Hi,

First things first: thank you for Akismet!

… I just wanted to offer my sincere appreciation for the Wordpress anti-spam plugin: ‘Askimet’.

This nifty plugin has saved me countless hours (and possibly days) of work by filtering out hundreds of spam post each and every day!

I can easily say that for me, Askimet has proven to be the most important plugin for Wordpress.

… Just in the time it took me to write this post, Askimet has caught 7 spam comments!

If you see a spammer, smack him!

It is clear that blog spammers are among the worst of Web citizens. They are the hyena’s of the Web, trying to steal traffic they don’t deserve.

Blog spam protection tips

Being a high value spam target (the juicier the traffic …), I can offer the following advice:

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One of the Web’s most popular places to get an idea of a web site’s traffic is Alexa.com.

There is one major problem though: Alexa is not accurate at all.

Alexa gets a lot of it’s traffic data from its’ Alexa toolbar and other nebulous source they don’t identify. So that leads me to think that they still get most of their data from the toolbar.

Sounds OK, except for one glaring problem – who uses the Alexa toolbar?

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One question that is put to me from time to time is:

“… how can you budget the amount of time it will take to build a website?”

This can be a tricky thing because there are so many factors involved:

• How fast do you work?
• Is your client going to be really picky and ask for many revisions?
• Are you likely to come across time consuming bugs?

Ultimately, you will have to learn how fast it takes YOU … to build a website.

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Hi,

When I was working on the redesign of the killersites.com, I found (as a starting point) that the templates that ship with Dreamweaver CS3 useful.

Dreamweaver CS3 starter templates

Dreamweaver has a nice collection of bare-bones web templates. One thing I found cool about these templates, is that they contain a lot of notes that describe why they (the web-nerds at Adobe) have certain things in place – like the specific code they used to deal with a given CSS layout issue.

… This is another good way to learn more about CSS.

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Up until Flash CS3, I think Flash had been slowly drifting into becoming a niche market technology. But now, Flash CS3 (and the Flash player 9) puts Flash back into the game as an important player.

… This means that it now makes more sense for web developers to learn Flash technology. I go over some of the details below.

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