Much credit goes to wensing and Stormpulse for the inspiration.
This site uses the Ruby static site generator Middleman and is hosted on Amazon S3.
Ruby scripts pull data from (currently) 8 different government agencies from around the world. This data is then stored in YAML format so that it can be used by Middleman. The site is then rebuilt and uploaded to S3.
If you're using name.com's DNS, then they've basically got a wildcard subdomain that points to a spammy domain-parked page.
So, say you have valid records for .yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. Those two hosts will resolve as you would expect them, but *.yourdomain.com will resolve to a spam page.
I have a few bots of my own that do weather based alerts (by state). They don't @reply anyone; they just do normal tweets.
What's so frustrating for me is how often I get slapped for spamming yet these quite-obvious @mention spam bots continue to prosper (I can never get a response out of twitter as to why I keep getting blocked; they just remove the block without actually responding to anything I asked).
I get probably 10-20 @reply spam a day on my more active account and it all follows the same pattern:
* account is nothing but @replies with just a link
This has been going on for probably a month and I've reported every single account that's spammed me.
If twitter can't figure out how to auto-block this obvious spam, it doesn't give me much hope that they'll figure out how to take care of spam in general.
I've just fixed the broken links - the image links are based on the valid start time that the SPC puts on the outlook, which is supposed to be 20:00 (UTC) for this outlook, but they put the start time on there as 20:40, so the links were pointing to files that didn't exist.
The caveats to this advice are that this worked for me a couple of years ago (so I'm not sure if the same community exists there now) and that my thing was much more about fat loss.
Still, I was shocked at how quickly I felt like I had been embraced by a community, especially since I had only started out with the intention of using Tumblr as a free place to host a diary (I was quite ignorant of the community features at the time).
Another caveat is that Tumblr tends to favor short form content rather than longer blog posts. However, this could actually be seen as a positive since it's a lot easier to do shorter, more frequent updates.
Aside from that, finding forums where people are talking about these issues and then getting actively involved could be one of the best ways to indirectly build an audience.
A few thoughts on your website:
* I'd either make your blog the main page or automatically pull in at least the latest blog onto your main page. Otherwise, I get the impression that the site was last updated in 2009.
* I'd write a one paragraph summary of who you are and what you're trying to accomplish, the "elevator pitch" if you will. I feel that a lot of what is on your current main page would be more appropriate on a longer form "About" page. I'd put the elevator pitch front and center so that new visitors can know exactly why they should care and keep browsing your site.
* I'd consider coming up with a short timeline - as a new visitor, I might be interested in quickly knowing things like how far along you are in your journey. Like were you just diagnosed? Have you just recently decided to turn your life around or have you been working on this for awhile? As a new visitor, it helps me more quickly identify with your story and what I can expect to get from you.
To sum up, I think there's an audience out there for this. Plenty of people are going to be interested in the everyday perspective of someone who's down in the trenches battling an illness.
So if keeping the site going makes you happy, don't give up!
I found out after far too much time, that a huge part of my personal success with a programming language is whether or not I "click" with its syntax. So my previous attempts at learning javascript failed miserably because I just never got over the syntax.
So you might take a look and see if its syntax appeals to you. The big downside is that it assumes a prior knowledge of JS, so you'll still need other resources to really learn what's possible with JS/CS.
And my even more niche advice is that, for me, what really built up my momentum was to rewrite someone else's JS site in coffeescript. It's definitely a roundabout way of learning, but I basically got to learn coffeescript and javascript at the same time as I pored over this other person's code line by line as I rewrote it.
I don't know how common my syntax "hang-up" is, but if you do start looking at other languages, I would advise that you seek out sample programs so you can get familiar with what the syntax looks like. And then pick the language that makes the most sense to you even without any programming knowledge.
> I don't begrudge them this income stream from people who buy domains but don't do anything with them for awhile. What's the harm?
There are 2 main issues I have with this:
1. It's not "unused domains" that get this treatment. It's any domain that uses their DNS. I had several active sites and was shocked to find that blahblahblah.mydomain.com pointed to one of their spam pages.
2. If you went to spammysubdomain.realcompany.com and found a spam page, who would you think was responsible for it, realcompany.com or realcompany.com's registrar? I'm guessing almost everyone would think that the company themselves did it. By name.com doing this for active domains, they risk damaging the domain holder's reputation, for anyone who happens to stumble on to one of the spammy subdomains.
I'm not sure if they're still doing it, but the thing that drove me away was their spammy DNS.
Example: I had valid DNS records for mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com but they were forwarding ANYTHING.mydomain.com to one of their ad-ridden pages.
I can kind of see an argument for having that when a domain has just been purchased and there is no valid content yet. But doing that to an established site makes ME look like a spammer.
tl;dr - if you're using name.com's DNS, you might want to see if they're hosting spam pages on whatever.yourdomain.com
Since it sounds like you haven't yet started coding, I would argue that the most important question to ask yourself is which framework makes you most excited about jumping in and coding something now.
Since both frameworks are Ruby, I'd hope that it wouldn't be too big of a deal to decide to change from one to the other in the middle of the project, unlike a full blown language change.
Me personally, I came from the Python world and started out with Ruby on Rails. But I didn't spend enough time with it to ever get out of the stage where it felt like I was working with a black box.
I tried Sinatra on a project and quickly "clicked" with it and I haven't used RoR since.
My biggest project runs on Sinatra, but the caveat there is that probably 90-95% of the current code has nothing to do with the framework.
I have seen the number of files grow to the point where I start wondering if I would've been better off with Rails where there would be a specific location for everything. On the other hand, I get to decide where stuff should go, and more important to me is that everything that is there is something I put there. Whereas, with Rails, I found I was wasting time trying to wade through all of the skeleton files to find where I had actually written some code. But again, I chalk that up to the fact that I never moved out of the black box phase.
As to reinventing the wheel, depending on your motivation, reinventing the wheel isn't necessarily so bad as you'd learn a lot along the way. And if you enjoy it, then I'd argue that would be more important than being half hearted on something where gems already exist for what you want.
So again, I'd say to pick whichever one motivates you to get started now.
I do something similar with wildcard forwarding, only instead of filtering those emails, I full out block an alias when I start getting spam there.
Though I must say that I've been surprised at how many (theoretically) legit places have leaked my email address. Like when aweber got hacked, I suddenly started getting spam on a whole bunch of aliases.
If my address gets leaked but I still want to continue getting email from a company, I update my email address with them to include the (then) current month and year (so companyMMYY@) and then I disable the old alias. So far, I haven't gotten any spam at any of these new MMYY aliases so it kinda feeds my suspicion that their mailing list must have been hacked.
This site uses the Ruby static site generator Middleman and is hosted on Amazon S3.
Ruby scripts pull data from (currently) 8 different government agencies from around the world. This data is then stored in YAML format so that it can be used by Middleman. The site is then rebuilt and uploaded to S3.