So much is so discouraging that we should celebrate the small gains -- and maybe this one is not so small after all.
December 2009 was the first month without a single American death in Iraq since we invaded nearly seven years ago.
It's tempting to go on about 4371 that should not have had to die for the Bush/Cheney folly. But for the moment, I'm just going to be glad that the number didn't become 4372 in December.
Ralph
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If anyone caught the "comment" that appeared here last night -- which I have since deleted -- I have no idea where it came from or who wrote it. It was in Japanese, with just enough English words thrown in to suggest that it was an ad for porn.
ReplyDeleteThe sender's "name" was definitely Western and female, but when I clicked on her "bio" link, it came up in Japanese.
Whatever . . . I just don't see how blanket mass mailings could find their way onto the comment section of a private blog. It's also not a very smart use of their effort. I doubt that any of the handful of readers of ShrinkRap can read Japanese, even if they were Japanese porn aficionados.
To help demystify the point of that Japanese comment, if you allow blog comment postings to contain hyperlinks (useful in many cases), then there will be motivation for blog spammers to post, whether or not your readers can read their comment. Merely posting a link to their own website is the goal itself; it is an attempt to increase the website's ranking in search engines (see below).
ReplyDeleteBarbara
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs
"Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.
"Adding links that point to the spammer's web site artificially increases the site's search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer's commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers."
In Wordpress, there's a plugin, Akismet, that catches such things. It's remarkably accurate. Even the ones that get through are marked for approval, so they almost never make it to the comments. Maybe a couple of times in five years. It's unclear if there's such a thing on blogspot.com. Were I worried about such things, I might just move to Wordpress for this reason alone [see http://www.wordpress.com].
ReplyDelete[Frankly, there are about a jillion other reasons to use Wordpress...]
Thanks to both of you for these helpful comments.
ReplyDeleteGiven my utter pathological aversion to confronting technology or having to learn something new, I'm going to wait and see if it happens again before changing anything.
If you doubt the depth of that aversion, consider that my cell phone was lost (or stolen) several weeks ago, and the new one is still in the box unopened after 2 weeks.
箱の携帯電話は沈黙の美しい音を作る
ReplyDeletejust kidding...
it's only me
with a technology treasure hunt for you
Barbara
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt
LOL, Barbara. I don't know what exact English phrase you translated into Japanese, but here's the reverse translation back into English:
ReplyDelete"The portable telephone of the box makes the sound whose silence is beautiful."
What fun!!