Tag Archives: language

Blogging Courtesy

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Why I think people should use some common courtesy on the Web.

Maybe I’m old fashioned or naive, but when I visit someone’s blog and read what they have to say, I would never consider posting a nasty comment that belittles or insults the author or another commenter.

But apparently, I’m among the minority. People will say anything they like in the comments, no matter how rude or crude it is. They use foul language, they insult the author of a post in no uncertain terms, they do their best to make it clear to other readers just how stupid they think the post’s author or another commenter is. I believe they do this for kicks and to make themselves seem more important. But what they really do is show how little self control and maturity they have.

Your Blog is Your Living Room

Here’s how I see it: A person’s blog is like their living room. By putting it on the Web, they’re opening the door for visitors. They share their opinions in their blog posts. They open comments to get feedback from visitors, to start discussions about the topic. Visitors can come and go as they please, they can participate in discussions by posting comments, they can share their insight to add value and help others learn or see another point of view.

I would no sooner post an insulting comment or perpetuate a heated argument in a blog than insult my host in his home.

If I read something in a blog that I don’t agree with and I want to comment to present my point of view, I’ll word my comment carefully as not to be insulting. This is how mature, educated people start discussions, the way ideas are shared in a friendly, non-offensive environment. This is how we learn from each other.

(A perfect example on this blog is the incredible string of informative comments for the post “Podcast Playlists No Longer Play Continuously.” I posted my solution to a problem and dozens of other people came forward with their comments and solutions. We all learned from this.)

If I find something in a blog so offensive that it makes me angry, I will simply stop reading that blog. Let’s face it: there are millions of blogs out there. Why should I waste my time reading the ones I don’t learn from or enjoy?

Bloggers Have a Responsibility

Bloggers, of course, have a responsibility. Allowing rude, insulting, and offensive comments to remain on their blog only invites more of the same. It’s like allowing the riffraff of the Web to take over your living room.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about at least one female blogger being threatened on her blog, in other blogs, and by e-mail. The threats are nasty and explicit, and to an intelligent person, would seem to be the work of deranged minds. They’re certainly not funny and, if taken seriously by the authorities, would probably lead to arrests.

My question is: how could a blogger consider himself responsible to the blogging community by allowing such comments to appear and remain on his blog?

The comment feature allows moderation. It makes it possible to clear offensive comments from a blog — like wiping dog crap off the carpet in your living room.

You might call this censorship. I don’t. I call it keeping things under control, respecting your fellow bloggers and visitors, taking responsibility for what goes on in your living room.

I Keep My Living Room Clean

I’ve had offensive comments appear on this blog. Some have been directed at me, others have been directed at other commenters. The comments were removed as soon as I saw them — normally within a few minutes of being posted.

But it bothers me that they appeared in the first place. That people can’t embrace the value of the blogging community and participate in discussions as mature and responsible adults. That they spend more energy typing in verbal abuse than actually thinking about what they’ve read and how it might apply to their lives — or not. That they’re willing to waste more time typing in a nasty comment than just moving on to a Web site that’s more in line with their own personal taste.

One thing’s for sure; their efforts will always be wasted here.

Site Comment Policy

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I need to make a few things clear(er).

June 30, 2014 Update
I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the site comment policy on a regular page (rather than post) on this site. You can find it here: Comment Policy.

Although I discuss my comment policy briefly on the Contact Me page of this site, allow me to expand on what’s there in this post.

Comments Overview

This site allows comments on blog posts (often referred to as “articles” here). To enter a comment, fill in the comment form at the bottom of the post. If the form doesn’t appear, click the Comment link at the bottom of the post to display it. Registration is not required.

The name, e-mail, and comment fields of the form are required. If any are left blank or if the e-mail field is an obvious fake, the comment will be deleted.

First names only or handles are fine for the Name field, as long as they don’t use words that are in poor taste.

If you enter a company name or Web site name in the Name field, there’s a pretty good chance your comment will be deleted as spam.

Speaking of spam, if your comment was posted solely to advertise a product, service, or Web site, it’s likely to be deleted as spam. I have zero tolerance for spam or spam-like postings.

