Monthly Archives: April 2004

OK, the real answer to blog spam

I’m not really shutting down the blog, but spam has become a minor nuisance. Luckily, the folks at Movable Type have been working on a solution, which will be rolled out with the next major release of the software.

The solution is a registration service called TypeKey that lets you register a username for use when posting comments to any Movable Type blog. The first time you post a comment at Global Spin I’ll approve you, and after that your comments will appear on the site as soon as you post them. Unapproved comments will never show up on the site, so hopefully that will discourage blog spammers by taking away the benefit of spam.

The next version of Movable Type is still in alpha testing, so it may be a while before TypeKey is set up here. In the interim, keep notifying me of spam as it occurs. Thanks!

Closing up shop

[Oh, well. It's hard to play a joke on people who don't read the blog regularly. :) I'll keep the post up in case you're curious. ~c]

Due to the recent (incessant) spate of blog spam, I’ve decided to call it quits. I’m going to remove Movable Type from the Global Spin site and go back to a static front page, updated whenever I get a chance. The change should take effect by the end of the day, as soon as I get the kinks worked out of the new home page.

It’s been a great experiment, and I thank you all for contributing. It’s too bad that a few bad apples can spoil all our fun.

Sorry,
~chris

Google Mail

Those tireless gnomes at Google have done it again. Gmail is a new Google service that provides spam-free e-mail with 1000 megabytes of storage. Compare that to the usual 5-15 megabytes, and that’s quite a deal. Especially for free.