Not long back the stats file for my domain was attacked by referrer spam and the end result of that was my page rank in Google was lowered and my email filtered out by some organisations. I protected the stats files and created a .htacess file to begin bouncing the referrer spam back.

Anyway, I did a whois lookup for all of the domains responsible for the referrer spam and they all have a single Registrar that is
Go Daddy Software Inc and the registrant is Domains By Proxy, Inc.

The individual that owns the Go Daddy Inc company is Bob Parsons. I cannot help but think of Bob from Bob’s Country Bunker in the Blues Brothers movie. He has a blog at www.bobparsons.com. His blog’s banner features a picture of him (the lights are on but no one is at home?), a big motorbike, girls in tank tops, a 4WD and, you guessed it, the star spangled banner. Get the idea?

Domains By Proxy Inc protects the identity of the real owners of the domains. When you visit their web site there are two links on the home page as follows: “If You Are Law Enforcement ~ Click Here” and the other is “For our subpoena policies click here”. It makes you wonder where one should draw the line when it comes to privacy and the rights of the individual. Are they really protecting the privacy of individuals and families or are they actually providing a cover for the owners of web sites that represent the ugly side of the Internet?

I have wanted to do this for some time and at last my little project has a beginning. I have created technology tip sheets in the past and with this project I plan to bring them altogether in a single place. Anyway, the first few tips deal with finding files, searching the Internet and creating slideshows. Explore the tips here.

Read about Swickis today in the Sydney Morning Herald in an excellent article by Brad Howarth. In the article he made a reference to a relatively new technology called Swickis ~ a combination of a wiki and a search engine. I added one to my web site and I shall see how it works out. Another tool for Web 2.0.

My web site has recently undergone a major revision. I had been constructing the revised web site using Apple’s iWeb software application however the actual web pages took an eternity to download. They looked absolutely brilliant but each page element did take an age to download. I tried two different web servers just to check. One in Hong Kong and the other in Melbourne. Each web page looked messy as it downloaded as well. It was a real pity.

I borrowed the style of the iWeb “Gazette” template and built this using Macromedia Dreamweaver and simple html. Nested tables. I did not wish to play around with style sheets too much at this point. Maybe later. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements to create all of the photo gallery pages. I love the way you can manage sites in Dreamweaver and make site wide changes. Excellent!

The new web site has been uploaded. I also updated the Google sitemap. I need to fine tune it all a little. There is some redundancy in the code and I will rename some of the smaller images that act as spacers and background pictures so they download first. I will reduce the file size of some of the images too. So far, so good.