All Comments are Moderated

Because of the problem with comment spam on frequently-visited blogs, this site uses two types of comment moderation:

  • Automatic moderation through the use of spam prevention software. I use two different spam prevention software packages. One can automatically determine whether a site “visitor” is really a spambot and prevent it from posting a comment. It’s about 75% effective and generally catches 5,000 to 10,000 individual spambot accesses each week. The other spam prevention package uses established algorithms to identify messages that are likely to be spam. It holds these messages in a special moderation queue for me to review. But since there are usually 50 to 200 of these messages a day, I normally just delete them without an in-depth review. The best way to stay out of this spam bucket is to minimize links within your comment.
  • Manual moderation through the review of comments that have not automatically been identified as spam. If a comment makes it through the first two lines of defense, it’s put in a moderation queue. I read the comment and determine whether it’s appropriate for this site. If it’s not, I delete it. If it is, I approve it. If it’s spam, I mark it as such to help “train” my spam detection software. If you post a spam message on this site just once, I’m not likely to see any of your future comments, since they’ll automatically go in the spam bucket.

Please don’t expect your comment, no matter how appropriate, to appear immediately or even within a day or two. I’m a busy person and try to moderate comments daily, but that doesn’t always happen. Don’t post the same comment repeatedly; I’ll just have to delete the extras.

I’m always interested in reading the opinions of others, as long as they’re presented in a reasonable and friendly way. Rudely bashing me or other commenters is a good way to get your comment deleted — or, worse yet, marked as spam so I never see one of your comments again. I’ll allow comments with differences of opinion if those differences are presented in the spirit of friendly debate.

I also reserve the right to edit comments. I don’t modify content, but I might delete something I think is offensive or overly commercial if the rest of the comment is something other readers might benefit from.

I do want to remind all visitors that I am responsible for this site’s content — including comments. I simply won’t let the site be used for anything other than a place to share information and ideas. The site maintains a PG-13 rating in both content and language.

If you believe I’ve deleted your comment because I didn’t think it was appropriate, you will be wasting your time if you attempt to repost it or e-mail me about it. Your comment will not appear and I will ignore your e-mail. It takes only seconds to delete either one, so you’re not wasting my time at all. There are a lot of small minded, nasty people out there and I’m not about to waste my time dealing with any of them.

And That’s How It Is

While I realize that this policy might be harsher than the policies in place on other sites, this isn’t one of those sites. It’s my site. You’re my guest, and I don’t expect my guests to abuse my hospitality. If you have a problem with this policy, then you have a problem with me and my site and I don’t expect you to waste your time here.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Your comments are appreciated — really! You know where to put them.

Computer Wait Speed

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Maria Speaks Episode 34: Computer Wait Speed

My current computer woes remind me of something I heard long ago.

A long time ago — ten or more years, which is the middle ages in terms of the computing industry — computers were being marketed primarily on the basis of processor speed. Every time Intel or Motorola would come out with a new processor chip, members of the geeky set hurried to the stories to buy a new computer or upgrade that would bring their machines up to speed. It was then that I heard this rather curious statement:

All computers wait at the same speed.

The statement, of course, was meant to poke fun at computer users. At least that’s how I read it. Your computer could be the fastest in the world, but if you weren’t up to speed, all that extra fast processing power would be wasted. After all, each time a computer completes an instruction — whether it’s opening a dialog box, applying a font style change to some text, or matching e-mail addresses in your address book when you type into a field in a new e-mail message form — the computer faithfully waits…for you. As long as it has to. And while computer processors are getting ever faster, computer users are simply not keeping up.

Let Me Tell You About My Mom

All this reminds me of a sort of funny story. My mother, who has been using computers for nearly as long as I have, is not what you’d call a “power user.” She pretty much knows what her computer can do for her and she can usually make it do it. But she’s not the kind of person who pushes against the boundaries of what she knows very often. And when she’s working with her computer, she spends a lot of time making the computer wait while she thinks about what’s onscreen and how she needs to proceed. That isn’t a big deal — I’d say that 95% of computer users are like her. People react to what the computer does rather than anticipate what’ll come up next and have the next task prepared in their minds when the computer is ready to accept it. And all these computers are waiting at the same speed.

Anyway, for years, my Mom used dial-up Internet services. Most of us did. But as better alternatives came around and Web sites got ever more graphic-intensive, most of us updated our Internet connection technology to take advantage of cable or DSL or some other higher bandwidth connection. (I was literally the first (and only) kid on the block to get ISDN at my home. This was back in the days before cable and DSL Internet service. It cost me a fortune — heck, they had to dig a trench to lay new telephone lines to my house — but I simply could not tolerate busy signals, dropped carriers, and slow download speeds for my work. It operated at a whopping 128 Kbps and cost me $150/month. Ouchie!) My Mom, on the other hand, didn’t upgrade. She continued to surf the Internet through AOL on a dial-up connection, right into late 2006. Worse yet, she refused to get a second phone line, so she limited her Internet access or was impossible to get on the phone.

