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B&W Printing, Blog, Looking Back, Montclair NJ, New York City, People, Photography, Places, You Lookin at me?

Bryant Park Rainbow ( 100th Post !!! )

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Bryant Park Rainbow
Bryant Park Rainbow

Welcome to the 100th Post at DustAndRust! In my first post on this blog back in the fall of 2005, I wrote :

“I don’t really know what direction this blog will take…”

I think the lack of any effort I have put into finding a direction has been well worth it 🙂 . Having the blog as an outlet for my hobby has really given me a lot of satisfaction over the past four years, and I still look forward to capturing the next image that I think is worthy to share. I’d like to thank everyone who has come to look at my humble efforts, with a special “thank you” to everyone that has left a comment.

It’s been very interesting to watch the blog grow in the wilds of the inter-tubes. In the first month of the blogs life, I had 86 unique visitors, and just under 1000 page views. A good portion of those page views was probably due to me tweaking the layout. In March of this year, I had 9558 unique visitors, and over 40,000 page views. The biggest source of traffic has been Google Image Search, which drives almost exactly 50% of the visitors here.

I don’t have any major plans to change anything I’m doing here. As I’ve mentioned before, I will be offering B&W prints for sale in the near future… but for the most part the blog remains the same.

I’m looking forward to the next 100 posts. I hope I can get them here faster than the first 100.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sean

Blog, Miscellaneous

Who is wpblackhat?

1 Comment

I’ve noticed a significant increase in comment spam… mostly poorly hidden (sorry http://losebellyfat.profitcruiser.com ) I noticed some referrals coming in from http://wpblackhat.com/commenter/modifiedblog.html . After looking into it, I found this site : http://www.contentgeneration.org/wpblackhat-faqs/ . Apparently you can sign up for $89 a month and get lots of tools and scripts to fake out Google, Amazon, and other affiliate programs by forcing visitors directly to ad links when they click on links that are supposed to go to a real posting. The also have lots of blog scraping tools that will generate craptastic conglomeration sites using other peoples content, which they plaster with ads.

The end result is that it is getting very hard to tell a real comment from a spam comment… so many comments are going to the askimet spam folder.

While none of this appears illegal… i’m sure it will hurt everyone long term… bloggers, affiliate programs, and anyone doing a search for real content.