Has anyone else noticed an increase in Skype spam via instant messaging  of late? I’m getting lots of instant messaging Skype spam now as opposed to the calls/contact requests that seem to have been the first generation of Skype spam.

What I’m talking about is unsolicited Skype chat messages that pop up offering links to the usual types of spammy websites – viagra/cialis/wonder herbs, ‘male enhancement’, stock market stuff, porn, dating.

The penis enlargement/sexual stamina spammers often make use of Skype’s animated chat emoticons to, um, ‘enhance’ their spam.

There’s not a great deal you can do to stop getting spammed on Skype but if you do I recommend you immediately click  ‘Block’ and then tick the ‘Report abuse from this person’ checkbox to stop the person from contacting you again.

(More detailed instructions for both Windows and Mac versions of Skype is available on the Skype blog).

Another kooky type of spam I’ve been getting a bit of lately is blog comment spam. This is where comments are left on a blog in the hope that they’ll be published and will then leave a link from the commenter’s name – which will always be keyword-heavy, something like ‘cheap viagra’ – to their dodgy website.

By writing meaningless, vaguely legitimate sounding and usually mildly flattering wording (“You write very well”, “I’ll add you to my favourites”) in their comments these spammers try to trick comment spam filters like the excellent Akismet (34, 769 spam comments caught on my eeny little blog in the past six months).

Here’s a sample of some of these spam comments left on this blog recently (all caught by Akismet). Of course I’m not going to publish the links but I will put the names left with each to give you an idea.

I read blogs on a similar topic, but i never visited your blog. I added it to favorites and I’ll be your constant reader.
singulair generic

Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.
cipro side effects

There’s a wealth of information here. I’ll be back again.
Business Man

Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!
physical therapist

If he doesn’t know what he is doing, mutual fund is the way to go. That might be counted as cheating in the class though.
reports from CEO

and my favourite so far:

Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!
School Grants

These are so transparent, lacking in imagination and clumsy in their attempts at flattery that I kind of like them. Sometimes a new one will come through in the spam comments list and give my day a little lift. Sad but true.

Since Google’s Chrome browser was released for Mac in late 2009 it’s become my default day to day browser, mainly because it’s so fast. It’s fast to start up and it’s fast to load pages and that’s what we all want for browsing the net.

For developing though it’s not quite up to Firefox‘s standard in a few key areas and I almost always find I have to switch back when working on sites.

Like many people I’ve long been a Firefox user and like many people, I’ve noticed Firefox getting slower and slower and choke on loading things that Chrome seems to breeze through. However there are still so many things it can do that no other browser can match right now – partly by its design and partly to the myriad of extensions available. Remember life before Firebug?

So why isn’t Chrome there yet as a developer’s browser? Here’s my list of niggles…

1. Chrome’s status bar isn’t wide enough to see full urls

This is incredibly frustrating! It looks like the status bar has a maximum width of around a third of the browser window. So with a browser open to an average width of 1000 pixels or so you just don’t see full urls of anything over 50 characters or so. To the average user this may not matter but to anyone who’s developing not being able to see where a link is pointing without having to go there is soooo frustrating.

Status bar in Chrome truncates urls

Status bar in Safari (top) and Firefox shows full urls

2. Chrome doesn’t show full page titles

This is a similar issue in many ways – perhaps Google’s aim to keep the interface clean has driven both of these? You only see each page’s title on its tab, which is not very wide (even if you only have one tab open). This means you can never  see a pages full title, and when you’ve got a number of tabs open at once (which let’s face it is is how things always are) you’re lucky to be able to read the first word. Firefox and Safari show the full page title above the tabs.

Page titles in Google Chrome are only shown on tabs and are truncated

Full length page titles shown above tabs in Safari (top) and Firefox

3. Chrome doesn’t have some of Firefox’s useful menu options

Being able to right-click and choose ‘View Image’ or ‘View Background Image’ and get an image in a tab with the filename, type and dimensions in the title bar is so simple browser makers should be forced to include this feature. Safari and Chrome doesn’t. Yet.

4. Firebug (lite) in Chrome has scrolling issues

Firebug is such a useful tool, particularly it’s ability to allow live css changes to be tested on a page. Firebug Lite was released for Chrome on mac early in 2010 and was the the one thing I was waiting for before making the switch. There is a small issue with scrolling though, in that you sometimes can’t scroll to the bottom of a page with Firebug pane turned on.

I understand this is something that is currently beyond the control of the Firebug developers but it pretty much makes it unusable right now.

5. The Chrome icon in my dock looks too similar to the Firefox icon

Maybe it’s habit but I just can’t help clicking the wrong icon because they’re quite similar. I’ve moved them away from being side by side but it’s not helping.

OK, this is stretching it…