All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Baby Jade

On Sunday 6th February at ~11.40am Jade Ellousie Salisbury was Christened. Claire and I took the trip to Toowoomba for the occasion!

It was held at Saint Lukes church at about 11.15am, however given there were other parents with kids coming, it started a little late. Everything went smoothly and their little bloke Fletcher, thought the alter was just fantasic, couldn’t keep away from it!

Once it all got underway, there was a little bit of the standard church stuff and then the christening. Baby Jade was very well behaved and didn’t put up much of a fight at all, which was a kind gesture from her I think.

While Rachel, Stuart, Fletcher and the Minister were up on the blessing area, I was in charge of taking some photos for them. Not sure how that is going to go just yet, but we’ll see soon enough.

Rel=”nofollow” Follow Up

The rel=”nofollow” is certainly coming into effect already, with quite a few prominent weblogs implementing it themselves, installing a patch/update or a plugin.

In my previous comment about it, I mentioned that I felt that it isn’t the search engines job to filter out spam and that it should rest on the owner of the site to make sure thier particular backyard on the internet is mowed.

With that in mind, we clearly need to come up with some alternative methods to combat spam. There are a few options which would invariably slow down most spammers, but not all, lets investigate a few of them.

The first being mandatory registration on your site to leave a comment. The problem with forced registration, is that it doesn’t lend itself to someone being linked to your site and leaving a comment. Signing up on every site is just a pain in the arse, you know it and so do I, so for the moment, that isn’t an option.

Secondly, I think forcing comment moderation is an option. However, if you have an active blog, the inherent workload for the owner is quite tall. There is also the downside that people leaving comments on your site can’t view them, or participate with other users, until you approve their comments. Not ideal, we’ll leave it for the moment.

Third, this isn’t all that likely. Allow anyone to post comments to your site and their comments go live, but be examined for spam content before posting. This is fine, except where the spammers leave a non-spam like comment with a link. At which point, it gets posted and they get their reward. We could take it further and parse their input, pull down the text for the page they are linking to and parse the html for illegal keywords (in the same line of thinking as Squid might if it was proxying content).

Fourth and this is really a category of tactics. User interogation when they post. For instance, they go to post and before they do, they have to enter a string that is blurred within an image (done before). What about a random but easily answered question? This line of thinking I think, would make it much harder for spammers to automate their attacks; especially if the challenge was random.

Fifth, change the way we accept comments. For instance, most spammers will pick a particular type of blogging software and attack it because it is simple. Look at MT, when you submit a comment with that software, the feedback is always posted to comments.cgi or the like of. If I were a spammer, that is making my life very simple. Make it more complex, lets make the submission URL synthetic, so they can’t hardcode it. Lets link the synthetic URL to their session id and make it available for only x minutes at a time. Check that the referrer for the submission is in fact your own site and that the HTTP header information is all there and intact.

At this point, I havn’t thought the fifth item right through; however I feel that there might actually be some merit in it. What about a combination of all of them, varying from submission to submission; just to keep them guessing a little.

What ideas have crossed your mind about it?

Rel=”nofollow”

Recently a bunch of people (precompiled list, thanks Google) decided to make an attempt at reducing the significance of comment spam on websites.

The concept, in short, is that any feedback provided by the user with links in it, will have the rel=”nofollow” attribute in place. When the search engines index the page, they won’t count any links with rel=”nofollow” as an incoming link to that particular site; thus removing the reward for a spammer.

The reason I’m undecided about the outcome/reason behind this method, is that it will remove the reward for a genuine user to gain popularity through participation. The sake of example, lets consider someone who participates online all the time, is an active part of the community, however does not feature in other sites blogrolls. He gains popularity for his site through participation on other peoples sites. Now, with the rel=”nofollow” in place, he loses that popularity; thus reducing his position in search results.

In my opinion, it is the users problem to make sure their site isn’t spammed (think of it like mowing your lawn) and the search engines job to rank the content.

I think there are alternatives and I’ll write about them shortly.

The Photographer

Tonight, Claire and I drove back to Brisbane (again) to go and see a photographer for our wedding.

We’ve been told that there are a few things you absolutely can’t leave till the last minute for a stress free wedding. A condensed list looks something like this:

  1. Venue
  2. Photographer
  3. Women’s stuff

Well, we’ve already sorted the venue, it is at the Stamford Plaza. Claire has decided to get her dress made by the wonderful Brisbane dress makers at Airs and Graces. It isn’t completed, however it is at the dress makers and under control. I’m told she looks breathtaking in it, yippee! So that leaves a photograher.

Without really knowing what separates a good one from a bad one, we decided to ask around a little. As it turns out, the wife of one of my brothers used to do photography. Their wedding album was superb, so it seemed logical that we’d start there.

We then booked an appointment to see Jason from Studio 60 and what we saw was nothing short of awesome. He had a fantastic variety of albums on hand in a multitude of different styles. Claire and I were thrilled with what we saw and his pricing scheme (although a little expensive), seemed very logical.

We had a good chat about everything and when we were leaving, he gave us the names of three or four of his colleagues (I know, who would have thought he would give us the names of some of his competitors!).

Turns out, I honestly think he is in it to try and deliver a great product. If we don’t go through him, he still wants us to get a good product, which is a testiment to his character in my opinion.

Hopefully, we’ll be seeing more of him in the future!

An Engagement Party

Well it took us about 6 months, but it finally happened. On Saturday 29th January, we had our engagement party at the Avanti Cafe in Brisbane.

We had the choice of a couple different types of meals, so we ended up selecting a combination which consisted of:

Starters
A trio of Italian Dips served with fresh focaccia, garlic pita and crispy lavosh bread.

Main

  1. Spaghetti Bolognese: Rich authentic meat sauce
  2. Penne Ai Funghi: Fresh button mushroom, garlic, onion, white wine and a dash of cream.

Dessert
An choice of Brisbane’s best N.Y. Baked Cheesecake or Rich Double Chocolate Mudcake served with cream and strawberry garnish.

When the food was bought out, I thought there was honestly not going to be enough to go around. Ohh how wrong I was! By the time everyone had finished eating, there were two or three platters that were barely touched; which equates to a whole lot of food.

The night went off pretty smoothly I think, however we did have a hickup upon arrival with the power in our area. Apparently something had happened that required Ergon/Energex to come to the restaurant and repair it. For our apparent inconvenience, we were given a couple bottles of wine. It was fine really, we were drinking regardless, but the gesture was nice.

The party was just close friends really, so about 20-25 of us turned up. If I had of had more time and such things, I would have invited some more friends. A little bit of a shame, but they are hopefully coming to the wedding; so that is ok.

Well, next on the agenda will be a wedding; the clock is ticking for the 24th September 2005!