I want to start this week by asking you all to keep the Gulf Coast in your prayers. They are all still recovering from hurricane Katrina and will most likely be doing so for some time to come. However, hurricane Rita currently has set a course for the Gulf Coast and is expected to become a category 4 hurricane (one category stronger than Katrina) before it makes landfall somewhere on the coast of Texas this Friday-Saturday. Please
keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

  • Moving Webhosts
    This week I was having problems with my hosting account causing
    500 internal server errors. Because of an unrelated matter, the
    host was not able to resolve the problem quickly enough, through
    no fault of their own. I decided it would be in my blog and my
    readers’ best interest simply to move it to a new hosting
    account.
  • Leaving The Perfect Comment
    Darren’s post at ProBlogger stirred up a bit of controversy
    over leaving signatures in comments on other blogs. I started
    to write a response in his comments until I realized my response
    was a post in and of itself. I believe it’s best to find a happy
    medium and to do that, one would need to craft the perfect
    comment and blogmasters need to help those who comment
    on their blogs. Meet in the middle.
  • A New Kind of Spam Exploit Using Web Forms
    A few weeks ago I began receiving odd queries through my online
    contact form through a couple of my websites, after inspecting
    the forms, I realized that it was a slick spammer trying to find
    a way to exploit my web forms in order to enslave my hosting
    account and remain anonymous. This spammer is using a number of
    different AOL email addresses as drop boxes where he can then
    harvest the exploitable forms. It’s important to make sure your
    web forms, whether or not they are PHP, ASP, or CGI are secure.
  • Google Blog Search
    There was a recent hubbub because Google launched their own blog
    search service. I tried out a couple search phrases and was
    impressed with the speed. Some have experienced an unhealthy
    number of splogs in the results, however, my searches yielded
    legitimate sites. This will be a wait and see game - hopefully
    the spammers don’t ruin it for the rest of us ;) .
  • Editorial Guidelines For Your Blog
    Editorial guidelines aren’t just for newspapers anymore. If you
    are blogging, you can rest assured that anything you say can and
    will be scrutinized. When you develop a proper plan for your
    blog, you can ensure (or at very least, minimize) the potential
    damage that may be done if the wrong person happens to read your
    blog.