A few days ago I read about IndieKarma on Jason Kottke’s blog . I agree with most of his remarks and I have a couple of my own.

I dislike the fact that IndieKarma is another walled garden. It means that both the content publisher and visitor must use the same system for transaction to occur and that’s a lot to ask. Building a more open system, which would allow transactions between parties belonging to different systems and wouldn’t be prone to abuse, is difficult and is probably one of the reasons why it hasn’t happened yet.

But I think it’s also a necessity for small companies like PixelPass , since as a visitor I’m unlikely to use more than a couple of such systems. Same goes for me as a publisher. If my reach is limited to websites using same service as me, then they’ll have a hard time getting traction. It will also be impossible to compete with big boys if they decide to move in this space.

IndieKarma is also a very apt name for a service that by its very nature is completely voluntary. Even if it was widely used on websites, it wouldn’t amount to much without people willing to spend money when they don’t have to. I’m sure there are lots of well-intentioned folks out there, but the enormous prevalence of ad supported services and the fact that most users will be freeloaders makes me doubtful.

Still, it’s a nice idea with approach that might work. I certainly hope it does.

In true Don Quixote fashion, I made a new attempt to make email harvesting more difficult. It won’t work forever, but it will work longer than previous one, which hasn’t fail yet either.

This time I use a bit different approach. Instead of replacing spam-proof, but not directly usable email addresses with mail links on page load, I create mail links on page load, but populate them when mouse moves over them. This way they are still perfectly usable, but less likely to be abused. They are also less friendly, since you can’t see email address until you move your pointer over it. But that was the point, to prevent javascript enabled scrappers.

You can download new version or check a demonstration on alternative version of my homepage.

Yesterday was a lovely sunny day. Sebastjan and I were sunbathing at a nearby cafe, sipping juice and talking as we often do about Python related things.

I noted how I’d hate to see Fredrik Lundh being swallowed by the black hole of Google, where too often good people go to never hear from them again. I simply can’t seem to write anything substantial in Python these days without relying on at least a piece of Fredrik’s code.

Sebastjan doesn’t share my pessimism and he might be right. Forgetting my possibly unsubstantiated fears for a moment, which Pythonista’s loss would in your opinion hurt our beloved language the most?