Category Archives: On Blogging

Some thoughts about blogging.

Blogger or Writer? Not Both?

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An article and podcast from a former blogger.

I listened to the podcast first. It was in my iPod after updating yesterday, among the other Slate Magazine Podcasts. Its title sent a chill down my spine, “Stop Blogging, Start Writing.”

But the interview with the author left me with the sneaking suspicion that her “last entry” was just an attempt to get some publicity. She sounded like a giggly airhead. She admitted that she had trouble “following up” with potential assignments. Hell, she claims she’d been contacted by “several” New York publishers interested in books, yet she’d managed to come away without a single contract. Not much of a professional writer, if you ask me. Any unknown who sits around waiting for a publisher to play the ball for her doesn’t deserve to succeed as a writer.

Good things may come to those who wait, but book contracts don’t.

Still, the idea of blogging taking up too much creative juice, leaving nothing for other writing, remains with me. I looked up the article that led to the podcast interview:

“Why I shut down my blog” by Sarah Hepola. She seems to echo many of my sentiments, but spoils the piece with her last sentence:

Now, if I could just turn off the TV, I think I could finally get started.

Blogging and television? No wonder she doesn’t have any time to write! Or maybe that was some kind of joke? Ha-ha?

I don’t think that author will stay away from blogging for long. It’s rather addictive — at least I think so. Something interesting happens to you and you want to write it up in your blog, partially to remember it and partially to share it with others. You learn something new, something that could help others and you want to share it in your blog. You have a deep thought or a revelation of major importance and you want to shout it out in your blog pages to see if anyone else agrees or wants to argue with you about it.

But I do agree that blogging sucks something out of a person. That something isn’t lost, though. It’s just stored away for the future.

E-Mail Addresses on Web Sites

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Why you shouldn’t include a link to your e-mail address on your Web site.

Many people — including me! — use their Web sites as a kind of global calling card, a way to share information about themselves or their companies with others all over the world. It’s common to want to share your contact information with site visitors — particularly potential customers — so they can contact you. This is often done through the use of a mailto tag. For example, e-mail me! which appears as a clickable e-mail link.

Unfortunately there are people out there who want your e-mail address, people who want to scam you into sending money to Nigeria, advertise their online casinos, sell you prescription drugs, show you their porn sites — the list goes on and on. If you have your e-mail address on any Web site, you probably already get a lot of this spam. That’s because of computer programs that crawl through Web sites and harvest e-mail addresses that are included in the otherwise innocent mailto tag. Heck, they even harvest addresses that aren’t part of a mailto tag, so just including your e-mail address on a Web page without a link can get you on a bulk e-mail list.

So what’s the solution? There are a few.

One popular and easy-to-implement solution is to turn your e-mail address into a text phrase that a site visitor must see and manually type in to use. For example, me@domain.com becomes me at domain dot com or meATdomainDOTcom. You get the idea. Someone who wanted to send you an e-mail message, would be able to figure that out — if he couldn’t, he really shouldn’t be surfing the ‘Net anyway — and manually enter the correct translation in his e-mail program. But e-mail harvesters supposedly can’t figure this out (which I find hard to believe) so the e-mail address isn’t harvested.

Another solution is to use an e-mail obfuscation program. These programs take e-mail addresses and change or insert characters to make them impossible to read. The e-mail addresses look okay on the site — to a person viewing them — and work fine in a mailto link — when used from the Web site. WordPress plugins are available to do this. I don’t use any of them, so I can’t comment on how well they work. But they must be at least a little helpful if they’re available. You can find a few here, on the WordPress Codex.

The solution I use is form-based e-mail. I created a Contact Form with fields for the site visitor to fill out. When the form is submitted, a program processes it and sends it to my e-mail address. Because that address is not on the Web page that includes the form — or on any other Web page, for that matter — e-mail harvesters cannot see it. As a result, I’m able to provide a means of contacting me via e-mail that keeps my e-mail address safe from spammers.

The program I use is called NateMail from MindPalette Software. it’s a free PHP tool that’s easy to install and configure. But what I like best about it is that you can set it up with multiple e-mail addresses. Use a corresponding drop-down list in your form to allow the site visitor to choose the person the e-mail should go to. NateMail directs the message to the correct person. You can see this in action on my other WordPress-based site, wickenburg-az.com, in its Contact Form. If you want a few more features, such as the ability to attach files to an e-mail message, MindPalette offers ProcessForm for only $15.

Other WordPress users are likely to have their own favorite methods of protecting their e-mail addresses from spammers. With luck, a few of them who read this will share their thoughts in the Comments for this post.

