Whoa! My last journal entry was typed on the first of July 2004. Now it's the 13th March of 2005. I have to admit, I don't really like blogging on Slashdot. I used to put my Slashdot submitted stories online, but I don't really submit stories anymore. Got my 15 minutes of Slashdot fame (see previous journal entry) so it's all good.

I do like to write a blog entry every now and then though. Not here, but on my personal homepage.

Heheheh, funny: Timothy posted a dupe of an article posted 3 (yes, three!) posts down on the Slashdot frontpage. The funny thing is that the article disappeared almost as soon as it appeared. The Slashdot junkie I am, I saw the article which was deleted before any comment had been made. No hard feelings of course, we know it's Slashdot right? ;) Here it is, without links, because I'm a lazy-ass:

Your Rights Online: SPF Hits 20k domains, Gains Support From FTC/ISPs

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 01, @03:41PM
from the spam-spam-spam dept.
wayne writes "The anti-forgery standard SPF is maturing quickly. More than 20,000 domains have self-registered at the online registry, a third in the last month! They include big names like AOL, Amazon, Earthlink, and, newly, RedHat and GMail! SPF is also getting mainstream media coverage. According to articles at The New York Times, InternetWeek, and ClickZ, the ASTA Proposal echoes the FTC's recommendations that responsible domains publish SPF records. All this good news is mentioned in a recent CircleID interview with Meng Weng Wong which ends with a plea for the open community to send money or buy a t-shirt --- the SPF community would like to send someone to the IETF meeting to represent them, but donations to date can't even buy a ticket to get in!"

Oh yeah, I finally made it to the Slashdot frontpage! :)

2004-01-25 16:57:15 Games turning to movies? (games,movies) (rejected)

rastakid writes "Sometimes we see movies turning to games, either based on books or not, some well-known examples: The Matrix, James Bond GoldenEye (and other James Bond Movies), X-Men, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Sum of all Fears and others. On rarer occassions we see the opposite: games turning to movies, with the most known examples being: Tomb Raider, Alone in the Dark (work in progress) and last summer's rumours about Half-Life The Movie. Now my question to the Slashdot crowd: which games do you think should be filmed? What about Duke Nukem or Commander Keen? And what are the minimum demands to let a game get to the big screen, like: may the story be altered a bit?"

Okay, maybe it's time to stop submitting stories for Slashdot. I think Slashdot grew to large over the years, and the time it takes to submit a story doesn't outweigh the profits. I'm currently at 9 submitted stories, from which 0 (yes, zero) stories were accepted. I admit, there may be a couple of them just not news-worthy enough (as if Slashdot features purely news, but that aside), but some of them were certainly worth it to get accepted. Maybe not for the frontpage, but still.. Please give me your feedback on this.

2004-01-28 15:43:38 Yet another way to fool Google (articles,internet) (rejected)

rastakid writes "We've seen various methods to fool Google in its indexing to achieve a higher ranking, like mass-linking to a certain website. But today I came across this thread in a Dutch forum (Voelspriet.nl) which shows a new method being used: cloaked pages. The idea is simple: use populair keywords to find populair pages, mirror these pages and let the Googlebots find them. By using tricks like .htaccess, it's possible to let the Googlebots see the mirrored (populair) pages, while the 'real' visitors are send to the actual website."

Hmm.. stupid, stupid me.. thinking the backpage idea was unique, I should had known better.

I e-mail my idea to Rob Malda (CmdrTaco), which replied my e-mail with:
I think this is covered in the FAQ entry asking "What about a page for rejected submissions?"

I don't understand how I missed that FAQ entry, since I read the whole FAQ, before posting my journal entry about the backpage. Oh well, at least I can say my idea was good enough to make it to the FAQ pages ;)

All right, at 03:31PM (GMT+1:00), Slashdot author michael posts a story submitted by securitas about the Beagle 2 landing. This one, exactly:

Beagle 2 Probe Lands; No Signal Received Yet
securitas writes "The BBC reports that Europe's Beagle 2 Mars lander has failed to broadcast its landing confirmation signal. While project leaders are trying to put a brave face on it, the failure is seen as a major setback. The Beagle is out of broadcast range but another contact attempt will be made later today, when they hope a signal will be detected. Another failed Mars mission will solidify Mars' reputation as a spacecraft graveyard. More at icWales and News24."

I submitted my story at 10:21AM, 5 hours and 10 minutes earlier. Within that timeframe these two articles were posted, in my humble opinion, less news-worthy than the Beagle 2 posts. Now, comparing my submitted story to securitas', we see one very big difference: he supplies links to seven different articles, relating to the Mars mission. I only posted one link, to the CNN article. Why? Because I wanted to bring the news quick, since I found it very important and news-worthy. Of course I can imagine a post as securitas' is more usefull than mine, however, completely rejecting mine is a bit overdone, I think. Why not put my link to the CNN article in it?

Well, don't get me wrong: I don't really care about being rejected on this particular story. I only started this journal so that other users could read the stories I submitted, since if I don't log them, they get lost in Slashcode. Therefore, another idea for Slashcode: create a 'backpage', where all the submitted stories (but still a little interesting, the submitted stories filled with troll-crap should go directly to /dev/null) are stored, so that users who finished reading the frontpage and found nothing interesting for them, could read the backpage, containing other news articles. More is better right?

Of course I understand being rejected on this post, but I also really understand why it frustrates other Slashdot readers when their submitted story get rejected (without any reason supplied!) and see a similair story accepted a couple hours, days or maybe even weeks later. Slashcoders: create a backpage, where all readers who do take the time to supply Slashdot with articles can get the credit they deserve. Without Slashdot submitters, there wouldn't be much Slashdot, would there?

After being rejected with six submitted stories, I decided to put all the stories I submit up in my journal, so that other users can comment on it, and explain why they think the Slashdot authors are right or wrong to reject it. It's too bad that Slashcode doesn't allow to view the submitted stories, only the subjects. Anyway, here's my seventh (rejected) submitted story:

2003-12-25 10:21:48 Beagle touchdown failed? (articles,science)
The Beagle 2 probe has failed to broadcast the "I'm okay" signal after touchdown on Mars. According to Professor Colin Pillinger there are five possible scenarios for the failure, where you can read about in this CNN article.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Merry Christmas!