Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek, geek and more geek.

Spam’s Tenth (-ish) Birthday

Posted on by

Spam turns ten today

Today (5 March) marks the tenth anniversary of what is generally considered the first spam message.
On this day in 1994, US law firm Canter and Siegel posted a message on several Usenet newsgroups advertising their services to people interested in participating in the US Green Card lottery.

That date (5 March 1994) is only a couple of months before my very first personal internet email. I got my first ISP account (although we didn’t call them that back then) with Demon Internet around June 1994. I still have that email somewhere!
I had been online for few years before that via FidoNet. I think I must have first gone online in 1986 or ’87.

Interestingly, Brad Templeton has evidence of much earlier spam, though the term wasn’t used then; 26 years ago in fact.

And he has a nice piece on the history of the term spam, again, going back much further than 10 years.

PS: Let’s not forget this!

I’m back

Posted on by

I’m back! A simple search for mike on Google has me back at number 7. This just 7 days after I failed to appear in the top 900! I’m back at number 1 for ‘mike little’ too.
Both of these results are with the new URI.
All this thanks to good old Google honouring the 301 return code and some very sophisticated redirection code turning, for example, a request for http://zed1.com/b2/archives/p/986/more/1/c/1/Happy-Birthday-Chloe (my customised b2 SE frendly URIs) into a permanent redirect to WordPress‘ cruft-free URI https://journalized.zed1.com/archives/2003/12/26/happy-birthday-chloe/

PS: I’m still number 1 on MSN at the old URI

Happy Belated Birthday WordPress

Posted on by

Matt remembered the birth of what turned into WordPress was just over 1 year ago. We have come a long way.

Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.
Comment by mike — Saturday January 25, 2003 @ 3:58 pm

Dropped Off The Face of Google

Posted on by

Just as I suspected, it appears I have dropped off the face of Google. As Paul points out, I am not even in the top 100 Mike’s according to Google. In fact I am not in the top 900.
I am also down to the number 3 ‘Mike Little’ from a 20-month run at number 1. I’m sure that too will soon disappear.
Why has this happened? Because I changed my URI. And whilst Google is happy to now crawl the new URI’s (permanent re-directs are the answer), the majority of links in to the site are still at the old address. So, if you do have a link to my site which is still the old http://zed1.com/b2, please update it to the all new https://journalized.zed1.com URI.

New WordPress, New URI

Posted on by

It’s done!
I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.0.1. At the same time I’ve removed the ‘b2’ from the URI. The official URI for this journal is now https://journalized.zed1.com . Please update your links, bookmarks, favourites, and blogrolls. Everything should get redirected automatically but if you see any errors, please leave a comment.

Everything seems to be about 20 times faster at the moment. I’m not sure whether that’s because I am using WordPress’ mod_rewite-based cruft-free URIs (as opposed to PHP parsing of the URI) or because I’m running off a new copied database (DB performance seemed to be a big factor previously).