Let me take a little side trip here to discuss why her attitude wasn’t a bad thing at all. Personally, I believe we have too much dependence on the Internet. I recently read “I Survived My Internet Vacation” by Lore Sjöberg on wired.com, which takes a comic but all-too-real look at Internet withdrawal. If you’re the kind of person who uses the Internet to check the weather, look up vocabulary words, and find obscure information throughout each day without really needing that information, you owe it to yourself to read the piece. It really hit home for me. So in the case of my Mom, the fact that her Internet use was minimal wasn’t such a bad thing. Not at least as far as I was concerned.

But it had gotten to the point with my Mom that she was spending more time waiting for her computer than her computer was waiting for her. And it had nothing to do with processor speed. It was her dial-up Internet connection that made it slow.

At first, I don’t think she understood this. I think that when she replaced her aging Macintosh with a PC about 2 years ago, she really expected everything to get faster. But the Internet got slower and slower for her, primarily because Web designers don’t design sites for dial-up connections. (Shame on them!) The Internet had become a tedious, frustrating place for her and she couldn’t understand why so many people were spending so much time using it.

In November 2006, I came for a visit. I had to look up something on the Internet and within 15 minutes, I was about to go mad. I asked her why she didn’t upgrade to a different service. Then she showed me a flyer that had come with her cable bill. We sat down with her phone bill and AOL bill and realized that she could upgrade to cable Internet service and actually save money. A little more research with her local phone company saved even more money.

So she was paying a premium to connect at 56Kbps or less.

I made a few phone calls and talked to people in the United States and India for her. I’ll be honest with you — the price difference between cable Internet and her local phone company’s Internet was minimal, but we went with the phone company because the person who answered the phone spoke English as her first language. (Subsequently, my Mom needed some tech support after I was gone and that person was in India. Sheesh.) The installation would happen the day after I left to go back to Arizona, but I was pretty confident that they would make everything work. And although it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped, my Mom was soon cruising the ‘Net at normal DSL speeds.

In other words, wicked fast.

My Mom was floored by the difference. I’d told her it was much faster, but I didn’t tell her it was 100 times faster. And it’s always on — all she has to do is turn on the computer and she’s online! And she can even get phone calls while she’s on the Internet! Imagine all that!

The happy ending of this story is that my mother now spends a lot more time on the Internet. (I’m not sure how happy that is.) And of course, she’s now back to the situation where the computer is waiting for her.

Who’s Waiting for What in My Office

I reported a hard disk crash here about 9 days ago. I know it was 9 days because that’s how long I’ve been waiting for the data recovery software to churn through whatever is left of my hard disk. And although it’s still progressing, it’s slowed to a crawl. I think it’s teasing me. But I’ll get the last laugh — I’m pulling the plug today.

There comes a time when you simply can’t wait anymore. I think 9 days shows a great deal of patience on my part. I know I couldn’t have waited so long if I didn’t have other computers to work with. I did get some work done this past week. I wrote up the outline for my Mac OS X book revision for Leopard. I did a lot of e-mail, fixed up a bunch of Web sites, wrote and submitted a bid for Flying M Air to dry cherries this summer in Washington State.

But what I did not do outweighed what I did do. I didn’t work on my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide. (I need the big monitor to do layout.) I did not pay my bills. (The latest version of my Quicken data files are on the sick drive.) I didn’t update Flying M AIr’s brochure. (Original files on the sick disk, need big monitor for layout.) The list does go on and on.

Now it’s time to get back to work. So I’ll pull the plug on the current data recovery attempt, put the hard disk in the freezer for a few hours, then reinstall it and try again by accessing the sick disk via Firewire from another computer. I can try multiple software solutions to fix the problem. And if that doesn’t work, I take the long drive down to the nearest Genius and let them give the computer a check up to make sure there’s no motherboard damage (again). If the mother board is still fine, I’ll leave them the disk to play with, get a new disk to replace it, and get the hell back to work.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Useful HTML Tricks for Bloggers

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Formatting can help draw readers in and keep them reading.

Amit Agarwal has written a nice little article that provides a few quick and easy-to-use HTML coding tricks that you can use in your blog posts to make them more visually appealing. After all, no one wants to big, fat, unbroken paragraphs of text.

