OMG! Am I high or is there really CAPTCHAs all over Digg. Okay I have confirmed it, a people saw the CAPTCHAs too. Okay what’s going on?

What is Digg trying to do? Stop spammers? Well the only spammers I saw on Digg was those McCain or Obama supporting village idiots. Some guy commented on one of my submissions:

IF RON PAUL WOULD BE PRESIDENT, WE WOULDN’T NEED “HOW TO USE DIGG” GUIDES
RON PAUL 2012

Oh wait. Who’s Ron Paul again? I didn’t see him on the news or anything. Wait. WTF? I went to the profile of the retard who posted this and look what I found. He’s been spamming Digg about this Ron Paul guy. Seriously who the fuck is Ron Paul? Oh he was running for President.

You know what? I thank Digg. This was a smart move actually. Now idiots like him can’t post comments. They’ll be trying to figure out what they should enter. I bet most of those retards never even seen a CAPTCHA.

Man who’s idea was this? Kevin Rose? Ah who cares, but it was a brilliant one. Good bye <enter candidate’s name> “brigade” (that’s what they call those retards).

But, then I think about it and it makes me wonder if the activity on Digg is going to go down. Like people are pretty lazy and it takes a lot of effort to put in the CAPTCHA everytime you post a comment. I guess the people at Digg never thought of that. Or maybe the fat, lazy people will just quit using Digg. Not bad.

So, what do you think of this? Are you going to post comments and send mass shouts on Digg anymore or is it a lot of work for you? Are you thanking Digg for this or hating on them?

Update (3 hours later): Digg just realized that the activity was going to go down and the diggers were really pissed off. Now the good news is that they took off all the new CAPTCHAs. Thanks to my post (duh!).

Update (5 hours later): Sorry guys bad news. Digg is not taking the CAPTCHAs off. They are just testing it right now and that’s why it was a bit buggy. At the moment you can’t see them, but Digg will put them back eventually.

Did you hear about the OPML exploit on Feedburner that allows you to get a lot of subscribers? Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Wondering how this works? Well you make an OPML file with your RSS feed’s link pasted a couple of thousand times and then export it to Netvibes.

FeedBurner used to count each one of the thousand lines as a new subscriber. And that’s how you could jump up to a few thousand subscribers within 24 hours. Not a very honest thing to do though. I wouldn’t put up a fake feed count because I’m serious about what I do and I respect my visitors/readers. Oh and here’s the post from the guys who found the exploit.

So, you wanna try this exploit? Well too bad. The exploit has been fixed. I tried it myself yesterday and it doesn’t work anymore (I did this to check if it has been fixed or not). The thing that is pretty amazing is that FeedBurner fixed it within a few hours. Now that’s fast. But, they should have made some kind of official statement saying that its been fixed. I guess this small exploit wasn’t very important for them.

Keep in mind that there are still many ways to fake the feed count. So, don’t count it as a blog’s success or failure. Try not to judge the blogger based upon that number. The more important thing is the quality of content.

Hmm looks like Digg just got the “Digg effect”. You can never have enough bandwidth. Yeah that’s right folks. Digg is down. I’m not sure why. But, at first you couldn’t even load Digg and now they have a page with all their hot topics and the title of the page says “Digg will be back soon!”.

While we’re getting the site back up and running… check out the latest news before we took the site offline. If there are updates during this outage we’ll keep you informed on the Digg Blog. Thanks for your patience!

Okay so its confirmed that Digg ran out of bandwidth. Or maybe that’s not the reason. I can’t tell what’s going on. I’ll look around and update you guys. So, stick around!

Oh and here’s a screenshot of the “Digg will be back soon” page.

Update (10 mins later): Digg is back up again. Yay!

Update again: Looks like Digg’s acting as if it never happened. I emailed them. No reply. Checked their blog. No post about this. Oh well.

Sorry I couldn’t post yesterday. Had a problem with my VPS (I accidentally turned off the DNS server). Oh well. Its fixed now (my brother pointed it out). So lets move on to the important stuff.

Google Analytics (GA) is probably the most popular and detailed traffic analysis application. Well actually it used to be. Not anymore. Now we have a better and more privacy-friendly alternative. Its called Woopra. Its a pretty new and right now, its in beta. But still, it kicks ass!

The Features of Woopra

Its got all the features of GA. So its just as detailed as GA, but even better because it updates live. Yeah that’s right folks. Its always updating unlike GA which updates every 24 hours. Plus its got this really unique feature that builds profiles of your visitors and you can tag them. And you can even chat with your visitors. Now that’s just awesome.

Oh if you’re wondering how it lets you chat with your visitors. Let me tell you how. Just like GA you enter a few lines of JavaScript before the end </body> in your page. There’s a button on the Woopra desktop client (yes you need to install that) that lets you pop-up a chat screen on your site and then you can chat with that one particular visitor.

More Privacy-friendly! How?

Well duh! Its not related to Google. Thank God! Google like stalks us. They take information from your GA account about your site’s visitors. Learning your visitors habbits so they can show more relevant ads to them (and God knows what else).

What do YOU think?

Go ahead and give Woopra a try. I’m telling you, you’ll love this. Trust me. I loved it. Plus don’t forget to let us know what you thought about it and if you have an application like this in mind.

Yeah that’s right people. My spidey senses are telling me that the next PageRank is going to be within the next few days. I’m just sharing it with you guys. I know a lot of us don’t care about PR anymore (I don’t).

Oh look. I was right! Matt Cutts, head of Google spam team posted on his blog confirming this. Man my spidey sense are awesome. Just amazing, huh?

So tell us if you care about PR or not. I personally don’t. Like I do a bit, but I don’t go crazy about it (like all the people over at DP and a lot of other webmasters). I would be happy to have a high PR, but I wouldn’t do all the crazy link exchanges, backlinks, etc to get it. I would rather concentrate on writing great content for my blog.

Wanna check your PR? Head over to Smart PageRank or PRchecker.info. Or you can also check it from your Google Toolbar (but I wouldn’t install the Google toolbar).

Update: PR has been updated.