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23
Aug 10

Word of the Day: jekjxcntwdhsencnj

Not surprisingly, I get a lot of spam comments to this blog. Recently I noticed strings of letters appearing in the text of the comments. For example, “jekjxcntwdhsencnj” is in several comments that contain links to a registry cleaner. One must ask why make an obvious spam comment stand out any more than it already does? I’ll speculate that it gives the spammer a way to track their comments and concentrate on sites that allow comments to be posted without moderation. In fact a quick Google search of “jekjxcntwdhsencnj” found 748 hits and a search of “jekjxcntwdhsencnj registry” found 821 hits. Many of these sites were flagged as questionable by Norton Internet Security.

Several means are available to combat spam comments.

  • Turn the comment feature off on your blogging platform.
  • Moderate comments. In other words, you must check all comments and allow only the real ones into the system.
  • Blacklist the IP address. This option allows you to completely block the IP address of the spammer but is easily bypassed if you cannot specify an address range.
  • Work with your hosting provider to explore other options.

1
Mar 10

ISBN Web Service

I have written a Perl script to decode the Cuecat output so I could capture ISBNs and catalog my book collection.  Several sites host Web services that return book information given the ISBN.    Below is a GET request that requests the title of  The 2007 ARRL Repeater Directory.

http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9780872599901?method=getMetadata&format=txt&fl=title

By modifying the last variable in the URL, specifically the value after “fl=”, the publication date or author can be retrieved.  See examples below:

http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9780872599901?method=getMetadata&format=txt&fl=year

http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9780872599901?method=getMetadata&format=txt&fl=author