The Stagnation of Blogging
First off, I just want to say “Hi!” to Jeanne, on whose blog I tried to leave a comment, but gave up after ten minutes of trying with two different browsers and concluding that Orble sucks. Here’s how their CAPTCHA system doesn’t work. But, after entering the letters, it would only take me to the Orble home page and never actually post my comment.
That’s a good example of why I would recommend something like WordPress as a blogging platform, because it (for the most part) puts you in charge of your own site and content. And, if something like a CAPTCHA plugin messes things up, you can always uninstall it. When your platform is controlled by someone else, you don’t have that option.
And that is not meant as, nor should it be construed as, any type of chastisement against Jeanne. Orble is the one that is failing here.
And so we segue into blogging. Not the cleanest of seques, but it’ll have to do.
After August, here is my blogging income graph:
As you can see, things were pretty stagnant over last month. The green line had a slight bump and the blue line had a slight dip but, overall, it pretty much remained the same. The red line was supposed to be my focus for the month of August, but wrapping up my eBook and working on a client’s website kept me from doing anything in that regard.
Don’t know how September will fare. I do know the green line will be taking a nosedive back to first quarter levels due to the loss of three advertisers. That blue line is all over and could go anywhere. So far for this month, it’s looking grim but that’s always once that bounces around during the month, so I can’t draw much of a conclusion there. In fact, the bulk of last month’s earnings on the blue line came from earlier in the month, and it was looking as though it could potentially be double the prior month’s earnings, but then it just fizzed out during the last half of the month, and it fell short of matching July by 12 cents.
So, we’ll see how September fares. With kids back in school and family vacations over with, maybe more people will be back on their computers.
Nice LOOKING graph !
Mine is all zeros … all the time
With your traffic, you could at least turn that into a few pennies.
Dan,
Sorry to hear you had so much trouble attempting to leave a comment on my blog. Noticed your avatar in the MyBlogLog widget, so knew you’d visited and was a bit surprised you hadn’t commented. Now I know why. This has been an ongoing issue at Orble for quite some time. Needless to say, several other bloggers I know of (and I shudder to think how many I don’t know of) have also had trouble leaving comments there.
A while back, Orble made an improvement to its CAPTCHA, at my request, which made it a little easier for one of my blogging friends (who has visual difficulties) to read. So, now I’m wondering why, all of a sudden, it’s gotten to be a problem again. (And I’m really wondering about the black, fuzzy CAPTCHA screen shown in the blog post you’ve linked to, because I’ve never been told that Orble’s CAPTCHA was that bad!) Will definitely have to look into this!
Thanks for the heads up!
Jeanne
That black CAPTCHA screen in the post I linked to is the same thing I saw. And entering the letters it gave beneath didn’t seem to do the trick either.
At first, I thought maybe it didn’t like my browser (Safari) so I tried another (Firefox). Same thing. Then, I went poking around and found that post.
…
Well, I just left a comment on your blog. It went through this time. But, the black CAPTCHA is still what shows. If there are letters in there, I’m pretty sure NO ONE could make them out. I mean, I’m not visually impaired and I’m usually pretty good at seeing even the tough ones, but I’m reasonably sure there aren’t any letters there at all. I had to type the letters it provided, which as that post I linked to mentioned, is somewhat counterproductive because spambots could be written to read that text and enter it.
Dan,
Just replied to your comment at Writer’s Notes, mentioning (in a postscript) that I sent Orble a link to your post. Hopefully that will provide some incentive for them to work on the problem.
Obviously something has gone wrong with Orble’s CAPTCHA since my friend facilitated the changes I mentioned–unless she, too, simply began reading and reproducing the text in the box below the CAPTCHA screen. Doesn’t look to me as if any letters are visible in that black, fuzzy screen either. (I’m using the Google Chrome browser.)
Glad, though, that you were finally able to leave a comment–or rather, two! Thanks for being persistent enough not to give up!
Hopefully, they will also take a look at the post I linked to on The 42nd Estate, as they covered it more thoroughly.
At this point, I’m thinking maybe the problem I had on Wednesday was a glitch of some sort. But, the CAPTCHA system they’re using does need fixing. On two of the three comments I left tonight, I had to go through the CAPTCHA twice. If it happened once, I could believe that maybe I entered a letter wrong. But, I’m certain on the latest comment that I entered the correct letters the first time.
Found the culprit, or at least the reason my comment would never go through the other day. Apparently, you can’t mention JavaScript in a comment. Probably to guard against people trying to sneak JavaScript code into a comment, but not implemented very well. Instead of generating an error or maybe encoding the comment so any JavaScript couldn’t be run, it just sends you off to the Orble home page without any indication of what happened.
This is really fascinating, Dan!
Good work experimenting to find out which word was causing you to be diverted to the Orble home page! I probably never would have even suspected that it was a word I’d entered into the comments box. (I’ve been assuming all this time that Orble’s software had just malfunctioned.) As I mention in one of my replies to your comments at WN, I was also diverted to the home page when I included the word “Javascript” in my reply to your comment. At first I was planning to use a variation of the word, as you had done to make your comments go through; but then I decided I just had to test it and see whether it would affect me, an Orble blogger, as well. And, of course, it did. Good detective work! Thanks to you, we now know it wasn’t a glitch after all.
I did mention the 42nd Estate blog post in my message to Orble, though not by name. Just linked to your post and mentioned the other post and its fascinating screenshot of an Orble CAPTCHA screen. I’m sure they’ll be curious enough to click the link in your post to check it out (at least I hope so).