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As a blogger, one soon attracts unwanted attention. Fortunately, there are tools that automatically block spam comments. Askimet and SpamKarma are the two I am employing on this blog.But of late, there have been coming in new types of comments (and not just here). Genuine comments, but with a link to a commercial web-site. The name is not a real one, but a SEO friendly one.

So, what to do?

Rather than just deleting those comments as spam, I am (for now) simply removing the link.For now, I will keep my policy of “do follow” on all comments, just as a little thank-you to anyone taking the trouble of adding to this blog. 

These past weeks I have worked on a couple of web pages. In the course of it I came across some helpful sites that I want to share with you.

Flash files (from good to awesomely mindblowing)

Flash Den is a relatively new site, offering mainly Flash files. They have all from small pre-loaders to full webpages. And most of them of an exceptional quality.

In addition they also have royalty free music loops, some video files and graphics on offer. Plus a few fonts. But their main business is Flash.

Stock Photos (affordable)

iStockPhotos offers royalty free photographs for all kinds of usages. You can chose the size of the picture you buy, and a photo can cost just above $1. They have gained both size and quality, but unfortunately have increased the prices, while lowering the pay-out for the original photographers.

Still, you can easily browse for hours in their exhaustive library, searching for subjects, themes, emotions, colors, even whitespaces. Additionally, iStockPhoto also offers graphics, good vectors, cheap videos and lower quality flash files. One nice feature is that you can save interesting photos in your own lightboxes, leaving them for purchase at a later point. Or you can share your lightbox with a client.

If you have some good photos rotating away on your harddisk, you can start selling those pictures at iStockPhoto. Hey, you even can get some of my photos there.

Ajaxising (without knowing Ajax)

For the portfolio section of our new webpage I used a donation-ware component by Kevin Miller, called LightWindow. Besides adding that Ajax feel to your website (opening links without having to re-load), it also enables you to play back pretty much any media format around. Lots of options.

And if you use it, send some PayPal love to Kevin, so that he can get his well deserved Power Book Pro.

Shopping Cart (open source)

If you need a cart system for your website and you want to avoid having to pay hundreds of dollars in royalty payments (and probably some monthly fees), Zen Cart is definitely worth a look. Though it has a somewhat messy admin interface, it leaves you space for many tweakings. There are numerous extensions available, such as plug-ins, language packs, buttons and a couple of free templates.

See it live on our company’s brand new (and Norwegian language) shopping site.

Content management (minus the pain)

Now 1 1/2 years old, this blog has always run on WordPress. Though I’ve had some Windows like experiences, by and large I am impressed by this powerful — and free — tool. So impressed, that I have used it as the CMS for our new webpage.

With the new version of WordPress, I can even be lax with using links. A page that is really located at, say, www.abitofmagic.no/english/services/eng-crew can also be reached by www.abitofmagic.no/eng. The magic happens without me having to do anything.

Of the many good plug-ins around, the one I want to mention today is WordPress automated plug-in, which takes the pain out of upgrading your blog. Which is especially nice when the frequency of those updates increases, and exponentially higher when you have more than one copy of WP running. I’ve used it on most of the 5+ WordPress sites that I maintain, without a single glitch.

Graphic Freebies (quality, not quantity)

One of my favorite blogs on graphic design, BitBox, regularly offers high quality freebies, be it web 2.0 buttons, high res Photoshop brushes or vector graphics.

Photoblogging (free)

Pixelpost is to photos what wordpress is to writing. One great software to easily, yet beautifully, churn your digital photos into an on-going on-line publication. Lots of followers, translating to many exciting add-ons. Recently they also took the important step of easing the process of upgrading to new versions.

For fun, I am occasionally posting pictures on my pblog over at visualnary.com

For this blog, I used to employ PopStats to get an idea of how many readers I have. I learned that I had a solid readership of about 100 souls per day.

A while ago, another Blog recommended GetClicky, which I gave a shot. It turned out that that one gives totally different statistics than the other one. So when WordPress started offering statistics as well, I installed their plug-in. Might be not so surprising, but again, I get different numbers.

Blog statistics are no exact science

Taking the last week as an example, the following numbers pop up:

• PopStats gives me a daily average of 126 visitors with 2618 hits, or roughly 20 hits per visitor.
• GetClicky calculates an average of 31 visitors with 60 actions per day, or roughly 2 actions per visitor.
• And the WordPress gives me 34 visitors per day, and doesn’t elaborate on the hits.

