code with tabs? He replaced them with two spaces line-by-line! I can only smile reading it because I do the same thing too.

What do you think? You can read the full article here (the comments are even more interesting… :))