What would people not do to get traffic to their site!

Today I saw a spike in traffic on one of the blogs I contribute to http://blog.expulp.com and went to check where the traffic was coming from. Turns out it’s all coming from some Forex site that’s been doing referrer spamming to my blog, as explained here: http://www.businesshut.com/spam/google-analytics-referrer-spam/.

Definitely not a big deal but certainly annoying.

2012 search predictions: the experts’ view – Econsultancy (blog)

Via Scoop.it – Human Powered Search

2012 search predictions: the experts’ viewEconsultancy (blog)I’ve been asking a number of search experts to look back to last year, as well as giving their predictions and hopes for 2012.
Via econsultancy.com

What is The Future of Human Powered Search?

Via Scoop.it – Human Powered Search

Mahalo popularized the term “human powered search” when they launched just over a year ago. Many of the pitches we get still use that term as part of their positioning. Many of them are bootstrapped, so the price of entry is clearly low.
Via http://www.readwriteweb.com

Disabling ftpd on Ubuntu

I wanted to disable FTPd on Ubuntu 10.10, but couldn’t figure out which ftp program I had installed. After checking the /etc/init.d folder, /etc/ folder and running a ‘find’ on anything that resembles an ftp program, here is what I found:

ftpd is part of openbsd-inetd, a service that is started automatically and can be configured via /etc/inetd.conf.

To disable FTPd:

1. Comment this line under /etc/inetd.conf (via sudo or as root)
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.ftpd

2. restart inetd (via sudo or as root)
/etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart

et voila!

Youtube: finally a decent UI!

Youtube is launching a new UI… I always thought their UI was a hack job, but that is changing very soon. They have a new UI deployed. Not yet for public, maybe it’s in the process of being A/B tested.

To get the new UI, follow the instuctions below:

1. Go to youtube.com
2. Press Ctrl + Shift and J in Chrome to open the “Developer Tools”. In Firefox  Press Ctrl+Shift+K to get the console.
3. Click on the “Console” and key in:

document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU”;

4. Reload and enjoy!

Here is a snapshot of the new UI:

Youtube New UI