Brief notes
I know, I know: I haven’t been posting very regularly just lately. What can I say? I’m sorry. I don’t know if it’s the New Year or cosmic rays, or the value of the pound but nothing has really sparked me enough to make any comments (well, that’s not quite true, but I think everyone else has said everything I would say quite eloquently enough so I’ll stay away from the subject).
Which leaves us with the latest installment in the ever popular Brief Notes series; you know you love it!!
Politics
Everywhere I turn on the Net and TV these days, I can’t seem to get away from the US presidential candidate elections. So, you guys have an election to select a new leader for your party? That’s novel - you’d think Tony might have picked up on that one, being such a good friend of Dubya.
What I don’t get is all this caucus, primaries, Super Tuesday sort of stuff. It’s like you’re voting to be able to vote or something. But then the whole voting system in the US seems screwy to me; all that electoral college stuff - what’s that about? (Well, other than making sure that the man with the least number of votes get the job, of course).
Blogging 1
One of my pet subjects; there should be a further episode of my Going Self-hosted Guide in a few days but I just wanted to mention spam today. If you have a blog, you get spam; there’s no avoiding it. Wordpress.com blogs get Akismet (whether they want it or not) to filter theirs and it’s OK-ish (although just recently it seems to be somewhat over zealous and is creating a lot of false positives). On a .org blog you have a choice and thanks to a tip from Cornell Finch, I’d say drop Akismet and go for Defensio. I”ve only installed it today, but all the comments I’ve read about it rate it very highly and you do get more control than with Akismet.
Blogging 2
I read a lot of news feeds and since changing to the Mac, I’ve tried out lots of different feed readers. One of the ones that I tried and liked was NetNewsWire, but as it was something you had to pay for (albeit not very much) I ended up plumping for the free of charge Shrook instead.
Shrook is a very good piece of software for reading blogs and I’ve been using it for several months, but there was always something about the way it looked that niggled me. But today comes the announcement that NetNewsWire is now free, so I’ve switched. It just has a nicer feel to it than Shrook and I’d recommend checking it out.
Blogging 3
Over the last day or so, I’ve been having a discussion with another blogger about comments; he was complaining that his relatively new blog never got any comments. He seemed to be taking this as a personal affront, and even suggested that a third blogger only got comments because she sometimes wrote about sex and was “selling herself”.
As an aside to the issue, I started to wonder what other bloggers experiences were with comments. Did it take you a long time to get your first comment, or were you getting lots of comments from day one? Do you see more comments when you write about certain subjects, or on certain days, or is there no pattern at all?
Throughout the life of The Wolf’s Howl (first at Wordpress.com, then Blogspot and now self-hosted) I’ve seen comments go up and down like a yo-yo. I don’t get all that many, but then I don’t get a huge number of visitors.
And what’s your reaction when you do get comments? Has the newness worn off the experience and it’s just another comment, or is it still irregular enough that it’s like a little present, a reward for writing a post that someone else not only read but took the time to write about?
Football
Well, Eastbourne Borough finally got beaten in the League on New Years Day (shame!). But that’s the only loss so far - 22 games in - and they’re second in the table with two games in hand. Just need the team above to have a couple more losses and we’ll be in like Flynn!
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