Aja Lapus

Blog

  • Nothing Could Stop a Dreamer

    I’ve watched this animation a long time ago, but after I saw a recent Multiply entry about some inspirational video from a friend, I just remembered it right away.[1] I searched for it and found it on YouTube.

    I do not know how this may touch you, but I felt a mix of inspiration and heartbreak at the same time, with tears filling up my eyes,[2] after I’ve watched the following video as it came to its end.

    Watch Kiwi! on YouTube

    What do you think of it? I think I should start nailing trees to a cliff right away. I know I will eventually come to my end, but I would have reached my dream anyway.

    Kudos to Dony Permedi for this great thesis animation.

    Footnotes:

    1. ^ I didn’t watched my friend’s video, I searched for the one I remembered right away.
    2. ^ I didn’t actually cry.

  • New Way to Get Involved

    If you happen to be an advocate of anything—may it be Web-related or not—it really wouldn’t hurt to get out of your lazy sitting position and go out to reach a broader set of people. Web-wise, this has been done successfully on the Spread Firefox Web site with its members, and business-wise, on record companies and bands with street teams. Now, my advocacy followed suit.

    The Web Standards Project announced the formation of the WaSP Street Team during the WaSP Annual Meeting held at SxSW—to take the advocacy out to the streets—or possibly everywhere you might be involved with.

    There could be a little disadvantage to this, since you aim for the Web user and you take the promotions out anywhere around the real world, you may be shooting at the wrong people. But, of course, the primary advantage with this move by WaSP, in my point of view, is to let the person who uses the Web know what Web standards are even if they do not browse such scary tech or Web standards-related sites just by knowing them in the streets they walk on everyday.

    I still do not clearly know what WaSP plans as the first task for its Street Team. But, you could sign up for announcements from its mailing list on the Street Team homepage. Could this be the answer to the standards awareness problem? I really hope so. Let us watch out what it could do for the Web standards community. Be aware. Get involved. Get the message out everywhere, together.

    Oh, I remember you could also join us in discussion on Web Standards Philippines. Just send me a message or leave a comment on this entry so I could add you on to the Basecamp. 🙂

  • Musing #0009

    I think I’ve lost my touch. Well, I mean my writing skills. I’ve got tons to say but I couldn’t write it. So … How do you think I could overcome writer’s block or—in my case—blogger’s block?

  • On Nofollow, Spam and Plugins

    When the search engine giant Google announced that it would implement the rel="nofollow" directive on its crawlers, most people had hopes it would be the end of comment spam, most especially when search competitors Yahoo! and MSN expressed support for the microformat as well.

    But, as the years passed even with WordPress immediately supporting the rel="nofollow" attribute since its inception, comment spam attacks on AjaLapus.com increased so suddenly. The most probable cause of the increase is when my homepage’s PageRank increased to 6 last 29th of January rendering it more visible on SERPs. From 50 spams a day to up to 200, the weight of these spammers causes my server precious bandwidth and processing, and me of my time when checking for false positives. These spammers could just be turning a blind eye on rel="nofollow" as spamming costs almost—if not absolutely—nothing to spread.

    From the words of Ben Hammersley:

    If the playing field is levelled by rel="nofollow", then everyone involved will be forced to try all the harder to get their links out there. The blogosphere will be hit all the harder because of the need to maximise the gains.

    Besides, them spammers are not only aiming to be displayed on SERPs, they are trying to be clicked on by human visitors as well. And, even when 99% of the blogs out there use rel="nofollow", the remaining 689,000[1] blogs that doesn’t could be easily found by mere crawling of these spambots on any link they could find. Why bother to scan for the use of rel="nofollow" when you could just post away spam as easily? These spammers affiliate with porn, pill and casino advertisers that earn thousands of dollars of revenue from clicks and visits from real people, consequently receiving commission from them—providing the motivation for more spamming.

    But, has this initiative from Google done its job? Many people do not think so. Aside from Ben, other people thought of it as utter failure.

