Creekside Chatter

So what is the best strategy for dealing with content-scraping scumbags? My personal three-tiered strategy includes the following levels of action:

• Do nothing.
• Always include lots of internal links
• Stop the bastards with a well-placed slice of htaccess

These are the tools I use when dealing with content scrapers. For bigger sites like DigWP.com, I agree with Chris that no action is really required. As long as you are actively including plenty of internal links in your posts, scraped content equals links back to your pages. For example, getting a link in a Smashing Magazine article instantly provides hundreds of linkbacks thanks to all of thieves and leeches stealing Smashing Mag’s content. Sprinkling a few internal links throughout your posts benefits you in some fantastic ways:

• Provides links back to your site from stolen/scraped content
• Helps your readers find new and related pages/content on your site
• Makes it easy for search engines to crawl deeply into your site

So do nothing if you can afford not to worry about it; otherwise, get in the habit of adding lots of internal links to take advantage of the free link juice. This strategy works great unless you start getting scraped by some of the more sinister sites. In which case..

Great stuff! Read the entire article.

A fresh insight into life in the trenches in World War One has been discovered in a series of amazing sketches and drawings found in a soldier's diary hidden away for 90 years.   

Lieutenant Kenneth Wootton's 120-page journal vividly brings to life the horror of major WWI battles, and even includes detailed ink drawings of tanks and battle movements.

Lt Wootton, who was awarded the MC for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty, kept a diary from 1915 until 1917, when he was sent home to England after being injured in an explosion.

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Startling discovery: A soldier's-eye view of the horrors of WWI caught in sketches in an intimate diary. Here Lt Wootton's eerily beautiful watercolour shows a French-built Renault FT17 tank - the first 'modern tank to be built - on the battlefield

Now the diary and Wootton's incredible pictures have been found by his great granddaughter, who inherited a mass of old books and papers and discovered the diary lying inside.

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From PRWeb:  The new Gutenberg eReader Android app, which delivers free ebooks on demand, is now shipping through the Google Android Market. The Gutenberg eReader provides an intuitive interface to browse through the Project Gutenberg catalog and lets users read any ebook on the device.

Nuance has addressed some of these deficiencies in its 2.0 overhaul of the product. The recognition engine is now the same one used in the latest version Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows (version 11), and the software adds better controls for manipulating the mouse curse and for performing basic tasks, like searching Google. And editing, long the thing that kept me from using MacSpeech Dictate on a regular basis, is now said to be better, with commands that are "easy to say, easy to remember, and designed to simplify and speed up editing by voice." We'll see.

The new version requires Snow Leopard. It goes for $199, though users of earlier Dictate versions can upgrade for $49. We'll put the new Dictate through its paces and bring you a full review soon.

In an exciting addition for all platforms, Photoshop Elements 9 takes the power of one of Photoshop CS5's most popular features, Content Aware Fill, and puts it into the Spot Healing Brush. This powerful new tool can be used to remove specific objects from an image by analyzing the surrounding information. Also new to this version are Layer Masks, which can be used to block out specific parts of images with varying transparency levels.

Users new to photo editing can use the program's guided edits to learn how to make basic or fun edits to their images, including imitating the toy camera look, with easy to follow step-by-step instructions. Photographers can then share their creations by posting them directly to sites like Facebook and Flickr from the organizer, or by using any of the templates included in Elements 9 to create scrapbooks, photobooks, online albums, or slideshows.

The Elements Organizer lets users sort images in a number of ways, including with automatic face recognition and keyword tags. A new auto-analyzing tag feature analyzes the content of images, such as lighting and contrast, to smartly suggest appropriate keyword tags.

It won't be cheap - $100 - but if the Elements Organizer can handle large photo collections, it may be worth it.

It’s a perfectly acceptable trade-off to have iOS 4 on the tablet. And it’s a first beta. And it’s got wireless printing and AirPlay. I agree with John when he says that, considering the previous nature of the device, iOS 4.2 might turn out to be the best software update of all time.

I'm really looking forward to November!

Unknown Horizons is a free colony simulation game that lets you experience what it would have been like to start a colony – to strike out in search of unknown horizons.

Game Start & Settings

What impressed me about this game is that even though it is free and open source (available for either Windows or Linux) – you get the impression that it’s a commercial game. The graphics and the soundtrack are enthralling, and will immediately draw you in. From the main menu, you’ll see a ship steering wheel with options to configure the settings, view the help menu or start playing a game session.

This would be fabulous on the iPad!

dotEPUB is software in the cloud that allows you to convert any webpage into an e-book.

For content consumers (readers), we have developed a bookmarklet (or  favlet) for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari. And, if you are a Google Chrome user, you can install the dotEPUB extension in your browser.

For content producers (editors, authors), we offer a widget. See the tips for webmasters. For more customizable results, developers can use our API.

Features

Download webpages to any epub-compatible device:  e-readers, tablets, smartphones, netbooks, desktop computers...

Save now and immersively read later (even offline) those long and deep articles you didn't have time to read while browsing.

Build a personal library of your favorite blog posts, news articles, etc.

Compatible with the IPhone, the IPod Touch, the IPad, the Sony Reader, the Nook, the iLiad, the BeBook, the Cool-er, the CyBook, the Alex eReader, the Kobo eReader, the Elonex eBook, the eSlick, the eClicto, the Hanlin eReader, the QUE ProReader, the Papyre, the Leqtor...

Finally, infinite content for your e-reader... with a single click!

And, because it is software in the cloud, you benefit from the improvements of future releases without having to re-install anything.