The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns

That's right folks, there has been a breach at NZ Bear's top secret computer facility. While I did not perform the breach, I have in fact received the source code to the new link counting system yet to be released. The thief chooses only to identify himself as "Red Dawn Trackbacker".

Seems that NZ Bear forgot to apply a patch to a well known exploit to his TRS-80 also known as CoCo. The system, whose dates go back into the 80s, has been aggressively attacked by hackers looking for a challenge in recent years since attacking Microsoft products has been deemed too easy a target. Unfortunately TRS-80s still contain Microsoft Basic in ROM where this exploit was discovered and the patch has been difficult to obtain in recent years as Microsoft has discontinued support for 8k Basic (or any application that fits in 8k for that matter).

Some bloggers have questioned behind closed doors the authenticity of this source code and NZ Bear has neither confirmed nor denied the source code as genuinely belonging to his system.

While I would consider posting the source code as a breach of copyright, I will share some pseudo code logic for those whom are programmatically challenged.

while (system_is_still_barely_running())
{
   count_links_from_site()

   if (site.links_to("Don Surber"))
      ignore_links();

   if (site.links_to("OTA member"))
      count_links_as_1_tenth_a_link();

   if (site.links_to("Instapundit"))
      randomly_inflate_links_value();

   if (site.member_of("Big Blogger Friends of Mine"))
      artificially_keep_blog_at_top_100();

   if (site.mentions("NZ Bear in positive way"))
      move_up_in_ecosystem();

   if (site.contains("open trackback party"))
      treat_blog_as_evil_spammer();

   if (site.contains("carnival"))
      pretend_links_are_not_evil_spamming();

   if (site.contains("huge shared cheating blogroll"))
      count_all_links_anyway();

   randomly_order_blogs_despite_ranking();
}

So, there you have it folks. You can't make this stuff up! Controversy will surely follow this new link counting system.

PS. Happy American thanksgiving weekend all my American friends from this Canadian. I am thankful for all NZ Bear has done and support us bloggers and how fair he is trying to be. There is no perfect system, so let's go with the flow and respect that he has the right to do what he sees as fair. (not being sarcastic here people - the post is meant as joke - you know - ha ha)

Update: VoN has discovered a sub function I missed! Good find!

function Snob ( $url )
{
   $friend = member_of_friends ( $url );
   if ( !$friend ) {
      reTURN "Nose Up!";
   }
}