Removing Google Analytics referrer spam

Referrer spam is one of the more frustrating developments on the web in recent years. The premise is simple enough, a site owner sees a new referrer in their analytics and visits the website in question to investigate the source of new traffic.

The page in question does not contain any such links and instead advertises anatomical enhancements or attempts to install malware on the visitor’s computer.

Of the top ten referrers to my site in Google Analytics, seven are spammers. It’s an annoyance more than anything, all the same I’m trying a technique to kill it dead once and for all.

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A List Apart, an update on diverse authors

A List Apart have published an update on their efforts to become a more diverse publication.

Over the past year, we’ve started discussing inclusivity constantly, across every facet of our work—the authors we encourage, the messaging on our website, the people we invite to events, the way we edit articles, the topics we cover.

And yet, we screw up constantly. We cringe when we notice too late that we published an article with a biased example, or used words that defaulted to male. We struggle to include more people of color and non-native English speakers in our pages. We hear that our submissions copy feels alienating.

It’s a refreshing to read editor Sara Wachter-Boettcher be so upfront about what they’re doing; what they’re getting right and getting wrong. Go read it.

Plugin dependencies in WordPress, a user’s perspective

Ryan McCue has started a discussion around plugin dependencies in WordPress, Gary Pendergast has responded. Ryan thinks it needs to be solved, Gary doesn’t – but if he did, would solve it a different way.

As a user, I don’t want to be exposed to security issues in orphaned code.

Each of them go into some technical details, some of which I understand, others which go over this front-end developers head. I was going to leave the following as a comment on Gary’s post, but it strayed a little off topic so I decided to post it here:

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Woo joins Automattic

Woo is joining Automattic.

The Woo ninjas are not going anywhere!

I kind of wish they would, I have firm views about bro-culture & I understand it’s quite bro-ey at Woo.

Speaking is not the only reason I get nervous at conferences

I used to get nervous in the weeks leading up to a conference talk because I was talking at a conference.

These days, it appears I get nervous for an entirely different reason: casual homophobia. Unfortunately in my industry – web development – comments such as these are not rare transgressions.

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Intuition is ?

Complaining about WordPress 4.2’s inline Emoji script is to complain about the biggest front end performance gain of the feature.

You see, that tiny script does two things:

  • check if your visitors browser supports Emoji, and,
  • asynchronously load the JavaScript to polyfill Emoji if the visitor’s browser requires it.
Continue reading Intuition is ?

100 words

Jeremy Keith has been writing 100 words a day, he started a few weeks back. Not at least 100, around 100 but exactly one-hundred.

I’m really enjoying reading them, each day bring a new vignette.

Niels Matthijs on Spartan & Fanfic

Niels Matthijs wrote about the coverage of Spartan when it was released a couple of weeks ago.

[To see] other browsers vendors left largely uncriticized for the crap they’re pulling is not good at all. It’s the exact same lenience that led to the disaster that was IE6 and it made our job that much worse.