While I would love PopStats to be right, it seems more likely that I get just above 30 visitors a day. Not that the amount of people is so important to me, but these 30 visitors click on average only once before leaving again. Which suggest, that they do not find the content very interesting. Add to this the average number of comments per day (close to zero), and I start to wonder where this blog is going. Maybe it is beyond its half life?

There is a new(ish) blog for assistant editors, aptly named Post Production Standards.

Take a look here.

So long I resisted “monetizing” my blog. But today I received an offer that proved hard to resist. (And no horses were involved.) The makers of text-link-ads now also offer Auction Ads, which places eBay auctions on your blog. If your blog’s visitor wins an auction, you get a share. You have control over the layout, but most importantly over the key-words. Which means that you can chose ads that fit your blog. And the best part: if you sign up in September, you get an instant $25 credit to your account.

Gems from the Web:

• The Blog Population Grows & Grows & Grows - Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and they’re seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. WOW!
• What’s The 411 — Ask Google - Google has introduced it’s FREE information service GOOG-411, currently as experimental. It?s a voice activated service, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411. You lucky Americans…
  
• Learn to use Google Apps in your organization - Channel on YouTube has posted a tutorial on how to increase productivity by adopting Google Apps for your business or organization. via Doug Karr.

Gems from the Web:

• Verbarius - A clock that spells out the time.
• Optimus Maximus - A new approach to typing: a keyboard with a tiny LCD screen in each key. Could be great for translators, but also video editors and anyone who needs to remember shortcuts. Pricetag: 1500 USD, delivery expected for November 07.
• Cult of Mac - Wired News - It’s become apparent that Apple has released a device capable of much more than playing digital media in the living room — they’ve put out a full-fledged computer for dirt cheap. David Scharf took it upon himself to re-christen the delightful box.
• Top 10 Apple products which flopped - Some of these I have never heard of. For obvious reasons, I guess…
• Danger Room - Michael Jackson is in discussions about creating a 50-foot robotic replica of himself to roam the Las Vegas desert…
• Dvorak Isn’t Drinking the iPhone Kool-Aid, Thinks Apple Should Can the Device - Apple should pull the plug on the gadget before it is too late.
• Top Secret: First shoot! - We just finished a shoot with noted cinematographer and camera operator, Charles Papert, for an as-yet-secret project, with the Canon XL H1.
• Creating Passionate Users: Creativity on speed - One of the best ways to be truly creative–breakthrough creative–is to be forced to go fast. Really, really, really fast.
• TI’s Mini Movie Projector - Texas Instruments is showing off its Pico, a DLP projector that is chiquitito enough to be incorporated into the bottom of a cellphone.
• Creating Passionate Users: How to host a product/feature design party - Forget focus groups. Forget endless meetings and brainstorming sessions. Throw an ultra-rapid-design party, and do it in a single day.
• The MDI Air Car - the world’s cleanest car. - With the incorporation of bi-energy (compressed air + fuel) the CAT Vehicles have increased their driving range to close to 2000 km with zero pollution in cities and considerably reduced pollution outside urban areas.
• Chiquita Brands Funds Right-wing Death Squads in Colombia - If you have bought a Chiquita banana over the last 10 years, it is very likely that part of the money you spent went to right-wing paramilitary death squads in Colombia.
• TypePad: Censorship against blogs - If just sending an email to Six Apart is enough to remove a post that your company don’t like, what is freedom of speech for Type Pad customers?
• Windows Vista - Beneath the gloss they have hidden traps that take away important consumer rights, force expensive and environmentally damaging hardware upgrades.
• dotherightthing.com - Popular Stories - Do the right thing and change the world…
• 5 Reasons to NOT upload your Music or Videos to a Third Party - If you’re going to go through the trouble of cutting a video, mp3, Podcast, etc., spend the money and host it yourself. That way you don’t have to agree to some of these bizarre Terms of Use.
• BBC NEWS | Business | Google’s copyright nightmare - Until now most copyright holders had little incentive to sue YouTube. Now that YouTube is part of the Google empire, with a market capitalisation of $129bn (£70bn), there is a serious incentive to let the lawyers off the leash.
• Highway shut for butterfly travel - Taiwan is to close one lane of a major highway to protect more than a million butterflies, which cross the road on their seasonal migration.
• TV networks plan rival to YouTube - “NBC Universal and Fox will put top shows such as 24, House and Heroes as well as hit movies on the site”
• Federal agency bans Microsoft Vista - “At least two federal government agencies are refusing to upgrade their computers with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system, citing concern over costs and compatibility issues.”