Category: Editorial asides

Spam and curses – or, cursed spam

What the holy hell is going on with the spam all of a sudden? My spam filter has caught more than 700 spam comments since Friday, and I’ve deleted another dozen or more spam trackbacks. That’s about four times what it usually is. Seriously, I’m getting a little annoyed. And the vast majority of them have Greek names attached to them – go figure.

I wade through all of them, because the spam filter does occassionally snag a legitimate comment by mistake, but it’s getting to be an onerous task. I may have to look into some sort of comment validation, much as I hate those things. Sigh. The splogs are getting out of hand, too, but while I find it annoying to see that “Floyd wrote an interesting piece on (keyword): here’s an excerpt” followed by my content, I don’t have the heart or the inclination to follow up on each and every one of them. (I’m finding about three a week these days through the trackback spam.) Did I mention sigh?

***

Tristan has picked up one of my linguistic peccadilloes. On more than one a few occasions lately, he’s looked at something and said, “What the hell is that?” And each time I gently correct him and say that “hell” is not polite, and we should say, “What the heck is that?” instead. But “hell” is so low on my radar screen of curse words that I’m sure I say “What the hell” or, more likely, “what the bloody hell” about sixteen times a day without even realizing it.

For a truly delightful article on a son’s indoctrination to the wide world of curses, check out this piece from the UK Guardian a couple weeks back (hat tip to Andrea, where I first saw it.)

Social bookmarks

I’ve been meaning to get around to installing some social bookmarking widgets for a while now, and finally got around to it. They’re the little boxes at the bottom of each post. If you don’t know what they are, you can safely ignore them – but I highly recommend del.icio.us as a social bookmarking tool if you aren’t already using it! The rest of them I just kind of chose at random from the list of options based on what I’d heard other people using.

Let me know if the display is messed up in your browser, or if it slows the loading of pages for you! (And, yes, the blog was down for 14 hours in the last 24 hours. Am seriously considering changing hosts….)

Feedreader questions

Okay, I have some questions for y’all.

First, why do you truncate your blog’s feed? It seems to be the vast majority of the “personal” bloggers I read truncate their feeds, while the majority of the business bloggers use a full feed. I’ve seen lots of debates on which is better, but I’m curious as to why YOU do it.

Care to take part in my highly scientific poll on the matter? If you have more to say, you can always leave a comment, too!

And for those of you simply reading feeds instead of publishing them, what do you think? Does it matter to you whether the author publishes the full post or just a snippet?

FWIW, I leave the full feed simply because that’s what I prefer when I’m reading. I’ve had some issues with scraping, and had one site shut down for using my content without attribution, but now that I’ve figured out how to add an attribution tag through feedburner that says “This item is from Postcards from the Mothership” I haven’t had any problems.

And now, a more technical question for the Web savvy among you. In the feed reader, I notice that some blog titles have an avatar or icon beside them. Occasionally, this even appears beside the URL in the address bar or beside my favourites in IE.

How do you do that? How do you get your little icony avatar thing to be picked up by the feed readers?

Nasty Flickr messages

Well, that was disturbing. I got a notification that someone sent me a note on Flickr, and I had four messages from four different users:

  • Why did you post pornographic images on my photo?.
  • I Don’t get the mail you just sent me, are you trying to call me a pedophile?.
  • Do that again and i will call the cops..
  • You have been reported to flickr..

Needless to say, I was more than a little freaked. And when I tried to reply to any of them, it said my account had been blocked.

I did a bit of research, and apparently this is a widespread and growing problem with Flickr. The accounts are legitimate, but the owners are not aware that their accounts are being used. They have somehow given up their Yahoo! IDs and passwords to some sort of phishing expedition, likely an offer of a photo award. There’s a detailed explanation on Flickr, which has really done very little to settle the curdled feeling in my stomach.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s coincidence that I got these messages mere days after joining a discussion group attached to the photo pool I told you about, where images of kids are being “stolen” from Flickr to create fake profiles on Orkut.

Sigh.

Just wanted to tell you about it in case it happens to you.

Get yer blog on – moving to your own domain

A couple of people have asked me about moving to a self-hosted domain, and recently Maggie (hi Maggie!) asked me about customizing a blog.

This is more a recap of what I did, rather than a tutorial. I only wish I’d done this years ago! I was so intimidated by the process, though, that I was too scared to try it out. Maybe by sharing this, I can show you how easy (no really!) it can be.

Anyway, this will be long, so I’ve tucked most of it below the fold…
Continue reading “Get yer blog on – moving to your own domain”

Hey you! Lurker! This one’s for you

Huhn. I thought I had to wait until January for International Delurking week to beg y’all to come out of hiding, but apparently today is (ahem) “The Great Mofo Delurk” day. Don’t believe me? It must be true, cuz they’ve got BADGES!