From Useful HTML Tricks for Bloggers on :

Though knowledge of HTML or CSS is not essential to writing a blog, it is always nice to have some basic idea of these languages to make your blog posts stand-out – after all, readers have such short attention spans and we, as bloggers, desperately want them to read our content.

This is the new HTML thing I learned today. I can now put text in a box and have text wrap around it. It’ll be a nice effect for making points in an article.

My favorite tip? Putting text in a box and having other text wrap around it.

Although I’m no stranger to HTML and CSS, I’m no expert, either. I learn from getting the basics in articles like this one, then experimenting on my own to fine-tune the effect. For example, Amit’s article displays a fixed width/height box with borders on top and bottom only. My box here is a true box (borders on all sides) that’s just tall enough to fit the text I want to put into it.

I’ll have to do an article about this effect in the future. Stay tuned.

Reader Engagement Site Improvements

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I add a few “engagement” features to this site.

Blogging is more than just using blogging software to create and edit posts. After all, if someone shouts in an empty room, does her voice make a sound? An important part of blogging is to attract and retain readers. That’s where content, SEO, and site design come into play.

I’m a strong believer that once you get a visitor to your site, the site’s overall design can help keep them there, at least for longer than the average 30 seconds. (Read Jakob Nielsen’s books for the sad truth about site/page visit lengths.) You can do this by making sure the site is legible and by including navigation features that make it easy to find interesting content.

I read an excellent article on Connected Internet today: “Best WordPress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts“. The author lists several plugins — some of which I already use or have tried in the past — that’ll help keep site visitors on your site, reading more content. I added two of them today.

Readers Posts

Readers Posts is a plugin that offers three features:

  • Within The Loop, indicate how many readers have read a post before you.
  • List the most recently viewed posts.
  • List the most viewed (i.e., popular) posts.

I installed the second of these three options in the sidebar of aneclecticmind.com. It began working immediately, drawing information from the WordPress database to list the ten most recently viewed posts. Refresh the page after a few minutes and the list changes. This site has, on average about 5 visitors online at any time and they don’t always come to the site’s Home page. That, of course, is the drawback of any plugin that lists recently read posts — it only lists the posts that have been read on their own page — not on the Home page or archive page. In a way, that’s a good thing. It means the person reading a post is reading it because he found it via a search engine or used a link on the site to read it. He’s reading it because he wants to read it (or thinks he does; as we all know, search engines don’t always display desired results). That’s more meaningful than Home page reads, which could include lots of articles that the visitor just isn’t interested in at all.

The benefit of this: site visitors are shown a list of articles that other visitors have found interesting. I love this feature because it shows me what people are coming to the site to read and it helps me write more content of interest to visitors.

If you try this plugin, don’t be alarmed when you click the link above and arrive at a German-language site. Scroll down on that page and you’ll find an English-language translation. Although it isn’t perfect grammar (what is?), it’s certainly good enough to understand the installation and configuration process.

Landing Sites

Landing Sites is a very cool plugin that does a bunch of things, when installed correctly:

  1. It checks to see if the visitor was referred to the page from one of several popular search engines. It the visitor has not, it stops working.
  2. It displays a message with the name of the search engine and the search word(s) or phrase used to find the page.
  3. It displays a list of links to posts on your site that also match the search criteria.

What I like about this plugin is that it only displays content if a visitor has arrived at the site by clicking a link in a popular search engine’s results list. I put it at the top of the sidebar, where visitors are most likely to see it when they arrive at the page.

Installing the plugin isn’t difficult, although you really do need to follow the instructions on the page you download it from. If you copy and paste the code right from that page, you’ll need to modify all the single and double quote characters so they’re straight quotes when pasted into your template file. (I didn’t notice this at first and got PHP errors. It was an easy enough fix.) The result is what you see if you happened to arrive at a page on my site via popular search engine results link. You can try searching for Hermosa Ranch Insanity (the test link I used) and clicking the link to content on my site to see what I mean.

The benefit of this, of course, is that if the article the visitor came to read isn’t enough for him, he’s given other possible articles to try. He may or may not follow the links, but at least they’re there for him. You could keep him on the site longer.

Conclusion

Read the Connected Internet article. It tells you more about these two plugins, as well as others I currently use or have tried in the past. You might find overlap among features; pick the plugin you like best. Give them a try and see how they affect your visitor stats.