Web Class Blog

If you are going to blog for business, there is a distinct difference between business blogging, and personal blogging. The principal difference is, business blogging has to have a financial benefit.

That means your concept, your methods, and your layout have to have a purpose in bringing an increase in sales or traffic. It can do that directly, or indirectly.

Some people put products on their blog, and link back to them. Some people put ads on the blog – either paid ads, or ads for their own products. Some people just link back to their business website, and write about business topics. Any method will do, but you just need to make sure that it does benefit your business in one of those ways, so that you can justify the time. Because it WILL take time!

You can’t just build it and throw it out there and expect it to benefit you. You have to think about what you want it to accomplish, who you want to attract, and what you’d like them to do after they finish reading. Then make it easy for them to do that.

Otherwise, you have another drain that doesn’t bring results.

Moderation of visitor input is the first step in protecting a site against spam. But what happens when that fails?

You must move up to installing something to stop it before it gets to the forms, or to filter input at the form. There are a number of options for this, depending on what the site is that you need to protect.

One of our favorites is Bad Behavior http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ It works by stopping spambots from accessing your site content if they are identified as malicious bots. So far it has worked well on the sites I used it on. There have been minor problems with it, but nothing that I could not solve fairly quickly.

Another popular option is the Captcha option, and the other variants for identifying a person instead of a bot. Those forms that ask you to answer a simple question, or type in some squiggly numbers? That’s Captcha. And spambots are the reason for it. It isn’t foolproof, but it works a good percentage of the time.

If you have to move into this realm of protection, look at your options carefully. Remember that IP blocking solutions are almost useless anymore. You want something that works beyond that. Make sure it is well supported also, and updated regularly – or IT can become the source of a problem!

If you have a cart, a content management system, a guestbook, a forum, or a blog, you’ve probably encountered the problem of spam. If you have not, you will, if you ever operate those, or any other dynamic websites.

See, here is what happens when you have a form on your site that allows someone to register, send information, post a listing, contact you, etc:

1.Malicious bots are programmed to trawl the web, looking for sites with vulnerabilities. They look for any way to take advantage of your site – one may be programmed to spam, another to abuse a form, another to look for more serious security holes. Some do more than one thing.
2.When they find a site with the type of form they are looking for, they try to take advantage of it. If they fail, they move on. If they succeed, it sets up a chain of events.
3.The bot will proceed to exploit whatever opportunity it found. It may be a weak form, a site that does not have moderation turned on, etc.
4.If it succeeds once, then it marks your site as a target. It is important that you understand that these bots only check ONCE for a hole. If they find it, they will exploit it, and they will keep hammering your site even if you DO install some kind of protection later. Once you are found, the damage is done. This means that if you leave your comments unmoderated, and a bot finds it, and starts plaguing you with spam, it will NEVER STOP. Even if you set the comments to moderated. It will still keep sending you stuff that you have to clean out. Some bots can even break through moderated comments to auto-post. And they never go back to check again to see if it is still working, they just hammer away in the background. They can be unbelievably aggressive, and it just wears on you to try to fight them.
5.In order to get them to stop, you have to do one of two things: You can install something to stop them (which doesn’t really stop them, it just makes it so you can see them anymore), or you can move your site. If you move it where any links still lead to it that lead them there before, or if you move it on the same domain, they’ll find you again within a few hours, because while bots are not programmed to check to see if posts are going live after that first check, they ARE programmed to look if your page disappears.

The first rule then, is to prevent from the start. That means turn ON comment moderation, or post moderation, or registration approvals. Don’t EVER allow a site to operate where someone can register without confirming an email address, or where they can post a comment without someone having to approve it before it goes live. If you do, you are asking for someone to come in and take over your site. If you want it to be valuable to you, you have to keep control of what goes on it.

Ok, so we know it is out there, where do we find it?

If you know what the software type is called, it is pretty easy to Google it and come up with something. Of course, you have to be careful what you download, because it can be infected with a virus or spyware. But you can usually find useful software through reputable directories, such as Downloads.com.

About half the software we use in our business is free software. That includes stuff we use on our desktop, and stuff we install for clients, to run a website from. There are a few types of software that we have not found good free alternatives for, but for most daily tasks, we are running free.

Part of me likes free software just because it is one way to break out of the MicroSoft box. Part of me likes it because it is a bit of an equalizer – it allows the little guy to get a foot in the door, then to donate to the cause when he grows a bit. That seems to capture the spirit of the American dream to me, even though many programmers who create free software aren’t American.

We always make sure that our students go home armed with a CD that has the course handouts on it, and a nice assortment of free software goodies. And they are usually pleasantly surprised as well, at the types of things that you can do with free software.