OK, I can't prevent referer spam from hitting my site. But I can filter the log file later. Derefspam does exactly that. It cleans the log file using the blacklist maintained by MT-Blacklist. It works surprisingly well.

spam section. It contains more informations.

To my German readers (if there are any):check out all-inkl.com. They're really nice helpful people. And cheap they are too.

Scoble has a theory why: link blogs want people to go somewhere else. Craig's List, Gizmodo, Engadget -- they all tell people to get lost. The philosophy of  those sites is to take us to the coolest stuff on the Internet. And by doing that, they have become the coolest places on the Internet.

Case in point, the posts where I pointed to somebody else had more readers than some of my original content.

Does this mean, I should turn this blog into a link blog? No, I like my little niche. I already got job offers via the blog. That's more than I had imagined when I started this thing. Plus, there can only be one Erik, Scott or Scoble, although I actually planned to do something similar to Scott's blog. He beat me by a couple of days.

I tried to keep everything the way it was. Please tell me if I did something stupid and changed a permalink, a <guid> in the RSS feed or something like that.

In the mean time I implemented a backup strategy. Hopefully, I act more professional in the future and take care of my data.

Download it from my Software page.

Update: Download works now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

• I'd like to write more; especially in English. While my English skills aren't the best, I do hope to improve. Besides that, I plan to translate a couple (if not all) articles to German.
• I've been developing a news aggregator, JAggregator, and like to document and discuss it's further development in public. Go and check it out. I use it every day, it's a stable application.
• In the current economic climate I'd like to become more known for what I know. Hightech jobs that used to be well paid and pretty safe are being outsourced to India and Eastern Europe. In order to stay competetive, I believe I need to promote myself better. My website has been in limbo for ages. I feel that the best way to justify the expenses is to actually using the site.

These might not be particular original reasons but that's how I feel about blogging right now. As I become more experienced and proficient, things may change.

Technology-wise, I'll cover mostly Java. I do client-side Java programming for a living, mostly with Swing. I have a pretty good knowledge of various XML technologies ranging from XML Schema via Castor to Jakarta's commons-digester. I plan to cover a lot of the experiences that I made with these technologies in this weblog.

When I'm not working, hacking on JAggregator or wasting time reading news, I read a book (sometimes), watch TV (too often), listen to music (always) and spend time with my wife and daughters (not often enough).

This weblog runs on a shared Linux server at all-inkl.com, one of Germany's bigger ISPs. I maintain the blog using FogCreek's CityDesk Desktop Content Management System. While not cheap, CityDesk is a pretty useful system for maintaining a website, especially a multi-language one. I heartly recommend it. At the moment, comments are gratiously provided by Enetation for free. I'll replace them with a local script in the future.