As you may have noticed, I didn't post on this blog for a few weeks, because I am having a hard working period at school...

This evening I looked at the DIY directory to see if everything was fine and to my surprise I found more than 400+ trackbacks in one of my posts... all from spammer's websites.

What is funny is that these spammers do not even know that they are having a hard time making bots that posts on blog for... nothing. DotClear, the blog engine that I use, automatically append a special invisible tag to every link posted by the users: the rel="nofollow" tag. This tag prevent the search engines to use the link in their rank calculation algorithm. For more informations, see the post about how to prevent comment spam at the official Google blog.

I was able to implement some preventing systems in the DIY directory blog engine thanks to the informations provided in several blogs (in French - sorry):

• Antispam pour DotClear (rétroliens) from Sacha
• Un antispam pour Dotclear

Thanks to these small modifications, most of the spams will be filtered out (at least for some weeks...), and user experience is not modified, i.e. you won't have to deal with unreadable CAPTCHAs to post a simple comment.

UPDATE (June, 18th 2006): A few days ago I made a modification to Sacha's script allowing blog owners to be notified when a trackback is notified. My modification has been included in his script and is currenctly being tested here.

I wish you all a Happy new year and a Merry Christmas.
I hope that the year 2006 will come with a lot of new exciting creations that I'll happily publish here !

Yea, I know - I'm quite early for the first wish and a bit late for the last one; I was not able to update the blog on December 25th, and I'm afraid I'll be very occupied on the 31st...

I have always loved to disassemble, and possibly improve each thing I have. And I'm not alone ! During the last years, I have regularly found personnal websites including informations about interesting and original hardware or software modifications that people have done. I have also found some original and clever inventions.
I am only interested in modifications or inventions that were done by individuals, not by companies with huge R&D funds.

I will publish some of these hacks in this blog, in the hope that it will give you some ideas, and maybe you'll end up with a clever modification or invention that could be published here ! Now that the DIY directory is born, I have to fill it. It will be a long and permanent task, but I hope that you will enjoy browsing through this list.