The Great Mofo Delurk 2007

So! You, over there, the one who visits every day but never says hello. And you! The one who just stumbled over here looking for Star Wars porn – sorry to disappoint you, but you could at least leave a comment to let us know you were here.

Out yerselves, quiet lurkers, and be known in the brilliant klieg lights of the comment box – this is your day to shine.

Cuz I don’t have enough on my plate right now

I’ve written over 950 posts in less than three years, writing at least one post a day on weekdays the vast majority of the time. What’s a few extra posts on the weekend to an already overbooked schedule?

So yes, I’ve signed up for National Blog Posting Month, otherwise known as NaBloPoMo, starting November 1st.

I did this last year, too, and with 10 days left in the month I had my miscarriage. In the end, I think it was incredibly cathartic to force myself to keep blogging through it, unpleasant as it may have been to read along as I struggled back to normalacy. Looking back I’m kind of glad I was stubborn enough to keep posting just because I said I’d keep posting. Here’s hoping this year is a lot less traumatic, at the very least!

This year, NaBloPoMo host Mrs Kennedy has launched a fancy-ass new Facebooky-type social networking site specifically for NaBloPoMo, and if you sign up we can be “friends” and you can join the Canadian Parent Bloggers group. Isn’t that exciting? Cuz I need another social networking site like I need a hole in the head. I mean, I’ve already had to give up Facebook entirely, except for my precious Scrabulous games… at which I’m undefeated, I might add. (But I’m stuck in a lull of one-point letters lately, and I suspect I’m going down soon.)

Ahem, so yes, NaBloPoMo. 30 posts in 30 days. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll even break a sweat. I got lots to say. Want to play along?

The big PR roll-up for September

I get a lot of e-mail. A LOT! But that’s okay, I like it. I’m just not terrifically good at keeping up with it all. But if someone has taken the time to write to me, I often feel obligated to answer them, or at least share the information they want me to share. I mean, even if it’s not of interest to me, who am I to say it’s not of interest to you.

So here, in one huge deluge from my in-box, are snippets from some of the offers and advisories I’ve received in the last six weeks or so. There’s a tonne of them, though, so I’ve tucked them below the fold.

Continue reading “The big PR roll-up for September”

Administrative notes

So it’s been almost a week, and I am getting comfy in my new bloggy home. There are still boxes of clutter everywhere and I’m still tinkering with where I want to keep the blogroll and whether I like the sofa under that window and whether I should plaster all my categories on the wall beside the Green Day poster or tuck them away in a dropdown box. But in general, it’s starting to feel like home.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the look of a blog and the voice of the blogger are so intertwined? Or is that just me? It took me weeks to get used to seeing my words in a new font last time I changed it back on the old site, so I think it’s going to take a while for me to get used to all this happy yellow and fanciness. (No joke, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I fixed the columns so they were left-justified instead of centred yesterday.) Do you think the new look suits the overall character of the blog?

I’m pretty happy with WordPress over Blogger, and will likely write a couple of posts detailing exactly why and how I went about the transition (should anybody care) and maybe writing up a comparison of Blogger-hosted versus WordPress on my domain. The short version is, I’m glad I made the switch.

I know I shouldn’t give much credence to the stats, but it’s still a little humbling to go from a Technorati rank of 35,790 all the way down to 3,915,745, and to watch the traffic stats fall by almost half because of a non-existant Google Page Rank over here. (Ooo, as of today, Technorati acknowledges a second blog linking to me, so my rank jumped half a million blogs to 2,469,418… how exciting! But, if I can see that at least half a dozen of you have already adjusted your links to point to the new blog, why doesn’t Technorati see that? Step away from the stats, DaniGirl.)

Speaking of which, if you’ve honoured me with a link from your blog could I please trouble you to adjust it to point to http://danigirl.ca/blog instead of the old blogspot address? If you want to pick up the new feed, it’s at http://danigirl.ca/blog/feed/.

I’m actually surprised at how quickly Google indexed the new blog. If you Google “Postcards from the Mothership“, the new site is already the fourth link on the page – so feel free to click on it to boost it up the page for me!

And by the way, does anybody have any idea how to get the hypen off the end of the blog name on Google and Technorati? It’s obviously reading something from the meta data, but I’ve played with all the options and have no idea where it came from or how to get rid of it! Anybody know from meta data and tags? Anyone?

(Edited to add: hyphen problem fixed! Yay! And an interesting factoid for anyone else interested in Technorati rank: did you know that only links that are hard-coded into the blog are counted by Technorati? Blogrolls that are maintained by a script – i.e. through Blogrolling.com – are not counted. Interesting!)