As for naraku, I’m not entirely sure what to turn this domain into yet. There’s a lot of history here and a decent number of visitors still for the archives. So it’ll probably continue to “live on life support” for now at least.

Head on over to Fun To Think About to keep up w/my daily Internety antics. Or follow me on twitter here and funtothinkabout here. Thanks for visiting!

the technique is utterly straight-forward: disable spambots by utilizing javascript to check for “humanity.” since spambots are very simple creatures, with small instruction sets, they do not parse or process the browser language of javascript. the procedure is as such: on page load append a teensy hidden input to the comment form and then check for it on submission.

tis the baseball season, so a metaphore about how simple this defense is is fitting: naraku’s wordpress now throws a curveball when spambots always expect a fastball. yeeer out! thanks justin!

(psst… another ad block too! *gasp*)

update 8/16/08:
a nice side effect of switching themes is that my bandwidth usage has nearly dropped by half, while this site’s number of pageloads continues to be on a steady incline. overall, I am very happy with change!

in a word: great! in one year I can count the issues I’ve had on one hand. I’ve spent about $15 on hosting for the year and only had downtime a couple times. their business mantra cannot be beat. it’s a bit like supporting a grass roots cause.

on a nitpicky note, nearlyfreespeech latency leaves a bit to be desired. the point click … load is not instant. I’d say about “a” second for most pages, sometimes two or three…. but always less than ten. :) this is via this website, naraku a wordpress blog, and my pet project Tastes Like Happy which is entirely isolated from any potential mysql db related latency (if there is any, I haven’t noticed.)

One of our largest MySQL servers lost three drives from a four-drive RAID in the past 24 hours. I just don’t know what they were doing with the electricity in there.

how the hell does that happen? srsly. there must have been like sparks, smoke and maybe even fire (fire fire! heheh.)

Tastes Like Happy represents the past 2 months of my independant work. as the sole designer, developer, Q&A guy, project manager, technology evangelist and visionary, it was pretty tough keeping everything together. this isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed it, oh I have.

I have made an attempt to maintain a developer blog, although it doesn’t quite meet the expectation I set for myself (in terms of thoroughness) here

if you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, let me know!

stay tuned, tastey things are coming.

what a ridiculous means of creating income: annoying the living fuck out of your fellow man. THANX, JERKASSES.

if you are some oddly generous person who stumbled upon my site or an avid reader (so sorry for you, my last post was 3 months ago) I can accept donations for hosting. they are all retroactive so … – nevermind, it’s a pain in the ass to set up. later, maybe.

anyway hopefully this works out. the migration wasn’t too hard. setting up wordpress was easy & painless.

Home page crawl: Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Sep 20, 2006.

what the fuck? I added a sitemap to the same page about a week ago… no change. google is downloading the sitemap daily but nothing more. I’ve yet to find any answers and am properly frustrated about it. it does not seem like I am on any spam list – excluded from indexing – but perhaps I need to submit a reinclusion request? none of the discussion groups seem to have any insight to this predicament either. help!?

Naraku is a Japanese word with many translations:

kanji: 奈落
katakana:ならく
english:naraku - (n) hell, hades, eternity, theater basement

• what Naraku use to mean to me:

  – eternity is what we had in mind. it was, for a time, the word and symbol of our love. first love’s forever, right? yeah, right. so that’s it. since that’s been over for nearly 5 years, it has become my domain name of choice and will remain in my possession until an act of God or otherwise forces me to give it up. actually the word has proven quite ironic – considering its other meanings and the demise of the said us.

• what Naraku now means to me:

  – first of all, I like alliterations: Nate’s Naraku Net. I suggest everyone use more of em. they tickle the tongue and the tympanic tunnel. in addition, the word Naraku itself sounds cool no matter what language or dialect you speak. try it.
  – trouble pronouncing? listen here – nate’s naraku network, I am dork hear me roar.
  – Is there really such a negative connontation for this word among Japanese? I’ll find out, special report due out soon.

• what Naraku is not:

  – an inuyasha character, seriously. most of my search engine hits are from that little shit. while he does sound like a badass villian, he has absolutely no place on this site. wikipedia’s entire entry on naraku is devoted to him.
  – an underworld solice for myself; it has evolved a lot since then. the word has taken on a new meaning for me – for a long time it served as a destination for my depressed thoughts. now that much of the need for that is gone, a new name may be more appropriate… special report on new name due soon.

first of all, especially if it is brand new, go ahead and submit it to the biggies:

• Yahoo (inktomi) Search
• Google Search

second, since google is the most prevalent of search engines today, it would be in your best interests to explore the utilities that they have set up to us:

• Google Webmaster Tools

I just set up a sitemap (a rather tedious task) in hopes it will improve googlebots enjoyment of naraku. seochat has a good exploration of the info a sitemap provides googlebot.

lastly, there is a huge market for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – quite the buzz word for webmasters. lots of people claim they can get you on the top search results if you pay them to do so. it’s up to you. I am taking the cheap route and doing it myself whereever possible.

these sites have some decent info though they are not exactly pretty to look at, and not much of it is all that recent:

• SEO chat
• Submit Corner
• while I hate about.com and their incredibly thick ad layer, this page has some good tips and fundamentals to SEO.
• http://www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm

this list will be continually updated as I research and find the best of the best.

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