Akismet is a spam filter from the guys behind WordPress and I must say it works very well. If you use WordPress I recommend you install it, it’s a real time saver. There are other ones, for example Six Apart made something similar but I haven’t tried it.

Most of the junk stuck in the filter is so obviously spam I don’t think any blogmaster would intentionally okay it. Probably there are many blogs out there that are set up to just let everything through, unmanaged.

The statistics must say that spamming the crap out of blogs works for search engine ranking. But whose statistics is that? Not from those selling the tools for automatic spamming is it? Nooooo, of course not. I’m not to say that it doesn’t work, but I would be suprised if the search companies didn’t do all they can to try and detect it. At the heart of their business is to provide quality search results, if they can’t do that they go out of business.

Besides the obvious spam there are blog comments that don’t look like spam but still is in my opinion. I got one today that could easily have slipped through if I didn’t pay attention. It looked like one of those comments you want to have on your blog, well written. What made me suspicious was that it was a bit too flattering, come on this blog isn’t that great. So I made a quick check and Googled the text and lo and behold, I wasn’t the first one who’d received that very same comment. Thanks!

The comment may very well be the thoughts of the author, maybe he/she just happen to think the same about a few other blogs as well and copied the text to save some typing. At the same time, maybe not. I don’t mind linking to your site, hey - links are what makes the internet! But please be a bit smooth and write something a little bit more original!

For the spam that Akismet eats up for me - it must obviously work for someone, why else would it exist? But think about it, even if it doesn’t require much effort to spam thousands of blogs with junk messages with an automatic tool. What do you think that’ll do to your ranking once Google has noticed how your site climbed their chart? It’s not guaranteed that they’ll exclude you all together, because if they did they would open up for the type of marketing warfare where you gain rank by sinking your opponents, but it certainly won’t do you any good. Trying to fool the search engines only works for a little while, then it backfires.

In the end, links that count are those found in humanly readable content with a relevance between where the link is found and what it points to. Links that humans could end up clicking. But we shouldn’t think too much about it, what’s not relevant for me may be relevant for someone else. So, if you’re human just link!

Let me know what you think in a comment, preferrably not spammy but near anything goes.

What had happened was that the FTP program ignored hidden files, which includes the essential .htaccess which meant that the Apache web server didn’t know how to serve my permalinks. It was my fault obviously, not a fault of the FTP program. It as a background task while doing other things but I should have been more careful and pay more attention to what I was doing. Oh well, it won’t happen again.

• There’s no need to log on to the admin interface in WordPress or whatever blog software is used. Multiple blogs are supported.
• Posts can be authored and saved offline to be submitted later
• In split screen mode, it’s possible to write a post at the same time as browsing the web.

Do you use ScribeFire?

Cristian Suazo, a dear friend of mine, has been working on homein.com, a property rental and property sales site for quite some time which aims to solve these problems. I have known about it for quite some time but the other day I stumbled upon a Spanish article about it that made me have another look. It really is a brilliant service!

The unique feature is that all properties are marked on a map, so you can immediately see where it is located. Each property marker has a colour representing a price level, hovering the mouse pointer over a marker shows the price. You can set a filter so that only flats within your budget are displayed.

At the moment the serivice is only available for a handful cities in Spain, namely - Barcelona, Madrid, Mallorca, Marbella, Costa Brava, Sant Cugat and Sant Just. I hope they roll this out for other locations around the world. If this had been available for the cities I’ve moved to and within, it would have saved me a lot of time and money!

As I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel, being on a business trip to Milan. It’s a decent quality three star hotel, I am particularly happy with the WiFi in the room. The last three star hotel I stayed in also claimed to have WiFi, and that turned out to be only in the lobby, between 9 and 5, and the connection was so bad that I got better reception sitting outside the hotel so I could connect to the router of the hotel next door.

