Category Archives: Blog Blather

So this morning I had a rather unpleasant internal examination – want to hear about the state of my cervix? No, didn’t think so :giggle:

Anyway, as a result, I’m super sensitive and irritable, so I’m going to have a whine about some online-y things that have been getting me down of late.

Can anyone tell me why some people are completely comfortable with ruining the online experience for the rest of us? My question stems from a few ‘issues’ I’ve been having:

I am informed by OtherHalf that my domain name was recently appropriated by someone for use as a ‘sender’ address for spam. So if I’ve spammed your mailbox lately, sorry, it truly was not me. I don’t use this domain for anything mail related. OtherHalf has put measures in place which will hopefully stop this happening again – what makes me most angry is that not everyone can necessarily protect themselves like this – I’m just lucky to have someone on hand who happens to administrate mail servers for a living.

Secondly, I was targeted by a couple of splogs recently. Splogs are apparently ‘spam blogs’ – fake blogs (usually full of nonsensical or plagiarised content) set up purely for the purpose of either A) promoting other sites belonging to the blog-author via lots of linkage, or B) making money from AdSense impressions by luring visitors to the splog, or C) both. It seemed to be a couple of the B-type splogs which got me – incoming links to my blog are listed on the WordPress interface, and I usually check them out to see who’s linking to me (Um… I do believe that’s called vanity!) In this case, by visiting the blogs in question, I earned the authors a little bit of income from their Google AdSense ads. Sucks :grr:

Edit: I just want to clear up a little misunderstanding – Splogs are not exactly the same thing as comment spam. I have quite good comment spam moderation on here, and if I got more, there are several WordPress plugins that work really well at eradicating comment spam. Splogs are not possible to control in this way – they work by linking to me, I see the incoming link via Technorati or the WordPress interface, and visit the blog to find out who it is that’s linking me. Slightly different, and I can’t control who links to me… all I can do is stop visiting those sites to check. It’s more like referer log spamming, if you know what that is. If you find what you believe is a splog on Blogspot, you can ‘flag’ that blog as having ‘offensive content’, but I don’t know how effective this is at having them removed.

OK, now the third thing is a little closer to home. Stitching Exchanges. More specifically – mine. In trying to sort out the state of affairs – who has posted and received, and who has not – it has become apparent that one of the group has… well… disappeared. Absconded. Leaving behind her a trail of unfulfilled exchanges (so I hear now). Mine included. I feel awful for the person who’s missing out on her exchange (only she won’t miss out in the end, because of course I’ll arrange a replacement for her), and I feel really let down personally (partly because I’m the moderator, and partly because I was the person to send the fiber/embellishment supplies to her to use in this exchange). Why would you do that? Personal gain? There’s very little of that in this case. Malicious intent? I guess some could take perverse pleasure from upsetting people like this… but I just don’t get it. At any rate, it has soured my first experience of moderating an exchange, and I’m not sure I’m going to be jumping in to do another.

Aaargh! There was more, actually, but I think I’ve got the bulk of my grumpiness out of the way, so I’ll just stop here… Finn and I are going to go and cook Osso Bucco to make me feel better 🙂

PS. In case you did want to know the state of
Things-Cervical, all is well, and the finger-crossing can commence now, please :giggle: ! This month, one way or the other, I’m going to have a baby 😮 !