Canned meat

  “No spam” graphic by hegarty_david (flickr)

This is my fiftieth post, and I can’t stand it.  I just have to get it out of the way, so the muse is upon me.

I once read somewhere that a weblog is considered established (for what purpose, I can’t recall) when it has been online for at least six months and its content consists of at least fifty unique posts.  I’m not certain what they meant by “unique,” but my stuff is nothing if not different.

This domain went public on March 28th with the release of Geert Wilders’ film FITNA (“Too many copies, not enough jihadis”) and here I am just over six months later with my fiftieth piece.

Now if only I could remember what it is I’ve established.

I’ve learned a lot in these six months about the technical side of things, which is a relief to my webmaster.  There are a lot of regular and occasional problems involved in blogging, and one nasty problem is the matter of security.  If you have a hosted blog you’re a target for all sorts of drive-by attacks, and if your niche happens to be the anti-jihad, you’re also a target for more concerted and directed hacks.  I take all this seriously and do what I can, and I’ve also been conscientious to ensure that I’m not myself the cause of anyone else’s headaches.  Neither spammed nor a spammer be, is my motto.

Although spam is only one aspect among several urgent security concerns, it’s a significant and persistent one.  I’ve tried a few different strategies, and I’ve settled for now on one that entails a lot of different tools, routines, and practices.  Of course, security is a continual and evolving problem, so one needs to keep on it.  I employ various and sundry prophylactics, but as with safe sex, site security is more about what you don’t do, and abstinence doesn’t get the respect it really deserves.  Think about it: if you turn off your computer, you won’t get any virtual bugs.  Fortunately, we don’t have to go to quite that extreme, but I have learned to save myself some trouble by simply avoiding problem sites where I might catch a cold.

I used to try to keep my finger on the pulse of the jihad by visiting Abdul in his cave or bomb crater, but just as you don’t want to share finger food with him right after you see him screwing the top back on that little bottle hanging from his neck, you don’t want to exchange digital saliva with him either.  Since this isn’t a technical or geek blog, I’ll spare you the details of what I’ve done to myself by going where no infidel has gone before.  It suffices to say that these days I don’t visit even mildly problematic sites.  Remember, it’s not just whom you’ve slept with; it’s also everyone with whom your partner has slept, and some of these guys sleep with goats.  Like many of you among my millions of adoring fans, I use McAfee Site Advisor alongside several other measures to warn me about potential hazards at sites with which I’m not intimately familiar.

McAfee Site Advisor is a project that analyzes websites for annoying or dangerous practices like spamming, gratuitous downloading, browser hijacking, privacy violations and more.  McAfee has a free plugin for the two major browsers that works in two ways.  Search results on any of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) are flagged and color coded: red is danger, yellow is caution (see offset graphic) and green is safe.  You’re also alerted to a site’s status if you arrive there via hyperlink or bookmark: the large, prominently displayed McAfee button on your browser glows the appropriate color.  Although these days one doesn’t see many red sites (Google has stripped them from its index by the time McAfee has completed their analysis) I meticulously avoid or immediately exit any site flagged red—no further thinking required—and I generally do the same with sites flagged yellow, even though I know that many of these are not serious concerns.  I just don’t have the time to read the advisory report to assure myself, and the information highway is a big place.  I drive in the fast lane and I simply refuse to ask for directions or stop to read road maps.  I’ll just go somewhere else and I’ll find out where I’m at when I get there.

Much of the time I just go to one of my favorite hangouts, such as Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, which I visit regularly for a rundown of the jihad du jour.  Imagine my wonder when I visited there last week and saw the Site Advisor button glowing yellow!  JW flagged for caution?  Unthinkable!  I’ve been reading, learning, and commenting there for years without a single problem, and the site has always been designated safe—that is, flagged green.  This was one advisory report I just had to read.  Here’s what McAfee has to say about JW’s questionable practices:

After entering our e-mail address on this site, we received 6.7 e-mails per week.

Hogwash.  I’ve never received any e-mail from Jihad Watch, other than once or twice when Robert was kind enough to take the time to respond to an e-mail from me.  But what’s this about entering an e-mail address?  Like many TypePad blogs, Jihad Watch doesn’t require you to enter your e-mail address, but you need to be signed in to comment, which means you must register with the TypeKey service, and it of course records and verifies your e-mail address.  Robert therefore has had access to my e-mail address for a few years, but I get no unsolicited mail from him.

It was thus obvious to me that McAfee had registered a subscription with Jihad Watch for content updates, a service which most blogs offer in one form or another.  I wasn’t sure what kind of interface Jihad Watch employs for this purpose, since JW is not a site to which I subscribe.  There’s not much value in subscribing to a site which updates several times a day, especially if you also visit there on a more or less daily basis.  I subscribe to several sites via RSS, because most of these sites update much less frequently.  Rather than frequently check, for example, Dr. Andrew Bostom—who, like me, sometimes posts once or twice a week—to see if he’s published anything new, I just subscribe to his RSS feed and wait to be notified about new content.  No matter when you visit Jihad Watch (which includes its sister site Dhimmi Watch) there’s bound to be fresh content, so there’s really no reason to subscribe.  But JW does in fact offer a subscription e-mail service, and here are the instructions listed on the site, at the very top of the site’s sidebar:

Enter your e-mail address and check the appropriate button to subscribe or unsubscribe to a daily digest of updates to this site.

So the wizards at Site Advisor sign up for a daily e-mail digest of content updates, and then they suggest the site is spamming them with seven e-mails a week!  What’s curious about this is that, as I say, many if not most blogs offer an e-mail subscription service, so why aren’t most blogs flagged yellow?  I’ll let you decide if McAfee has an agenda here, but it really doesn’t matter.  Robert can survive this sort of thing because of his millions of readers, although he should worry, now that he’s been flagged,  about garnering his fair share of new visitors from search results—results he in fact dominates for all jihad-related queries.  But while we new bloggers are fighting off spam comments and trackbacks, hackers, and unauthorized access attempts, we can’t afford to be described as spammers.

So my first official act, now that I’m established, is to discontinue the sidebar portal for my FeedBurner e-mail subscription service.  It’s silly, but so is signing up for e-mail alerts and then alleging you’re receiving unsolicited mail.  Most of my subscribers receive their updates via RSS anyway, and those of you subscribed to the e-mail service will continue to find Haid Dasalami lurking in your inboxes.

I’m not certain you’ve heard the end of this from me, but I know McAfee hasn’t.  If you’re a regular Jihad Watch reader, you may also want to drop McAfee a line about your experience there, which I know is unmistakably positive.  You can even sign up as a Site Advisor reviewer and make your point official.  And if you’re a blog author with an e-mail subscription service, you may want to consider dumping it until this matter is resolved.

You want to be established, don’t you?