Gaaa! Spammed!

Sorry everyone but I'm going to turn comment moderation on for this blog. It's not that I want to moderate your comments. I'm happy to have them and I don't want to suppress any opinion at all, but spammers recently found two of my other blogs and the only way I seem to be able to keep the scumbags off my pages is to use moderation. (Also, Blogger's facilities for letting me delete spam comments don't work. Way to write software, Google!)

This means that, when you next comment, the software will treat you as a first-time commenter and will ask me to approve you. This will probably take some hours, I'm afraid, since it emails me and sometimes I don't check my email that often. Once that has happened once, you'll be treated with the respect you deserve and your comment will go up straight away.

Can I just remind everybody in the world that the only way to beat spammers in the long run is for nobody, ever, to reply to a spam email or click on a spam link. They only make money because there are enough idiots out there buying stuff off them and encouraging this disgusting practice.

Come the revolution, spammers will be lined up against a wall and shot (right after the politicians, business managers, and lawyers.)

Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible

Apologies to all my regular readers!

I don't know what happened to my front page but Blogger seems to have had some kind of psychotic episode, removed all the posts and rearranged all the widgets. Everything is still here (thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster) but you now have to look a little harder to find things!

I'll be sorting it out a little later in the day (got to go and measure up the garden for a DIY job we have planned) so please bear with me.

If you like, while you're waiting for normality to be resumed, you may curse Blogger. I'm sure it helps.

-oOo-

Later that same day...

All sorted!

Don't you just hate programs with a mind of their own? They won't actually have to do anything to take over the world. They'll just have to stop doing it right for a couple of days and we'll be back in the Stone Age.

A Public Announcement on Behalf of Grumpy People Everywhere

Here's an organisation that has just been begging to exist since the days of Reagan and Thatcher dehumanised society to the point where just being alive became a cruel and unusual punishment: The Grumpy Group.

The vision of The Grumpy Group is "to exploit grumpiness in any ethical way that can be creatively imagined and implemented". Specifically, they want to harness the hithertofore untapped power of grumpiness to cheer people up, to help people stand up for themselves against a world turned indifferent, and to stick it (back) to The Man.

For those who can't afford to join a class action, or who believe that whingeing on and on on your blog doesn't actually do any good, for those who'd just like to get the electric company to accept that their bill really was paid three months ago and get their power back on, The Grumpy Group may be the very thing.

By the look of the site, they don't have many members yet - maybe something to do with the fact that hard-core grumpies gave up on the Web years ago when those f**king annoying pop-up ads first started appearing - but, hey, there was a time when MySpace only had a handful of members, right? A time when there were only three videos on YouTube? A time when the United States of America was just Idaho, or Nebraska, or whatever it was, yeah?

And so on.

The point is that grumpy people deserve to be together.

Or something like that.

Atheists of the World, Unite!

Hey! Guess what I've found. An Atheist Blogroll.

Cool, eh? Now I can support a poor, oppressed minority - people who are not insane - by adding the blogroll to my blog. You'll find it down at the bottom on the left. To quote the blogroll's organiser;

The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

At the time of writing, the atheist blogroll is a fairly new idea but has already accumulated about 750 names. The curious thing to me is that it has any names at all. Being an atheist is just being a normal, sane person. So why would anyone want to declare their normality? Well, because the crazy people number in the hundreds of millions - possibly billions - they're highly organised, extremely wealthy, vociferous, influential and powerful. (Scary, huh?) When one finds a few brave souls willing to stand up to all this organised madness and say, 'Yo! I at least am not one of the fruit-loop majority,' one just feels the need to offer them one's solidarity.

So, all you atheist bloggers out there, I want to see your names down on this blogroll. Your fellow sane people need your support - and, let's face it, come the next Inquisition, you might need theirs.

Can You Drown In Yoghurt?

You could knock me over with a keyboard! I made it to two hundred blog postings! And you, my probably first-time visitor, are looking at number two hundred. So, as I always do in my 200^th blog posting, I'll take the opportunity to reflect on blogging and the nature of life in the tag clouds.

I started this, you may recall, because I wanted my voice to be out there with the tens of millions of others who take part in this pandemonium we call the blogsphere. I'd read a lot of stuff and wise old heads at the time said give it a couple of years – about 200 posts – to gather a reasonable-sized readership. Well, here I am and where are you?

