If you have your very own blog, here’s something to watch out for. It may take a while because I’ve had my very own blog for almost five years and this just happened to me.
I don’t do anything to publicize my blog because I pay for the bandwidth myself, I don’t want to pay more, and I write this more to entertain myself than for any other purpose. Nevertheless, the number of hits I get each month has continued to grow. It’s now around eight thousand. Also, the first time I ever Googled the phrase “Things I Want (Or Need) To Know,” I got 8 hits. Most recently, I got 899,000. I’ve even had one re-post that I’m aware of.
I am entertaining myself, I have a few readers and I’ve had three legit commenters (I’d like more). Two of them are friends who also blog. In the third instance, I stayed at a nice hotel in South San Francisco, not far from SFO, two or three years ago and while there, I lost the battery cover off a radio I travel with. I asked the nice people at the hotel to look for it and if they found it to return it to me. They looked for it, found it and returned it. I went into my blog, said thanks and said they were nice people. I got a comment from management thanking me (more proof that they are in fact nice). Oaf that I am, I managed to delete that one instead of posting it. Sorry about that.
It’s been a while since I last talked about how I handle comments. Recent developments dictate that I do it again. Last week, I got two complimentary comments from people who seemed to speak English as a second language. They seemed odd, because the comments were very general and came in response to something I wrote 14 months ago. Still, I published them. Who likes compliments? I do. Who knows the difference between compliment and complement? Not me, so I look it up each time I use either one. Now, I think that perhaps those two comments last week were from a spambot trying to see if the comments would be posted. If I’m wrong about that, I’m sorry and I will continue to publish comments similar to those.
The software I use to post this blog gives me a good idea where the hits come from and I’ve known for a while that some of my hits are from spambots. Why do I think that last week’s comments may be fake? Because after I posted them, I got another bunch of comments, all of which seemed like spam. So, I didn’t post those. If I should ever receive a comment that seems like Spam rather than spam, I won’t publish that either, but I reserve the right to eat it.
If you read my blog, enjoy it or hate it, agree with it or disagree with it, feel free to comment. I doubt that I’ll edit your comments although I won’t allow flaming. I know that spambots don’t actually read blogs, but just for the record, all comments on this blog are moderated. If a comment seems like spam to the panel of judges I use to vet these things, it won’t be posted. The panel of judges consists of me. Decisions of the judges are arbitrary and final: It is, after all, my blog.