One more thing…this doesn’t just apply to WordPress-based sites. It applies to all Web sites. And a contact form tool like NateMail will work with any PHP-compatible Web server.

If you’re already getting spam, using one of these methods won’t stop it. It’ll just keep the situation from getting much worse. Your best bet is to change your e-mail address and protect the new one. In my case, that’s a big pain in the butt — so many people I need to be in touch with have my e-mail address and, worse yet, I often use it as a login for Web sites I visit (which does indeed make the spam situation worse). I’m working on a plan to phase out the bad addresses and replace them with ones that I protect. Until then, I have to rely on the spam-catching features of my ISP and my e-mail software to sort out the bad stuff — currently about 20-40 messages a day — so I don’t have to.

Get Me a Spelling Checker!

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I used to know how to spell.

Plagiarism is not spelled plagerism. How embarrassing to have spelled it incorrectly — in the title, no less — of my previous post. I just fixed it.

Spelling checkers in word processing software have made me lazy. Why know how to spell a word when my word processor will simply underline it for me to call it to my attention if I get it wrong? Or, worse yet, simply fix it for me, as Microsoft Word often does? In exchange for convenience, just a little more of my mind is being sapped away by disuse.

WordPress, which I use to maintain this site, does not have a built-in spelling checker. That’s why you’ll see so many typos and misspelled words here. There’s no red underline to flag possible problems, so I just don’t notice them. I have, however, made a special effort to look up the spelling of words I’m not sure about (such as disuse and misspelled earlier in this entry). I do that with the Dictionary widget that’s part of Mac OS X. I leave it open and press F12 whenever I need to use it. Enter what I think is the right spelling and let Dictionary tell me if it recognizes the word. If it doesn’t, I think it out, trying to come up with the right spelling. It’s a good exercise for my brain.

The Dictionary widget is also useful when I’m reading an article online and need a word defined. Rather than try to glean meaning from use, I can just fetch the darn meaning to have a firmer grasp of the word and build my vocabulary.

If I can’t figure out a word’s spelling, I use Google. I enter my best guess at a word in Google’s search box — for example, plagerism — and Google instantly responds, “Did you mean plagiarism?” Uh, yeah. That’s what I meant.

Now at this point, Miraz, if she’s reading, is asking herself why I don’t use MarsEdit, like she does, to work with my WordPress blog. I tried it, but I wasn’t very impressed. I really don’t like using a lot of different software to complete a task. It’s more to learn. It’s more to figure out when it doesn’t work right. In my case, I couldn’t get MarsEdit to handle pictures the way I needed it to and I didn’t want to invest the time to make it work. I’ll probably use MarsEdit to do my blogging during the summer months when I’m away from a handy Internet connection most of the time.

So if you find a misspelled word in these blog entries, have patience with me. It could be my flying fingers unable to hit the keys in the right order. Or it could just be that I thought I knew how to spell the word…but was wrong.

Photos Taken Offline

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I take my slideshows offline. Here’s why.

I got a rude awakening the other day when someone sent me an e-mail postcard that featured one of my photographs.

Now I know this person didn’t mean anything by it. He was writing to me about something in the photo and I guess he figured that the photo would help him communicate what he was trying to say.

But it got me thinking. And it made me realize that the .Mac slideshows I’ve created to show off the places I’ve been are a perfect format for theft. They’re a high enough resolution for the Web (obviously) and for printing at smaller sizes. These are usually photos of remote places in Arizona and I’d like to think some of them are interesting and artistic. I create and sell photo greeting cards with these photos. It would really piss me off if someone else was doing the same thing with my work.

My friend Laura, who is a local photographer, is stuck with a similar dilemma, and was asking me about it just the other day. She wants to show off her work on her Web site and make photos available for sale. But she’s worried that people will just download the photos off the Web and print them. People do it all the time. People mistakenly believe that if something is on the Web, it’s not protected by copyright law.

It’s happened to me with work I’ve written here. Someone liked one of my articles in these blogs so much, he printed it out, photocopied it, and distributed it all over town. He left my byline on it, but made no note of the context of where it had been found. His goal was to make me look evil — some people really do need to get a life — but he wound up providing entertainment for a lot of people who agreed with me. But that’s not the point. The point is, he broke the law in distributing my work without my permission. The next time it happens, I will prosecute. Heck, I’d love to get a copyright thief to pay for my helicopter.

So anyway, I pulled the high-res photos offline. And, from now on, photos will be limited to the small, low-resolution images you see here in these blogs.