Actually, I'm not complaining. I get about 5 unique visits a day to Waving Not Drowning. That's 150 unique visitors per month, mostly from Australia and the USA but also the UK, Canada and India, as well as places I didn't expect, like Greece, Poland, Moldova, Romania and the Philippines. As far as I can tell, about a third of my visitors each month are regulars and two thirds are drop-ins. It's not roaring success by any means but it's a great feeling to think there are people all over the world who click by to read what I have to say about life. It's an even better feeling to know that there are some who keep coming back for more. (Thank you, all of you – especially those of you who have been interested enough to leave comments.)

It's also a source of guilt. In the past six months I've been letting the blogging slip. I post once or twice a week now (not quite the two or three times of my first year) but there have been weeks on end recently when I didn't post at all. All I can say is I had a lot of stuff to do and a big change of lifestyle to get used to but I'm getting back into the swing of it and I hope to do better in the coming months. When I was posting at a rate of 15 to 20 posts a month, I was getting 50 to 100 visitors every day. This was quite exciting but it's hard work finding something different and worth saying every other day. I don't really see the point in just blathering. If I haven't got something interesting to write about, I'd rather keep my fingers to myself.

In the course of my 200 postings on Waving Not Drowning, other blogs of mine have come and gone. I've had music blogs and writing blogs and user interface design blogs but I've hardly used them and have shut them all down except the UI design one (which I haven't posted to in ages.) I have, however, just started up a new blog about writing (which you might care to go and look at) and it seems to be more successful than the others. (More successful than this one, too, according to Google and Technorati – both of which rate it as twice as popular and 'authoritative', even though it gets only two thirds the traffic – go figure.)

In all I'm getting 350 visits per month for my three blogs (about 11 per day). It may seem unambitious of me, in a world where popular blogs get thousands of visits per day, but I'm very happy with what I've got. Fewer might make me wonder what the point of it all was but many more and I would start feeling pressured. I can easily imagine 11 people stopping by the house each day for a chat. I'd be hiding behind the sofa if there were a thousand queueing up the drive. I'm also pretty pleased with the standard of the comments I get. I've had a few excellent arguments over the years.

So here's to the next 200 posts, to the many great bloggers who have inspired me to join in, and to all my readers, without whom I would be talking to myself (you don't think I'd shut up, do you?)

Oh yes, and the title of this post. One of the many interesting stats I get from Google Analytics to help me interpret traffic to my blogs, is a list of the Google queries that have led people to come here. And, yes, one of them was, 'Can you drown in yoghurt?' I certainly hope my blog helped with that.

A New Look For WND

What do you think? I haven't personalised it much yet but I like the look. The columns are a little wider than the old layout, all the navigation and fun stuff is now on the left (the jukebox is still at the bottom though) and I've rearranged the order of things. You will also notice the absence of ads. What the heck. They were making more money for Google than for me and only cluttered up the place.

(Anyone who has had any experience with Adsense (Google's ad placement service) will also know what fun it is trying to keep scumbag advertisers off your pages. Every time I mention 'evolution' or 'god' in a blog, the ads are taken over by loony religious organisations with more money than they should have, trying to sell their insane ideas to a readership I'm sure would only find their rantings embarrassing. To stop them you have to create lists of advertisers that you want to block. Very tedious. It's far better that they just have no opportunity at all.)

I'd like to replace the background graphic (one day when I feel up to working out how to do it) with something a bit more meaningful but it will do for now, I think.

For those among my regular readers who hate change and can't stand surprises (you know who you are) I can only offer my sincerest apologies and hope that you will take this opportunity to flame me in the Comments section.

What is going on at Blogger?

I'm getting pretty fed up with Blogger. It has been nothing but trouble in the past week or so.

One of the big problems is in the page layout code. I can't change the layout on my pages and I can't add new page elements. Irritatingly, the error message is simply 'errors on page'! Not exactly user friendy! Blogger's 'Help Centre' is a morass. There is almost no chance of finding a fix there. I found two other people who had reported an identical error - but that was back in 2007 and no-one had posted a fix. Someone who had posted a similar error got a reply saying stop using Internet Explorer and change to Firefox. So I tried this and, with Firefox I couldn't even log on to my blog admin page. This time the error message was an alphanumeric string of about ten random characters! Gee, thanks, Blogger.

