Chad’s got another good post about the travails of trying to get a “good” RSS 2.0 feed out (here) along with this link to his un-funky 2.0 template.

www.hotscripts.com
www.totalscripts.com
www.scriptsearch.com

Chad discusses SPAM in this weblog entry and lists a couple of pretty good services to help block SPAM. I HATE getting SPAM and I’ve tried just about every service out there and, while SPAM blocking is certainly one element of a successful crusade, I find that separation of email addresses is crucial — i.e. discardable email addresses. There are many services that allow you to create discardable addresses and I’ve tried quite a few. The one that I swear by is Mailshell. I’ve been using this service for 2 years now, 1 as a user of the free service and 1 where I’m actually paying for it.

The idea behind Mailshell is that you “own” a subdomain and can create and “delete” addresses at will (I put delete in quotes because deleting an address doesn’t actually delete it but causes the service to bounce mail back to the sender). So, you could sign up for, say, ts-links and you would get ts-links.mailshell.com. When you sign up for a newsletter from ZDNet and they ask you for an email address you can give them [email protected]. Mail comes in to that address and you can send email originating from that address. If someone else uses that email address to communicate with you, BANG! — you know where they got it. Naming follows whatever standard you want cause you pick each and every address you want to use. Make ’em meaningless if you want or as meaningful as you care to get. Me, I try to use the name of the service it’s related to so, yes, I have a zdnet and a cnet and a blogger.com.

Mailshell also has a great feature called “remote compose”. With this feature you can compose email on your “home” account (AT&T, AOL, MSN, whatever) and send it through your ISP to Mailshell. When the service receives the message it throws away all the mail headers and creates a brand new set that only reference mailshell servers — et voila! — no indication that the message originated anywhere other than Mailshell. And if you own your own domain they will, for an additional fee, be your mail exchanger (MX records for the DNS literate).

PC Magazine has a review of 12 PDF creation tools, at least one of which is free.

I got a Mailblocks account back during the introduction when they were $10 for 3 years. At that time their IMAP server couldn’t handle requests from my favorite text-mode mail user-agent (MUA) Pine. I sent their technical support folks several messagea about it but never got anything even remotely satisfying from them. Well, the challenge/response model has lost some of its sparkle and I just kinda let it lie. They relaunched a week or two ago with a new version of their system and apparently they fixed their IMAP server, too, cause now it works just fine with Pine.

MajorGeeks brings you this update on the Esselbach Storyteller CMS System V1.2, a free PHP-based web content management system which is actually used by MajorGeeks to manage their site. Only 114KB and it can support up to 99 web sites.

This article in CNet shows that hackers are actively exploiting the DCOM hole that everyone was talking about last week (Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-026). I strongly recommend that you make sure your people know about the fix. You
should also consider recommending that they shut off DCOM altogether, especially if there’s ANY chance they’ll be connecting to the Internet away from home or if they don’t have a firewall at home.

Bloki.com now has weblog import working!

Ok, to review:

* they provide free web pages — and NO banners
* you can select from several templates and modify them as you desire
* they have a full-featured HTML editor
* each account has forums
* each account has a weblog
* each weblog has comment capability
* each weblog has an XML feed

What’s the downside? Uhh … I don’t care for the overall look — kinda 50’s bowling-shirt retro. But, hey, their feature list is great and they actually listen to their users. They have a Yahoo! group and a discussion forum on their web site, both of which they monitor and respond to. I’m preparing to move my weblog over there if I can master their HTML editor — I gotta admit, though, blogger.com’s weblog editor is extremely easy to use … it’ll take some effort for me to abandon it.

Thanks to my brother for these:

http://winfingerprint.sourceforge.net/
http://www.softperfect.com/products/networkscanner/
http://www.gfisoftware.com/lannetscan/

From Woody’s Office Watch of August 1, 2003. There’s a wealth of information that can be stored in a Word document that you might never see. Witness this story on ComputerBytesMan that discusses some interesting information stored in a UK government Word document dossier on Iraq. Fascinating reading!

If you just wanna cut to the chase, in Word 2002, go to Tools -> Options -> Security and check the box labelled “Remove Personal Information From This File On Save” and then save the document. According to Woody’s investigations, this information is not recorded in any easily retrievable form in Word 2002 nor Word 2003 documents; it’s only present in Word 97 and Word 2000 files.