The topic of this post is a word that was coined by a good friend of mine, Stryder. He knows I have it and has mocked me with it several times. But I don’t mind so much. He’s right, I have it. I have a (more than) slight addiction to leveling up. Although this would normally be related to games, I don’t think it’s restricted to just games.

I found a sudo-game  this weekend that I started playing. I’m not exactly sure it’s really a game… I don’t know what to call it yet. The name of this “game” is The Passively Multiplayer Online Game (link). Yup, that’s the name of this game and not just a description.

Here’s how it works. You install a Firefox extension found at the site linked above. This extension will put a tool bar at the bottom of your browser to track your surfing… or gaming as it were. As you surf, you may stumble upon chests, portal, or mines left by other players. It’s like playing an RPG while surfing the net. As you surf, you earn more points (or gold). As you earn more, you have the ability to level up.

It sounds ridiculous and that’s what made me check it out. Now, I am having fun playing it. I also can’t help but think of the possibilities that this extensions presents. Imagine what could be created with something like this in mind? I picture a community of people sharing things about the internet in real time instead of having to read their blog or their profile somewhere else.

If you noticed my post on MODSonline, I’m working on some updates to the site. Well, I wish it were as easy to do as it is to say. hehe.

I was going to update the tutorials with some custom code to allow user input and updating. The community needs more access to the tutorials and I have a plan to make it happen. But before I start with these updates, it made sense to update the entire back-end. Of course, that’s another involved task. It’s not just upload and update… it’s upload, confirm, test, fix, test, restore, copy, active, done. That’s just a quick list.

When I get that done, I can move onto the Tutorials updates that I originally planned. At least I hope that is all I have to do. ugh.

This year, I’ve seen a number of friends lose their hosting for various reasons. Either the host shuts down, the server crashes, or something along those lines causes them to be left without service unexpectedly.

I’ve discussed it with my web business partner. We’ve decided that we can help out gamers in need with some pretty nice hosting packages:

That’s not bad, right? If you’re interested, let me know.

For a long time now, I couldn’t get email notices from this blog site (yes, the one you are reading right now). It took me a while to figure out the reasons for this problem, but it’s finally solved. I actually filter my email for spam 3 times. Spam is awful… well, I don’t need to tell you how bad it is. When I get email, it first gets filtered via my server and Spam Assassin, a commonly used server-side spam filter. From there, the email goes to two places, it goes to my Spamcop email filtering service and it goes to my gmail account. Spamcop filters the mail and sends it back to a secret account from which I retrieve the email via Thunderbird, which filters the email a third time. On the Gmail side, it just gets filtered the one time and stays there in case I need to check my email from online.

Anyway, wordpress blogs send email notifications from wordpress@yourdomain.com (yourdomain being… well, your domain). But that’s a great way to get even more spam, so I don’t have it setup to receive email. Although Spamcop claims not to check for the sending email address validity, it would reject those emails and I wouldn’t see them (unless they caught my eye on gmail).

Well, needless to say, I had to setup wordpress@yourdomain.com (actually at mydomain, but you get the idea). Now I am getting those email from here. At least I now should know when I am getting comments here. lol.

Am I overly redundant in trying to stop spam? I don’t think so. I don’t get too much spam considering all the domain names (currently 36) and email addresses (only about 20) I have to keep my eye on. And it’s great(!!!) not to have to download that spam just to filter it locally.

However, the biggest problem now is caused by spoofing. That’s when someone sends email from your email address… not literally from your server, but pretending to be you. Then you get thousands of bounce backs from those email addresses that don’t exist. I’d love to hear about a solution for that!