The other big problem is that AdSense - Google's advert placement scheme - keeps telling me it can't 'crawl' my blog pages because it has been denied access. This means no revenue! The AdSense help pages explain how to adjust my settings to make it work - but only for a hosted domain of my own, not for Blogger or any other hosted blog site. Wonderful!

I've had good service from Blogger for almost two years now and I'm reluctant to switch - but this is becoming so frustrating that I may have to. Other people I know seem to prefer Wordpress - and perhaps I can see why now.

So now I'm a writer. Maybe.

Thing is, I write all the time. I write this stuff. I write stories. I write books. Trouble is, I'm a disillusioned, cynical writer who feels that getting anything published is such a lottery that it isn't worth even trying. I don't buy lottery tickets, or scratchies, or raffle tickets, and I don't submit my writing to publishers for the same reason - the odds are too long.

So how come I'm here at a 'writer's retreat' on beautiful Bribie Island off the Queensland coast? Well, it's a long story - which I won't bore you with - but, basically, I won the lottery (a writing competition) and the prize was this.

And for the first time in my life I have spoken to a publisher, a very charming lady called Bernadette Foley at Orbit (the speculative fiction bit of Hatchette Livre in Australia). Not only did I speak to her but we spoke about my latest manuscript - a novel called Time and Tyde - which she'd read! What's more, she had read it carefully and said such flattering things about it that she's achieved the unthinkable and given me hope. Of course, I may live to curse her for toying with my emotions like this, but right now I'm thinking 'Well, maybe I should give this publication thing another go.'

And what does that mean in practical terms? Have I rushed out and stuffed a dozen envelopes with short stories and novels and cast them on the winds of chance? Not a bit of it. What I've actually done is to start another blog (how many is that now?) This one, called 'Graham Storrs' (that's me, by the way) is intended to chart my progress as I try to get Time and Tyde published and to talk about my other literary endeavours.

It seems us writers need to market ourselves. Our names must become a brand. Our work must generate 'buzz'. So I thought I'd start with a bit of a blog, just to get the ball rolling. Later - probably if the book is published - I might start a whole website. But let's not go mad, eh?

So, if you'd like to follow the ups and downs of my budding literary career, you might like to click your way across to Graham Storrs: The Blog and scratch your itch. And, for the dedicated reader of Waving Not Drowning (that's this blog for those who don't read banners) don't worry. All the juicy stuff in my life will still be here.

The Most Popular Posting On Earth

Is popularity among your goals, plans and hopes? Well, here is the blog posting that is going to make me famous, the one all my friends will be blogging about in their own relatively unpopular blogs. And I don't need to waste your time dealing with boring topics like sport, Iraq, jobs, work, careers or Microsoft. I don't even need to post a photo. All I need to do is write a couple of empty paragraphs that contain the top 100 most popular tags from Technorati's current listing (each shown in green bold text here). What fun! What entretenimiento! (which is entertainment in Spanish by the way, no need for your school or college Greek on my Weblog!)

Of course the easiest way to be popular on the Web is to talk either about movies, TV and celebrities, or about technology and the Internet. Articles about art and photography, religion and philosophy, science and politics all have their place but if you really want to score big, just mention Apple, Google, MySpace, podcasts, or Linux, or regurgitate any item of tech news you can find about events involving them. The blogsphere clearly devours a daily smorgasbord of culture, current affairs, fashion, style, shopping, music, photos, videos, reviews and sports but it is computers and the Internet that really click a blogger's links.

Perhaps someone should make a movie of the life of a blog reader. He (of course it's a he) would be at home, pursuing his tech hobbies, taking an online quiz perhaps, but plagued by dreams of the supernatural. Concerned about his health and wellness, his diary, or journal if you will, shows an increasing obsession with parties and nightlife, pets and animals as he slips into a personal hell of random romance and relationships. He tries travel, shooting terabytes of video, writing awful love poetry and worse software in exotic places. He neglects his business in the automotive industry, spurns his family and starts work as a survey design specialist for a media and marketing company that gets bought up by YouTube. Yet miscellaneous (misc.) thoughts, like pictures from his favourite multiplayer games, return to haunt him. The mysterious word 'moblog' runs in his head like música in a Spanish film (or la musique in a French one). In the closing scenes, he is saved by writing 'My Life in Food' and other funny books ('Allgemein Noticias' being his most popular and the best example of his quirky, multilingual 'humor'.)

There now, that should do it. I can hardly wait for my readership to go through the roof!