I’m still in the “clueless newbie” stage of development in doing this blogging thing. I have to ask DH to fix up/install all the technical stuff, and then I tinker around with templates and things and have to yell for help if I can’t revert to something that works. I’ve been gathering links to tutorials and places where people gather to discuss blogging, the blogoverse, blogomania, sideblogs, blogrolls, and other things blog. I’m still learning definitions and trying to figure out how not to do it, in addition to how to do it. Far off in the hazy blue distance, there is some semblance of a clue, or of several clues.

Why Am I Blogging?
I don’t know. It’s an outlet. It’s an excuse to write something, anything.

Is This A Personal Journal
Yes, and also no. It’s not strictly chrono. Not everything that happens to me in real time ends up here (nor should it, there’s a lot of time spent keeping the couch from floating away). Some entries will be of old memories, because I have a terrible memory and don’t want to forget things out of lack of use. Also, I sometimes feel I’ve lived at least nine lives, since every now and then everything changed so radically that there was a palbable sense of “old life ends, new life begins.” I’m planning on figuring out how many lives I’ve lived.

Features, Not Bugs To Be Added Later
I’m thinking of adding a “Life List” of books I’ve read, with links to their listings on Amazon if they’re available there.

I’m thinking of adding a separate photo section, perhaps a full-on photoblog, rather than linking to the plain online photo album I currently have.

I’m definitely going to transcribe some travel diaries – the one from the England trip for certain, possibly with a few photolinks. That is, if I could actually find it. It’s somewhere in the house, probably underneath the perma-pile of clothes in my closet.

Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

I may be a damp, pink, mewling newbie (TM Madam ZK of Highlander Fandom fame) but I do have my own inhouse geek. He’s got me set up with a link to statistics for the blog, and reading them over has got me thinking and wondering about the phenomenon of “referral spam.” I’ve been gathering information from several sites on this. I also have to educate myself on the “mail this to a friend” feature that can be exploited for sending spam that appears to come from an innocent website or blog. I think Dear Geek Hubby (maybe I should start calling him “DGH”) already disabled it, but I’m kind of wondering about this one site that downloads all my pages every day. What are they doing with it? Are they evil or good?

A site such as Technorati appears to be very good – they appear in my log every week or so, and have a very cool “Cosmos” feature that’s fun to check.

A mention of two specific sites that appear on my log are in de-Googlized form in this post from Clack (can you guess which two? or at least one of them?)

“The following sites (the domains have been modified to keep them from being googlized) have been added to the block list due to referral spam:
www.dickgeph ardt2004. com
www.mp3 int. com
www.sharpton 2004. org
lin kz. com
www.dean for america. com
photos.star prose. com
pari s-hilt on-vi deo.blog spot. com”

I don’t think they’re adding comments, and I don’t think they’re sending emails (again, think that’s disabled) so what they’re doing is adding clickable links to my log, that I as a gullible stupe, clicked on.

At least the French-capital-city-hotel-chain-heir-tapedmedia-site is pretty funny to read.

And as for email spam to my normal back-line account…

Number of times the little pharmacist in the white coat landed in my inbox: 4

I think DGH is going to have to look at the filters he’s got and see if there’s a way to block those emails based on the specific email coding for the HTML image. Must Google on this.