Many online blogging software and other products require some type of cron and / or asynchronous execution functionality. Spammers and web robots are an essential part of any website today. Most web hosting providers, especially on shared hosting, do not provide cron functionality. Let's see how we can leverage spammers and web robots (like MSN bot) to get our perodic or asynchronous jobs done.

You can easily and effectively use your .htaccess file to easily and effectively block comment and referrer spammers targeting your blog(s). If you are using WordPress you can also use my Referrer Bouncer plugin, which is much simpler, to block referrer spammers. For the rest here is a sample .htaccess file you can start with.

Indian government had ordered blocking of some blogspot.com blogs and few other sites which are supposedly derogatory to Islam, including Hindu human rights site (makes you wonder if we live in Islamic country, doesn't it?). Our ISP's decided to block all blogspot domains including millions of totally unrelated blog sites like my old java technology blog.

Over 74,000 .eu domains have been suspended and 400 registering companies sued by EURid, the non-profit organisation in charge of the European Union's top-level domain.

Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Microsoft days, finally? It may be too soon to say but YouOS looks pretty functional to me. "YouOS strives to bring the web and traditional operating systems together to form a shared virtual computer." It is a wonderful concept. There are gotchas today, not to mention crumbling under digg/slash effect, but first, what in the hell is YouOS?