blog related: August 2004 Archives
About ten years ago, my mother decided to take up golf. Our family had never really been in the "golfing set", so when she started my parents began to mix with a new crowd. At the time of her joining, my brother said something along the lines of "But golf clubs are elitist, aren't they?", to which I replied, in a rare moment of wit, "Yeah, but it depends who you know."
I'm coming to the conclusion that blogs are the same. I've been wandering around other people's blogs a bit over the last few days, and in their blogrolling (or whatever) section I'm seeing the same names coming up over and over again. Do these people really all read each other's blogs, or is it some sort of mutual link-exchange which I've not been a party to yet? Either way, I won't be linking to all and sundry just because everyone else is. I'm only going to link to those blogs which I read regularly, and there aren't that many of them yet. I've got a few up my sleeve, and if I find myself going back to look for updates every few days, then I'll guess they've got my attention, and I'll note it here. But until then, my reading habits stay my own.
Next question...... would I read my own blog??
Those of you who have a blog will already know this, and those of you that don't, won't. This is aimed at those that don't, in order that after reading it, they do.
Every time I make a post on this blog, it pings a service at weblogs.com, which updates it's main page and puts me at the top of the list of "most recently updated blogs", which is fantastic. For all of about three seconds. Because when someone else updates their blog and pings weblogs.com, they go to the top of the list. I've spent the last half an hour browsing through the list on weblogs.com, and found a couple of blogs I'm going to keep an eye on.
And in that half an hour, I've slipped from number 1 to number 1943.
Yes, I do actually know how to spell tweak. I'm just spelling it that way to annoy you. I posted here about how I was starting to get comment spam, so I turned off comments. But if you look at the bottom of this post, you'll see an invitation to leave a little note of your own. What happened to make me change my mind, you ask?
Two things.
One) a blog with comments disabled is like a man sitting in a room with no doors talking to himself. Enable the comments and you put a door in the room. All I have to do now is wait for someone to come in :-)
Two) I discovered Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin, so I plugged it in. Just got to see if it works now.
I've added a list of RSS Feeds to the blog. Just click on the RSS Feeds link on the left (of the main page, in case you're reading this in an archive entry) and choose your category. Click on the down arrow or the "more" button and you'll see the latest headlines/entries etc.
I do believe I'm starting to get the hang of this interweb thingy..
However I still need to work out what the "[]" is after each headline, and also how to get it to open each external site page in a new window. I know how to do it, I just need to work my way through the php code to see which line I need to change.
Been playing around with Movable Type, looking around the net to find out what I can do with it, and I've decided to ditch the blogroll (mainly because I couldn't remember my username and password for it) and set up a sideblog, which I'm going to use as a quick repository for links to useful pages.
I prefer to have everything handled on-site so I am in full control over it, rather than having to rely on someone else's service. If blogroll suddenly decide that they're only going to offer a paid service, I don't want to have to type in all my links again. This way, they're on my database, and they get backed up with my database.
I might (if I ever get round to it) look at some of the ways of getting comments back onto this without attracting the spammers. I know it can be done, but let's face it, it's just taken me about 10 hours to get this sideblog up and running, what chance do I have of making this site spam-repellant this side of Christmas?
By the way, there are two reasons why it took me 10 hours to get the sideblog up and running. First reason was that the tutorial I was following didn't seem to work properly, and the second reason was that I spent 5 hours of those 10 at my parents for dinner. Once I found a tutorial that worked it only took me 10 minutes to set up, plus another half-hour of playing with the style sheet to get this thing into three columns.
Anyway, it's done now. It's in the past, so fuggehdaboudit.
I've turned off comments for this blog. It's a pity, because it would have been good to find out if anyone had been reading it at all. Not that anyone really left any comments anyway.
Apart from this guy, who left loads:
IP Address: 80.58.33.107
Name: pics mature women
Email Address: jhvrer@xoxma.net
URL: http://www.milfporn.org
Comments:
I am honored to drop a line here and say thank you for keeping this great site online.
Well, jhvrer, I've made sure your email address is available to anyone if they'd like to send you any unwanted emails. (I've not checked to see if the address is valid - it's probably not. But some email reaping bot somewhere should pick it up and start sending something to it. Hopefully)
