Category: The Blog

Another Turn of the Wheel

Four years ago today, Fiat Lux came online.

I’ve averaged a post every 1.21 days since then. Not bad, for a solo effort (plus one guess post from Scott).

I’ve had days where fewer than a dozen people came to my site, and a few days where more than 6,000 people stopped by.

I’ve had days where I couldn’t wait to get something up onto the blog, and days where I’ve though about shutting it down entirely.

I’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of web marketing — SEO, how to build traffic, how to get links — that I use in my professional work.

I like to think that the discipline of writing this blog has made me a better writer (although this post is probably not one of me better efforts in that regard). At the very least, I’m more aware of my weaknesses as a writer now, and hopefully I do a better job of working through them.

Lately, though, it feels like most of what I want to write about is me, me, me. And this blog is at it’s best when it’s not all about me. Not sure how to resolve that contradiction right now; perhaps I need a few more days away from the blog to get my groove back.

I closed my first post like this:

What next? Who knows. But I think that I’d like to blog the journey.

And now, 4 years later, I still do. So let’s see what happens.

Against The Grain

I’m of the camp that feels a blog is not a blog without comments. I also feel that there should be as few barriers to entry as possible when it comes to allowing comments. Easy interaction is a huge part of what has made the Internet great, and I’m a huge fan of it.

However, the damned comment spammers have made it impossible for me to run my blog the way I’d prefer. The vast majority of my older blog entries have had their comments closed to keep the spammers at bay, I’ve added all sorts of anti-spam plug-ins, and I’ve turned trackbacks off entirely.

And despite it all, especially in the last 48 hours, the comment spam has been overwhelming.

So today, and unwillingly, Captcha verification has been added to the blog comment form (Thanks Scott!). I really wish I didn’t have to, but it’s either that or go to some form of user registration / comment moderation, and on balance, I think Captcha is a little less of a burden all around.

To all you comment spammers out there who’ve forced me into this: You suck.

To the rest of you: I’m sorry. I hope it’s not too much of a hassle.

False Positives

A month or so ago, I posted a blog entry noting that I was having a problem with comments vanishing when I posted to WordPress blogs. Thanks to the kind operator the Burbed blog, who listened to my complaints and took the time to do some testing, I finally have an answer to why my comments were vanishing into the aethir.

Apparently, my ‘handle’ of Fiat Lux is classed as ‘definitely spam’ by one of the common WordPress spam filters (presumably Akismet).

That’s moderately annoying, since I’m rather fond of that phrase.

It’s Not That Hard

So in the wake of the Kathy Sierra situation, Tim O’Reilly has created a draft of a Blogger’s Code of Conduct.

Frankly, I don’t see why deciding to moderate one’s comments is such a big deal. We all do it already in order to mitigate spam; this is not all that different. It doesn’t need badges and it doesn’t need a long, painfully worded Code.

Here’s mine, from December 2005:

I reserve the right to remove any comment left on this site, for any reason or for no reason at all. I pay for the web hosting; I get to decide how my disk space and bandwidth are used. However, I do not edit comments; that seems unfair. If they do not get tossed into the bit bucket, they remain as their authors wrote them.

I see no need to change that policy. I support the rights of free, anonymous, and/or pseudonymous speech online. However, that doesn’t give you the right to say something I don’t like on my dime. Don’t like it? Go over to Blogger or Vox or WordPress and get your own site. Problem solved.

UPDATE 1:50 PM:

Tony Hung gets it absolutely right:

Bloggers don’t need a code of conduct, because it isn’t the content of blogs that are in the question. What’s being called into question is the cowardly personal attacks that are sent by email, and left in the comments sections of blogs.

And if that’s really the issue, then calling for a Bloggers Code of Conduct is pointless.

Webhost Update

I decided that I have too much else to get done before I head out for Europe to deal with finding a new web host this month.

However, MT-Blacklist is still hosed and at this point I don’t believe that Powweb is either willing or able to help me fix it. So until I have the time to really deal with this issue, I’ve turned off all trackbacks on the site and I am going to be very aggressive about turning off comments after a couple of days. I don’t like doing this, but there’s no other way to keep the blog spam under control for now.

What About Blogging’s Upside?

Ezra’s got a blog post about the pros / cons of blogging anonymously or under a pseudonym. It’s an issue that comes up periodically.

It did get me thinking, though — it’s easy to talk about blogging’s potential downsides. What are some of the positive things that have come out of having a blog?

Everyone’s answer will be different, I think. For me, it’s definitely helped my writing — I’ve always been a decent writer, but I’m a faster one now, more confident in my ‘voice’ and hopefully a bit more polished.