first spam

I received my first spam post on this blog recently.

I made a post about the new heating my landlord has installed and the spam post was basically vaguely aimed at trying to look like a post but then giving a link to some random plumbing company.

I always wonder about things like that - has the company set up its own spambot?  Or have they hired someone to do it?  Perhaps they've paid some company to get them a higher ranking in Google or other search engines and it's therefore crawling around spamming links in order to achieve that for them (page rankers tend to include numbers of links in their algorithms).

Certainly the fact it was a link to a plumbing company and my post was about something to plumbing (central heating is plumbed in) suggests it was a bot crawling around fro relevant content to spam on.

I have comment moderation turned on of course.  I can't say I was expecting vast quantities of spam or loads of nasty comments or anything, but I figured it was better safe than sorry.

As for the plumbing in question, it continues to be a mixed bag.

It comes on slightly too late in the morning and probably goes off slightly to early at night for it to suit me perfectly.  And it's still a bit random whether it comes on and how hot it comes on when it does.

The radiator seems to be very effective at heating the room and bedsit generally, although it doesn't actually get very hot to the touch.  It is quite a big radiator with a lot of surface area, so I would guess it relates to that - it transfers the heat to the room very well, rather than getting hot itself.

However it has definitely saved me money - there have been quite a few days I'm sure I would have turned my own heating on but the radiator took care of that.

As I say, it doesn't quite come on during when I need it, so I have turned it on a couple of times and on the couple of occasions it's been super cold as well, but even then I've only tended to have it on for a little while and not at full blast.

So yeah, it's save me a bit of money.  Indeed, I think it will probably pay for itself, especially if we get a proper cold spell.  There were predictions of a cold snap for pre-Christmas, but that doesn't really seem to have happened as it's been very mild for the time of year.

I'm still hearing predictions of super cold temperatures for the post-Chrimbo period, though, and given the last two years have been horribly cold I'm still expecting the worst.