use Perl

<rant>

I like to read (or at least skim) a range of articles to keep up with current industry buzz. Some are good, some are not so good and some are completely worthless except as a platform for grandstanding self-promoting 'authors' who are trying to drive up their adsense revenues. No surprises there.

A trend that is really starting to irritate me since I noticed it recently is the rise of the vacuous entries in the reader comments at the end of the articles. In theory, publishing reader comments is a great idea. In practice, if you go to pretty much any article linked from here or here for example, the comment area will be filled with the likes of:

  Awesome!! Great article.

  Thanks Mike, very insightful.

  great article jane - thanks for ur insights

Now I do understand that in many cases, the comment forums render the commenter's name as a link back to their web site. So in these cases it's just comment spam. But why do people bother posting enthusiatic affirmations of crap articles when they don't even get a link back?

</rant>