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You are here: Home / Archives for Recreation / Blogging

Waiting for Spring to warm up

by The Diva

I can’t believe how much rain we’ve been getting here in Toronto. It seems that every time I try to go outside with the dog it starts pouring! Oh and our dog is a Lab .. a dog that traditionally loves water, but for some reason not rain drops. Uh huh … strange dog.

When we come back inside she goes to her crate where we keep a folded towel and she jumps up to stand at the side of the crate to look at it, indicating to me that she wants me to get the towel to dry her off … even if she’s not really all that wet because really she just wants to play with the towel. My dog is just too smart.

It’s been raining so much or other wise so miserable for the last few days that we really haven’t been out as much as we normally are. I took advantage of a break in the rain this afternoon and took the dog out for a long walk. While I was out I ran into one of my neighbors, a lady who just loves my dog and always stops to pet her and gives her a treat every time she sees her, and I guess she’s working from home these days. She told me she was just taking a break from working on her computer. She was busy trying to install inetsoft performance management software for her company and then it was back to work for her.

It seems more and more of my neighbors are working from home. I’ve worked from home (being sick on medical leave) for five years but when I first started blogging and doing some work from home I was the only one in the neighborhood that I know of working from home … now just about every house seems to have a person staying home doing work.

Anyway … I’m hoping that the rain will stop soon and Spring will start to warm up to normal temps. It’s been cold, wet and just kind of miserable. How has it been in your area?

Filed Under: Blogging, Home and family, House and Home, Items to Try, Pets, Recreation Tagged With: beg, blogging, cold, crate, dog, medical leave, miserable, neighbor, neighborhood, rain, raining, sick, smart dog, spring, stay at home, towel, wet, work, work from home

Still finding new things on my laptop whooohooo

by The Diva

I’ve had my new laptop for about three weeks now and I’m still exploring everything that’s on it. It certainly came loaded with quite a bit of software … in fact, I think i”ll probably end up taking some of it off the computer after a while if I don’t find that I use it because my new laptop has two hard drives and the operating system seems to be installed on the smaller hard drive which means everything so far is getting installed on that hard drive so it’s filling up quickly!

The new laptop is an Asus and if you’re familiar with Asus they come with tons of software and as I said I’m still trying to figure out what it all is … like smart login manager, and asus multiframe, asus access, asus, ap bank .. Clicking on the programs has gotten me into trouble once or twice so I think i’ll do internet searches on them first to figure out what they are. LOL I just wish there was a better explaination somewhere on the computer as to what all this special Asus variety software was about.

Oh and there’s a built in webcam. I’ve never had that before on a laptop or desktop. Trouble is .. again, I can’t find anything about how to control it. There’s barely anything written about it in the manual. Odd. Anyway .. once I figure it out I can use it for Conference calling on Skype with my friends and family. I’m certainly looking forward to that! Actually maybe if I just download and set up the Skype software perhaps the webcam will work? Probably. I guess I should test it while I can still return the laptop huh? I mean, if it didn’t work …

Ok back to finding out what other fun stuff is on my laptop …

Filed Under: Blogging, Electronics, Entertainment, Items to Try Tagged With: asus, asus software, bells and whistles, computer, conference call, control, figure out, finding, hard drive, how, laptop, manual, new, operating system, skyoe, software, stuff, webcam, work

I’ve got to start using my camera more often

by The Diva

I’ve been very lazy about taking pictures lately. Actually, it’s not just lately … I think it started sometime last fall.

I have a photoblog that I barely post in anymore. I also have a lovely garden that I used to take tons of photos of – macros of flowers in bloom, seed heads and so on … but I don’t think I’ve pulled out one of my digital cameras in at least a month.

I still enjoy taking photos, but I think it’s processing them on the computer that I don’t like. I have quite a few – maybe 300 or 400 photos – from things that we did in June and photos of our flowers blooming that are sitting in folders on my computer waiting to be cropped and then uploaded to my Flickr account.

Do you ever get lazy about taking photos when you to parties or interesting events? Or are you like me – you take the pictures, but don’t do anything with them once they’re uploaded on to your computer?

I’ve got to get out of this funk .. I think I take pretty good photographs and I should be at least including a few on each of my blogs.

Filed Under: Blogging, Items to Try Tagged With: camera, computer, cropping, digital camera, editing, flowers, garden, lazy, macro, photographs, photos, pictures, posting

How do you deal with comment spam?

by The Diva

I’m so sick of spam and comment spam. I should be … I’ve been dealing with it for close to 20 years!

I was an early internet or shall I say World Wide Web user (1991 – remember BBS) and I started my first website in 1995. That’s a long time to have been dealing with spammy emails and now that I blog (my husband and I have 19 blogs between us) I have comment spam to deal with as well.

I’m so tired of getting emails and comments on my sites that are full of keywords and multiple links. You know … if the comment or keyword had anything to do with my article or post I might let it get by and I do occasionally … but most of them have nothing to do with the topic of my post.

I’ll write about my dog and get people leaving keywords and links for scammy products that will make you rich on the internet. I write about my dog and I get weight loss and lipofuze reviews links. I write about my garden and get spam comments filled with real estate or finance links and keywords.

Arghhhhh!

We changed all of our blogs over to DoFollow three years ago and since that time the spam comments have quadrupled!

So how do I deal with it? I moderate comments on our blogs heavily. If a comment is clearly spam, doesn’t make sense, has nothing to do with the topic of the post or simply says “nice post” or a new one – I’m having trouble viewing your sight with such and such browser It goes directly to the Akismet spam pile.

If a comment is somewhat on topic but full of keywords I’ll edit the comment to remove extra links (or nofollow the ones that are kind of relevant to my topic).

If someone is clearly spamming … such as hitting several of my blogs within an hour or two I might leave their comments if they are on topic but I delete their name link and any extra links. People that hit a good chunk or all of our blogs within a few hours are clearly going through a DoFollow list.

I mean, our blogs cover a variety of topics – two are humor blogs, two are guitar and music related, one is about my garden, another about organic gardening, one is about web design while another is about blogging and tech gadgets and two are personal, another is about celebrity news etc … most people aren’t interested in all of those topics on the same day let alone within an hour or two! LOL

As for email spam … well I used to get over 1000 emails a day thanks to all of our websites (plus mailing lists that i run that are associated with three sites) and the spam that they seemed to generate (as well as genuine email requests). Now I run our main email accounts through Gmail and forward the mail back to our email accounts and Google filters out most of the spam.

How do you deal with comment spam on your blog or website? Do you moderate? What’s your policy?

I know that my way of dealing with comment spam is likely a lot harsher than others, but with all of our websites and blogs we get anywhere from 50 to hundreds of comments each day … For me, the way I’ve described how we deal with comment spam above, is the best way, but it may not be the best way for you and your site.

Filed Under: Blogging, Items to Try Tagged With: comment spam, comments, dofollow, email spam, emails, heavy moderation, keywords, link, links, moderate, serial spammer, spammers

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