The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Yeah, I’m just going to stop doing Sentential Links for what will be the last two Mondays of 2009. The weekends are too hectic, and the last thing I want to do on a Sunday night when I’m tired is gather a bunch of links. So this feature will return in 2010.
(Content in general may be sparse between now and the end of the year, but I’m not going on hiatus at all, except for maybe a few days come December 30 or so. We’ll see.)
Lots of folks have noticed lately that the Word Verification CAPTCHAs on Blogger (and others) are less random concatenations of letters nowadays and more things that seem like they may be, or actually are, real words. Sometimes these are pretty funny, such as this one with which I was confronted a few minutes ago whilst leaving a comment over at SamuraiFrog‘s place:
Could Blogger be, I don’t know, telling me something?
Folks, I’m seeing a general up-tick in the number of spam comments making it through the CAPTCHA here over the last few weeks. It’s only been about one comment a day, so I can keep manually erasing them when they happen, but if the frequency picks up much more beyond that, I may decide to turn on Comment Moderation (which would mean that all comments would be “held” until I get ’round to publishing them). I’ll make that announcement if it becomes necessary, but there it is.
By the way, I’ve also noticed something that Will Duquette noticed: occasional spam comments that are actually “on topic”, and only include a commercial link either in their signature or at the end. For my purposes, unless you’re someone I know trying to point out a product or website that may be germane to a specific post, I will assume that any comment containing an obviously commercial link is a spam comment and delete it. My decision’s a bit more Draconian than Will’s, but he’s probably nicer than I am, anyway.
For more information, see my official comments policy.
At some point yesterday, this blog received its 500,000th hit, at least as far as SiteMeter is concerned. Thanks to the regular readers, the sporadic readers, the readers who were regulars until I offended them, and the people searching for pictures of Sophie Marceau. (For some reason she gets the most hits.) Since the heyday of blogging seems to be over, I don’t expect this blog’s traffic to ever grow much beyond what it is right now, for the remaining duration of this blog’s existence, however long that ends up being. But it’s still fun.
Onward and upward!
Earlier I posted a song from Brigadoon, the show about the town that appears for one day every hundred years. On a related note, my old friend Mr. Jones has posted a pile of entries. A bunch of ’em, which makes me wonder if he just writes entries and then saves them for a day when he feels like posting ’em. I mean, who does that?
(OK, I do that. Yeesh.)
I’ve had 2 Blowhards on my blogroll for years now — probably since about a year into the life of this blog. It’s a cultural blog, featuring posts that are almost always interesting and well-written, even if their stance is one I’m not entirely in agreement with. (At least, the posts on which I have enough knowledge to have an opinion — the range of topics over there is quite vast, and there are many topics on which I know absolutely nothing.) The blog started as a dialogue between the two blog owners — hence the title, “2 Blowhards”. One of them, “Friedrich”, stepped down several years back, but another, “Donald”, stepped into that breach. Through it all, though, one of the originals, “Michael Blowhard”, has remained.
Until now. Michael Blowhard is stepping down. That’s a shame, but having once walked away from blogging for several months myself, I completely understand his viewpoint. The number of blogs that I remember from the early days in which I was doing this which are still active is slowly going down. Sooner or later, blogs either change direction or close down. It’s pretty much inevitable.
Anyway, best of luck to Michael Blowhard.
Don’t be alarmed, folks, but I’m in the process of changing my template. At long last I’ve grown bored of how the place has been looking. Bear with me as things will be slightly hinky for a while.
UPDATE: I think I’ve got it roughly the way I want it to look for right now, but does anyone know how to get rid of that “read more” link that’s on each post? I don’t do expanded posts like that, and thus have no need of that feature.
I just now realized, at nearly 9:00 at night, that I forgot to come up with a Random Wednesday Conversation Starter post for this morning. I’m chalking it up to the minor cold I’ve been nursing the last two days. I’ll get back to it next week. Really. I’m going to write the post right now and schedule it so it automatically appears.