I arrived yesterday evening. To not lose quality office time on things that in an ideal world should have been ready before this trip, I began configuring and kicked off the build system that makes the software I’m here to work with. It didn’t get far. Sat up way too late with very little progress. Then today I spent the whole day in an office, struggling to make it work… small steps forward, one thing solved, on to the next, slowly slowly.  I really hate that pace. If I was with my team, I wouldn’t be the one solving these issues, I’m not very familiar with the inner workings of the build system of this quite huge project, that’s not why I was sent on this trip. It should just work, but with a new environment, missing pieces of software and different external parameters, you know!

Going back to the hotel I wasn’t very happy with the achievements of the day, the only comfort is that I actually couldn’t have done much else today because some equippment was missing that won’t be there until tomorrow. I felt close to the complete solution though, there aren’t that many Make targets after the one I was stuck on. The error message was new to me though - “Argument list too long”. What!? Eh, there’s only one argument, it can’t be that the one argument is too long, can it? It was a path, and it was long, it could be it. When I came back to the hotel I moved stuff around to get the path shorter and triggered a build, then I went out.

I came back a while ago and guess what… Build complete! That was the last obstacle. It’s late, I’m tired but oh so good it feels that I can start tomorrow with all pieces of the puzzle ready to kick a**!

Good night!

1. An Intel Mac
2. An IPhone or IPod Touch

Let’s say that the time I was thinking of buying one was really saving up to to buy one. Money yes, but reasons as well. So, now there was nothing to hesitate about really, enough saving!

I went for the cheapest possible route though, the £399 1.83GHz Mac Mini and the 8GB IPod Touch. It happens rarely that I go for the absolute cheapest option but in this case I like to think it was wise, both are good enough and I am stepping out on for me unknown territory. I don’t see what can possibly go wrong but I thought that it would be unwise to buy a Mac Pro(starting at £1,749.00) and then realize I hate Mac.

So far, having been a Mac user for a few days I can say that in general, I like it! Best of all is the almost unreal feeling I get from not hearing the machine at all!

Ok, with hardware sorted what else do I need to develop IPhone apps? Apple - to no surprise - has made it really easy to get going. The SDK together with an IDE called XCode, an IPhone simulator and other tools are included in a bundle which is available after a free registration here.

I have it all set up, next steps are:

• Learning Objective-C, the programming language to use for developing on Mac platforms
• Learning the APIs, not by heart but get a feel for how it’s organized and used
• Learning the Tools

Apple’s IPhone Dev Center is of course the number one resource but other places to look for help are forums.  The ones I have found so far are:

• Apple Developer Forums
• IPhone Dev SDK Forum
• Hackint0sh.org iPhone forums

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Looping through the array twice is not ideal but it was the quickest way to implement it not knowing all the nifty functions out there. It’s good enough for the moment, I rather not spend any more time on it now. If there is a more elegant solution let me know!

<?php
/**
* Swaps two elements in an array based on their keys.
* If one of the keys do not exist in the array the original array
* is returned.
* @param array $array The array to manipulate
* @param string $keyA The key to be swapped to the position of $keyB
* @param string $keyB The key to be swapped to the position of $keyA
* @author Martin Sveden, http://www.devcase.com
*/
function array_swap($array, $keyA, $keyB){
// To test this function:
// $arr = array('keyA' => array(1,2,3), 'keyB' => array(4,5,6),
// 'keyC' => 'hello');
// $arr = array_swap($arr, 'keyA', 'keyC');
// print_r($arr);

$i = 0;
$indexA = -1;
$indexB = -1;
foreach($array as $key => $val){
if($key == $keyA){
$indexA = $i;
}
if($key == $keyB){
$indexB = $i;
}
$i++;
}
$result = array();
if($indexA != -1 && $indexB != -1){
$x = 0;
foreach($array as $key => $val){
if($x == $indexA){
$result[$keyB] = $array[$keyB];
}
else if($x == $indexB){
$result[$keyA] = $array[$keyA];
}
else {
$result[$key] = $array[$key];
}
$x++;
}
}
else {
$result = $array;
}
return $result;
}
?>