Justin Germino Ramblings

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The Logitech HD Webcam C310 has 4.5 star rating with over 221 customer reviews so you know this is a popular and widely used webcam.  It comes with a 5’ usb cable and allows 1 click upload to YouTube or Facebook.

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It is the perfect webcam for fast vlog entries or chatting with friends or family over Skype.

Jump on yours quick if you want to get the Logitech HD Webcam C310 for $23.99 which is 52% off the original price of $50.

-Justin Germino

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This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of American Family Insurance. All opinions are 100% mine.

My kids enjoy seeing many comedians in movies, but they are too young to ever watch  most of them do a Stand Up comedy routine.  You find that Stand Up is very much adult oriented and there are few stand up comedy shows that are designed for the whole family anymore.

Don’t believe me, just browse the comedy section on Netflix and you will find very very few Stand Up shows in the last 3 years that aren’t riddled with vulgar language that probably shouldn’t be heard by anyone under the age of 17.

American Family Insurance is all about family and protecting your family, this is why they also helped put together a comedy program that the whole family can enjoy without having to worry about what will be said and how inappropriate the content may be.

It is called Stand Up For Family and many of the skits remind me of the original Bill Cosby material which I used to love and listen to on cassette tapes for hours as a kid.  Check out the Bill Bellamy skit about “Still Free” and how kids back in the day had such great imagination that they could just play Freeze Tag and stay still all day until unfrozen.  Very funny stuff!

AmFam reminds everyone that family is important and honestly and seriously I have been an American Family Insurance customer for over 10 years myself.  When I first signed up with them I thought they had very helpful agents and they check in with you regularly to see if you have everything you need for your family.

So take a few minutes and watch some funny stand up comedy, let me know what your favorite stand up bit was.  Most bits are only a few minute so you can take some time to watch them and get a few chuckles in.

-Justin Germino

Seriously folks, I have been incredibly busy these last few days and with my neck being injured and being tired I haven’t been staying up at night to catch up on blogging.

Even my rule of having some blog posts for rainy days ran dry here on my personal blog and I just don’t have time to blog as much so am going to have to cut back for a bit until I can play catch up.

With me also going out of town to attend CA World in Las Vegas in less than 2 weeks I will be even busier and I may just have to find guest posters to cover slots on my blog for a few days or leave them blank.

I just don’t like leaving “no posts” for days at a time, for some reason it makes me think of dust collecting on old furniture or a TV set.  I feel a blog should always be in motion and when my blog is void it appears as if nobody is listening or broadcasting.

Hence I wrote a post about not being able to do posts, ironic huh?

-Justin Germino

96 emails this morning I had to manually moderate on my blog using CommentLuv Premium, in every case the user was trying to simply embed a stupid word “loan”, “loans”, or “mortgage loan”.

All the comments were left from manual commenters so they bypass the GASP javascript check, and every one required me to manually flag as spam or trash.  CommentLuv premium for all it’s greatness doesn’t unfortunately have any SPAM check against manual spam being left by people hired to type and leave comments on blogs.

The stupid thing is they probably would have gotten the backlink they wanted had they just left username@loans and put in a decent comment.  Then they would have been allowed to keep the comment and it would have likely been approved.

The fact that all these generic comments are on poems and have nothing to do even close to the topic of poetry is another annoying factor.

CommentLuv Premium (Specifically the GASP module) needs to have additional spam filter options.

Options for CommentLuv SPAM Filtering

1. Strip hyperlink out of the comment code, so if somebody puts a hyperlink in, just simply remove the http code from the comment.  This way hyperlinked words become normal words and someone who leaves a full URL you can still see the URL and go to it if you want, just not get the hyperlink.
2. Ability to mark comments as SPAM if hyperlink is recorded in comment.
3. Ability to create SPAM Filter blacklist and any comment you mark as SPAM, the email and/or IP gets added to the blacklist automatically spamming all future comments.  In the case of the 91 spam comments, they all came from the same IP and the same website was the target URL.

Out of all the incredible features of CommentLuv, the only one I find that needs improvement is the GASP spam blocking module, there is just still too much manual spam making it through to my moderation queue.

Note, this blog uses Livefyre since it is much more effective at blocking SPAM as it uses Impermium to check the comment before it publishes and again it re-validates after the comment publishes.  I have only seen about 3 comments out of 200 not be caught by the Livefyre spam filter.  In reverse, only 2 out of 9 comments on my poetry blog with CommentLuv Premium are valid, 7 out of 9 comments are SPAM and make it to my moderation queue.

-Justin Germino