Sunday, July 20, 2003

Spam Count: 44,645

Spam Year Continues: As of this writing, the 2003 Spam Count has reached 44,645, which is significant only because it's just about where I thought it would be...at the end of the year.

When I decided, on a whim, to keep track of all the unsolicited, commercial e-mail I received this year, I estimated that on December 31, 2003, I'd wind up with about 45,000 spam messages, a guess borne out when by the middle of January, I was receiving an average of 118 spams each day. What a difference a few months make! We're 200 days in, over half the year past, and by the current count, I'm receiving an average of 222 spam messages each day.

On one hand, that's appalling. On another, it's perversely fascinating, watching number grow day by day. But one thing is clear, and was even before I began this little project: spam is out of control. Even though SpamAssassin catches nearly everything that isn't a valid e-mail message and shunts it into a separate folder so I can peruse it from time to time and even though I have a private, "unlisted" e-mail address for vital messages and family members, the amount of junk that passes through my server is intolerable.

I've hardly even got the worst of it. Last week, Lance told me he was receiving 3,000 spam messages per day. (It's a little apples-to-oranges, since Lance is trapping spam to every address at his domain, while I'm only counting mail to my primary address, but still!)

For the sake of the project, I'll be tolerating and counting spam for another few months but, come January 1, 2004, I'll start playing hardball in a couple of new ways, not least of which will be completely abandoning the e-mail address I've had for 5+ years. Until then, I'll be making guesses about what the year-end total winds up to be. My current bet is on an even 100,000.

Further: Within 30 seconds of posting this entry, another 31 spam messages arrived. And the beat goes on...

PVR Madness

The revolution will be TiVoed: My buddy Matt has launched PVRblog to talk about all matters related to digital video recorders such as TiVo, Replay and others.

It's certain I'll be following this regularly, particularly as I've added a TiVo upgrade to my list of projects to be accomplished as time and money permit.

Further thoughts on Movable Type

More MT thoughts: A few people have asked why I'm not regularly enabling comments on posts here, even though Movable Type makes it simple to do.

Essentially, I'm not interested in running a bulletin board or online community around Must See HTTP. Too many of my friends have had their spare time and karma sucked away by becoming de facto moderators of their own websites and I simply have no inclination to follow them. Further, very little of what I post here really invites discussion and, if you have something you simply must say to me, there's always good, old fashioned e-mail to accomplish that.

I will be turning on comments for posts, mainly calls for information, for which I do wish to actively solicit feedback. As I've often said, readers of The BradLands are among the smartest, most creative and best looking folks on the web. Seldom have I posed a question that wasn't answered shortly and completely by The BradLands Braintrust.

Also, some folks have noted that my switch to Movable Type represents my abandonment of hand-coding this website. In point of fact, although the entire site was originally done by hand, I've had stints with Blogger, Userland Frontier, and Radio Userland and, although Movable Type now drives this weblog and The Daily Brad, vast tracts of the site continue to rely on those applications, as well as ol' reliable BBEdit and my meager knowledge of HTML.

Meanwhile, a few thoughtful folks have recently published their experiences in using Movable Type to publish types of content outside the traditional weblog model. While these shoehorn approaches aren't suited for most of the sites I administer (of which this personal toss-off is only one), I do have one or two little projects that will benefit from this accumulated wisdom.

• Matt Haughey: Beyond the Blog
• Brad Choate: Doing your whole site with MT
• Doug Bowman: Rebuilding a Portfolio