Spammers are clearly running out of ideas. Today I came across a new form of spam that targets incoming links on blogs and other sites. I like to call this ‘Incoming link spam’.

Anyone with a WordPress blog, for example, will know the ‘Incoming Links’ section on their dashboard that displays information on who is linking to your blog. I checked the dashboard on one of my sites today and noticed a link that was quite obviously spam. (more…)

I live in a country where our local musicians, media, politicians, creatives and the blogosphere share something in common; the abject celebration of mediocrity. I believe that this perpetuates a prosaic environment in which many do the minimum to get by. After all – there is little incentive to be excellent at what you do when you are praised for being average. My intentions are not negative or pessimistic in addressing this issue, however. I want to see clever, creative and ingenious South Africans celebrated and acknowledged on the world stage, and back at home. But this can not happen if we continue to focus on self-reference, think locally and applaud bland and uninspired performances. Criticism is a vital tool for improvement and one that is not employed with enough frequency in SA, as is the case with our environment of generally apathetic consumerism that has led to a generally unacceptable service industry. (more…)

Following hot on the heals of the major 2.5 overhaul of WordPress, the WordPress development team today launched version 2.6 of the popular content management system.

The following video from the WordPress development blog outlines the new features including easy content sharing, gallery ordering and support for Gears. I’ll be upgrading all of my sites today.