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. .

LinkedIn Profile Error

Websites

LinkedIn in error has added a previous job role to my list which I have never held.This evening I received a notification via LinkedIn about some contacts within my immediate reach which I didn’t know about. After sending out a couple of invitations which make sense to have within my network, I clicked into my profile to see the above item listed.

In the last approximately three years with BreakFree and subsequently Stella Resorts Group, my roles have been within the realm of development and business analysis. As you can imagine, I was a little shocked to see an incomplete previous position listed on my profile.

At a guess, this error must have happened in the last month or so; as I don’t remember it being there the last time I logged in. What is peculiar, is that the title of the position is for the right company and overlaps with my time with BreakFree and Stella Resorts Group. If it was going to error in this fashion, I would have expected a totally random job from an unrelated business or industry.

I don’t have a way of explaining it, so for the moment it has been removed and I’ll be keeping an eye on it in the future.

What’s In That Book?

General

I haven’t participated in a meme for a long time but Zac posted one I thought was kind of cool, so I’ll give it a lash.

  1. Grab the nearest book. (Don’t you dare dig for that cool or intellectual book in your closet) Or anything with words and enough pages to complete this task. You remember books, those thin strips of dead trees that have lots of words printed on them bound together down 1 side. People used to have them before eBooks and digital paper.
  2. Open the book to page 123.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

Constraints
There are legal constraints, regulatory constraints and constraints imposed by distribution systems. There may be constraints of time and constraints of price. The constraints may be constant or they may be changing.

The above came out of an Edward de Bono book named Thinking Course.

Blogging Is Meant To Be Personal

Blogging

Like most people, I read a lot of web sites and the majority of them I read because of their insight and personal opinion on any given topic. Of late, there have been a flurry of web sites that are automatically generating posts based of content on other web sites; such as del.icio.us.

I’m all for aggregation of content, its a really useful utility – however I don’t come to someone’s site to see a list of links to other web sites. I come to someones web site to read about a topic and if it happens to link out, well that is fine and dandy.

If you want to aggregate content, put the aggregated content into your side bar or in any location other than your primary content space. You should reserve your main content space for your own content or personal opinion on something – not for an aggregation.

Generating primary content automatically based on another web site, feed or service is just impersonal; don’t do it.

Akismet, Friends Forever

Blogging, Software

Akismet Spam Filter, Caught & Nailed 80,010 Spam Messages In Five MonthsIn the last five months, I have posted twice about the wonders of the free spam filtering service Akismet.

Since the last installment, another ten weeks have pasted. In the last ten weeks, approximately 30,000 new spam messages have been received and all of them have been blocked in one way or another. Since installing Akismet back towards the middle of last year, it has now dropped a whopping 80,000 spam messages at the door and it feels great!

You know what I’d like, I’d like it if the spammers were a little more intelligent. Clearly I’m running something on my site that is blocking their spam from ever reaching the public. If I were a spammer, I’d be keeping a close eye on what web sites my spam bots submit to and what sites it is getting through on. Essentially, if they are just brute forcing thousands of web sites – they are not being efficient spammers. At the moment, they could be spending the majority of their time spamming sites that the spam will never reach; instead of focusing their energies on the sites that spam is actually being registered on.

This can’t be a new idea but it sure seems as though the spam is relentless, even though it never makes it onto my live site.