Today is National GIS Day, a day to gather together and celebrate the wonders of Geographic Information Systems.

Apparently enough people use GIS here at my office to make this a big deal.

Okay, here’s a tip I need to remember. How to use mod_rewrite to redirect any request for an .asp page to its .html equivalent.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.asp$ $1.html [R=301,L]

This will come in so handy when I finally move my site over to PHP and Apache.

I’m starting to see some of the new forms of spam cross my path. For one, I’m seeing referrer spam on this site. Sites like kwlablog and jennifersblog (no links, for obvious reasons; just add .com if you want to see them) are showing up in my referrers, and while they look, smell, act, and taste like real weblogs they’re really just fronts for linkfarms and porn sites, trying to use my PageRank to boost theirs. Each one has links to news articles and a little blogroll (which actually seems to be the last 16 referrers), and probably takes 30 seconds a day to maintain. And at the very bottom, in a hidden link, is a pointer to their “adult-webcam” site. And that link is the whole point of the site.

There’s more analysis at idly.org, as well as someone who’s tracking down the original sites whose designs are being stolen for these ripoffs. But the most pessimistic analysis comes from Mark Pilgrim:

Weblogs may turn out to be The Next Thing for spammers, the next vector to exploit. And if that’s true, then things are going to get really ugly really quickly. If you’re up for that fight, then take them on, Godspeed. But prepare yourself for the worst, and then imagine something worse than that, and then accept that your imagination is too limited, because it will be so much worse than that.

I’m also getting good old fashioned comment spam on an MT site I don’t even use, but suddenly that doesn’t seem so bad anymore.