In a fascinating turn of events, a guy alleges he was getting a ton of SPAM (hardly unusual nowadays). Claiming he’d had enough, he sent an opt out request as is legal in his area. His opt out request was promptly ignored and after detailing the problem on his site, he had a lawsuit filed against him by the spammer, and all the while he says they were sending him yet more SPAM. They sued him for 3.8 million because he called them spammers. You need to read this folks, at the very least you’ll get a laugh at the spammers sheer audacity. www.SpamDVD.org is where you need to go for more information.

[update: We have been contacted by someone claiming to be a lawyer for the other side of this dispute. We invited them to submit their side of the story so we can present their side of things as well.]

Not long ago Google launched a beta service enabling web site owners / developers to create and submit a sitemap. The aim of this is to assist Google / Googlebot with the indexing of every page in your web site, using a standard XML format that lists every URL.

Popular reaction was undoubtedly to embrace this opportunity and start creating sitemaps straight away. Call me simple if you like, but when I started reading Google’s instructions I found it very confusing and very daunting. I consider myself to be highly competent in (x)HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but like many have had no exposure to XML format. The link to the Sitemap Generator looked promising (I was hoping for “Sitemaps for Dummies”) only to find that you need to have / understand Python to use it. It all looked too hard when I first saw it, so I shelved the idea for another day.
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In response to Microsoft’s questionable paid reports that Windows is cheaper in TCO then Linux comes two new reports from IBM that report the opposite, in fact according to the reports Linux is about 40% cheaper then Windows in the application server stakes.

In other news, the Massachusetts state government has decreed that from 2007 all documents saved by their employees will be saved in open formats. Unless Microsoft adds support for those formats to Office or creates plugins, they are going to lose a good many Office users, possibly to products like OpenOffice.

It has been going around for a couple of years now, and it seems to be popping up again and again. I’m talking about that e-mail we regularly receive from friends and contacts along the lines of:

“Those funny guys at Google are at it again! Go to Google, search on the phrase ‘miserable failure’ and hit the ‘I feel lucky’ button.”

If you don’t already know this one then I suggest you try it and see for yourself.

Having done that, do you think Google have weighed-in to political opinion? I’m afraid not.

This trick is the result of a Google Bomb, or multiple web page links to the White House page that are linked by the text “miserable failure”. Google’s search program (Googlebot) crawls through millions and millions of pages and indexes what it finds, and in this case it found many sites linked to George W’s page using this term. In fact the (deliberate) linking was so common that it drove the page to the #1 Google Page Rank for that search term.

Back in 2003 when this was “new news” BBC News reported on it, while urban legends site Snopes.com further explained how this came to be. A Google Bomb simply takes advantage of Google’s indexing and page rank algorithms, and could be manipulated by any of us in this way if we tried.

So the next time you receive this funny little e-mail from one of your friends or contacts, you’ll know what to tell them (while perhaps raining on their parade).

WebmasterWorld has just done a nice explanatory piece on the box model hack, both explaining why we need them, and showing how to work with them. Well worth the read for anybody wanting to use modern coding practises and still have the maximum browser visibility. Take a look.

Too bad I lack creativity because the job would be fun. Maybe one of our readers is interested in the job. Let us know if you get it and remember us on the first payday. You heard it hear … second 🙂

Domain names are a thing of much confusion. Microsoft has spent years chasing down people using similiar names to theirs to confuse people (supposedly). In the latest big case on domain name similarity, the owner of Fallwell.com (two letter “l’s” in both places) is permitted to keep his website up and running to the displeasure of Falwell.com (one “l” in the first instance). The reason was simple according to the United State Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit panel: Fallwell.com is clearly adverse to and not easily confused with Falwell.com because of the clear disclaimer of non-affiliation and because the content is actually critical of the latter’s site.