    As Dylan Tweney may put it:

    Worse, nofollow has another, more pernicious effect, which is that it reduces the value of legitimate comments.

    It would also reduce the motivation to comment on blogs thinking that there’s no way we could benefit from reacting on someone else’s blog entry since our links would be regarded as nonexistent. So much for Web 2.0 and Web interaction. I know I have experienced this a lot of times before, though it has somehow dissipated with these realizations.

    Jeremy Zawodny has a better angle about this matter:

    I’ve seen that first hand. The “psychology of linking” did change in a fairly obvious way after nofollow started.

    ….

    Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit.

    Straight to the point. So what do I do now since WordPress has no way of deactivating the addition of rel="nofollow" on comment URIs except for hacking into the source code? I’ve looked through Andy Beard‘s Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins and found two different plugins that suits my taste:

    I currently use Kimmo’s DoFollow as it was the first one that got me interested. But, I think I need input from you guys: Which of the two do you think would be better to motivate commenters on my blog? The one in which they know their links would eventually be followable [DoFollow], or the other in which they’d have to accomplish a somehow obtrusive number of comments[2] on the whole site before their links would be followable [Link Love]?

    If you’re thinking that I may be then vulnerable to spam comments gaining ranking from my site: I wouldn’t worry, since Akismet has done a good[3] job of screening spam for me. I think Dougal Campbell made me realize this.

    And, I am planning to add another plugin that automatically closes comments on older entries that most spammers tend to target. I know there exists such plugins, I just can’t find them right know. Do you know any? How long should I make entries commentable? I have been receiving legitimate comments on older entries occasionally—a reason why I still haven’t decided about this kind of plugin yet. Maybe you could help me.

    Oh, by the way, there also exists 11 reasons against nofollow from a German site dedicated against the use of rel="nofollow". And, more reasons from Loren Baker, which could be what you really need to understand that nofollow is not the answer.

    Notes:

    1. ^ as Technorati currently tracks 68.9 million blogs
    2. ^ 10 comments as default—a somehow large number for a non-frequently updated Web log like this
    3. ^ not great, though—as there has been about 0.1% of false positives that occured

  • Towards a Standards Compliant Web

    Several weeks ago, with the discussions on and my involvement with WaSP ILG and recently with PWAG, I was struck by the idea of forming an advocacy group here in the Philippines concerning Web standards. I immediately asked two of my standards-loving friends, Shari and Lexie, if they are also interested. Though we sometimes had conference chats regarding the topic, we still haven’t been able to formally talk about our goals and objectives. All I know is that we sure love to promote standards to every Web-aware Filipino.[1]

    We thought about inviting some other standards-aware individuals and professionals, but we could never know them all [though Shari has already mentioned quite a few]. I guess I also like the idea of volunteering as this would constitute better involvement on the possible discussions that will be held regarding the matter. So if anyone would like to join the advocacy wholeheartedly, speak up! We will be very glad to hear from you. We are taking steps little by little towards a standards compliant Web.

    On the other side of the story, you may notice Filipino/Tagalog translations[2] on the International Liaison Group pages from the Web Standards Project. Those were translated by yours truly with the help of my mother and my friend Shari. We aren’t very good translators, so if you notice [some] mistakes—given the fact there are virtually no literal translation for every single English word, and most technical Filipino words are just borrowed—and you know you could help us, I am so much willing to receive some assistance. 🙂

    By the way, I have written an article for Bite Size Standards about styling inline list items. I would eventually post them here if ever they consider it useful and worthy of being included in their archive. I have considered writing the article for A List Apart, but I feel it seems a bit overreaching. I sent the article to them [BSS] on the 6th of February 2007. I guess am slowly realizing I am running out of luck—there are only two days left before their expected processing duration of one to two weeks comes to an end.

    Notes:

    1. ^ though Shari may have been a little bit sarcastic about it
    2. ^ examples include: