So, on one of my blogs that I have not touched in over two years (it will be three years this August), I received two “comments” today.

The first was on an introductory post–a post that just invites people to stick around the site. On that post, I got a comment that the commenter was interested in hearing more about that topic.

Well, if you want to know more, read the subsequent posts, which cover it.

The next comment was on another page, where I went into detail on a topic. On that, the same poster said that it was “a good article.”

And that’s it.

Both are very generic responses. And they look like spam comments, especially with regard to the comment on the introductory post.

But, you know what? The site listed looks like a real site, a real blog, and it appears as though a real person may have actually written them.

If that’s the case, that’s pretty sad. You don’t want to go around leaving comments that look and sound like spam comments because, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, bloggers are going to assume that it is a duck. And, so, your comment will be deleted and possibly reported as spam if they use something like Akismet, and that will make it harder for you to get blog traffic by commenting on other blogs.

You’ll just be shooting yourself in the foot.

So, don’t do that. If you are going to comment on a blog, leave a comment that is related to the blog posted you are commenting on and make it substantive enough that it is not indistinguishable from a spam comment.

In the wake of this weekend’s shootings, members of Congress are now proposing a bill that will outlaw “threatening” a politician or the ‘use language or symbols that could be perceived as inciting violence.’

If that happens, how long before saying something like “kick the clowns out of office!” might be perceived as a violent threat? Heck, you could say “remove them from office” with a wink and a nod and some people will think you’re hinting at some violent threat.

And, why? Because, according to some of these politicians (who, as we all know, are not always the sharpest crayons in the box), such words may push mentally unbalanced people toward violence.

So, when Sarah Palin says “Don’t retreat, reload!” or when Barack Obama says “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”, then normal people may understand the metaphor and not see it as a call to violence, but someone off their rocker might.

But…

You know what propels some crazy people to violence? The fact that they’re crazy!

Anyone remember The Catcher in the Rye? Not exactly a book that incites violence, yet it apparently led Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon.

John Hinckley, Jr. shot Ronald Reagan in an attempt to impress Jodie Foster.

Crazy people are, well, crazy. There’s no telling what’s going to set them off.

Restricting speech won’t accomplish anything outside of restricting speech. Crazy people can still read between the lines, even if what’s between the lines is blank space.

Well, some good news on my other site–the one with the forums that some of you are “pioneers” (i.e., beta testers) on.

It’s doing fairly well in the search engines.

And that is something I expected and hoped for.

Of course, it has negatives as well, and that is one reason I have made it a bit more complex to get an account on than your typical forum.

You see, a lot of people like to build what are referred to as “backlinks” to their sites. The more backlinks, the better, presumably. Google, for example, uses the number of incoming backlinks as well as the value of the site containing the backlink in ranking a site. So, if a high-ranking site links to your site, that’s considered good.

So, some of these people will do whatever they can to get those backlinks. As a blogger, you’ll typically see this in the form of comment spam. You’ll have people with keywords as their names, and they’ll make some generic comment on your blog, and have a link to their website. That’s a backlink. If you’re like me, most of those get deleted or blocked by something like Akismet.

Well, the same thing happens on forums. And it happens on any site where you might have a profile that can be seen by the public and search engines.

So, there are profile spammers. What they do is look for high-ranking sites that have offer their users public profiles, and they’ll go in, register on the site, put up their links and move on to the next site.

Which, of course, clutters the site with a bunch of useless profiles of people that don’t use the site, don’t participate in the community and never had any intention of doing so. So, that means the webmaster needs to go in a purge those profiles.

So, I am endeavoring to try to keep those spammers out. And, that’s why I’ve made it a bit difficult to obtain an account on my system, using a manual approval process rather than an automated system. They’ll probably still try to set up accounts, but there should be fewer than there otherwise would have been, so it should result in a reduced workload from what I would otherwise have had.

Also, for those of you who are “pioneers,” you should be reading between the lines here. As you may recall, you have the option of having your profile private (viewable only by logged in users) or public (viewable by everyone… and search engines). If your profile, for example, contains something like a link to your blog, you might want to consider making your profile public because i’ll be a little bit of extra link juice to your blog, which could help your search engine rankings, which could help you get more readers.

And, you know, right now it’s free, so you may wish to take advantage of that.

I like cooking.

I also like trying new things.

So, a couple years ago, I noticed that just about all the chefs on the Food Network were using capers. It seemed like everything had capers in it.

These people must know what they are doing, right?

I must be missing out on something great.

So, I got a jar of capers.

I wanted to try them. I wanted to use them. I wanted to make a great dish and when people asked what those tiny little buds of joy were, I could tell them capers.

And I would look like a professional chef because I knew to use capers.

Except for the tiny little fact that these little capers are disgusting. They can take a delightful dish and ruin it. You might as well pour kitchen sink pipe sludge onto your salads as use capers, because, in both cases, you’d be serving something just a couple notches away from raw sewage on a plate.

Yes, capers are a notch or two above raw sewage. Not that I’ve ever eaten raw sewage, nor would I try to, but, based on imagination, that’s where capers rank.

Now, capers are used in tartar sauce, and I like tartar sauce, so maybe they are good when they are pounded to oblivion and mixed in with other stuff that tastes a whole lot better, but, as far using “minimally processed” capers, um, no.

I don’t know what happened to the rest of the capers. Maybe they are still in a jar in the back of the fridge somewhere. I have no idea. I know I didn’t use them.

I also know that I haven’t seen any of the TV chefs mentioning them in a long time either.

I’m guessing a lot of people tried these things and were like What the frak is this? and wrote nasty letters to the Food Network or something.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give them another try some day. Maybe if I find that jar again some time, they’ll have matured into something more palatable.

It could happen, right?

Remember the article I mentioned the other day in my “I Take Entirely Too Long to Write an Article” post?

Well, I finished it today.

Finished creating the HTML file and all the images for it.

Looks cool, I think. Well, a couple of the graphics are lame, but I have a couple that are really cool, so it balances out.

So, at long last, it is ready to go.

Scheduled to make its appearance on Tuesday, so keep an eye out for it. I’ll probably tweet about it on Twitter.

Maybe now I can start work on the next article.

Whatever that will be on…

It’s Thursday, and I’ve spent a good portion of the day trying to come up with an idea for a blog post.

And, I’ve got nothing.

So, this is it. Lame, eh?

I think I did better before I was putting pressure on myself to blog at least once a day. I know there have been occasions–albeit rare–where I managed to do 2 or 3 insightful posts in a single day.

But, with the pressure to put something up, I haven’t been able to manage that.

It’s weird because I used to be good at doing things under pressure.

Then again, that was always stuff I had to do for someone else, whether it was a work project for a customer or a class project. You miss any of those deadlines, and you’re in trouble with a teacher or a customer.

Put up a lame blog post, and who cares, really? Who’ll even notice? Sure, the five of you still reading, but you don’t complain.

And, if you did, well, that’s not going to do you any good because it’s not like you’re paying me to write this stuff. Tell you what… You want to read some darned good posts here? Then send me fifty bucks every day.

Then I’ll feel the pressure to post something of quality every day and not just something quickly tossed together for the sake of putting something up.

It’s true.

Tonight, I am working on finishing an article I started last April. (Yes, April 2010.)

Oh, but it gets worse.

You see, that article is comprised of some other articles I had already written.

So, all I had to do was merge this articles together, expand on a few things and wrap it up.

But, it’s taken me 9 months to do that.

Truth be told, I wasn’t working on the article for 9 months. That would just be really bad. No, I had put it on the backburner and I didn’t really get back to it until this past Monday. Oh, I think I had worked on bits here and there, but, mostly, it was just sitting there.

Yesterday, I finished writing it, which wasn’t too bad because some of what I thought still needed to be written was already done. So, it was really just a matter of writing a few paragraphs to finish it all up.

Today I worked on illustrations for the article, one of which I actually finished yesterday, because it was one I was able to “recycle” from another related project of mine. Tonight, after this blog post, I will proofread the article one last time, and then I will convert it to HTML to put on my website.

Now, if I had worked on the article straight from start to finish, this is one that would have probably taken me a full week to put together.

That’s, of course, a far cry from nine months.

But, the thing is that articles take me time to put together. Sometimes, I’ll put together an article in a day. I do a lot of blog posts in under a half hour. But, you see how infrequently I have a substantive blog post here.

I know of people that will write 10, 20 or maybe even 30 articles in a day. I think the most I’ve done in a day is maybe 10, but I don’t know for certain.

But, with a lot of these “highly productive” writers, what they’re creating is search engine fodder and not articles really meant to provide readers with information but to sell something. Mind you, not all “highly productive” writers are just cranking out search engine fodder. There are people that can produce a lot of useful content and do so quickly. But, I would hazard to guess that most people producing dozens of articles a day are not.

The thing is that a lot of these people have to produce that type of quantity day after day to get traffic coming to their websites.

For me, on the other hand, this article that I’ve spent 9 months (or a week, depending on how you want to look at it) putting together will bring traffic to my site for years to come.

So, while it’s true that I need to finish them up faster and not put the on the backburner, maybe I’m not taking too long to write an article because I can get as good results from a single article that some people may get from 100.

Ever notice that people that want something for nothing are rarely themselves willing to do something for nothing?

It’s like they want everyone else to do the work for them so they don’t have to do anything.

Which is fine, of course, if you’re paying those people.

But, often, what they want is for those people to do stuff for them for free so that they can make money.

Seriously.

I guess we have reared an entitlement generation, sometimes retroactively.

Maybe we should all try that.

You know, I bet I had an ancestor that was stepped on by a woolly mammoth. He couldn’t hunt well after that. That really set my family back. If it wasn’t for Duktar and his bum leg thousands of years ago, why, I’m sure my family would be well off by now.

I mean, they didn’t have hospitals back then, so Duktar had to spend the rest of his days with a bumpy hideous leg with bits of bone protruding from the skin and yellowing and getting all nasty and dirty and stuff. Sure, he only lived a few weeks after that, because of an infection, but he suffered a lot.

So, remember poor Duktar as you write out a check to me. Okay? Thanks!

I received an offer this morning from a vendor promoting their affiliate program to me.

However, I am unsure whether to contact them or not. Maybe you can help me out here… Here is what they said in the closing of their offer:

“If you are interesting, please contact us.”

Interesting being such a subjective term, I’m not sure whether I am interesting enough to be their affiliate.

I might be too boring for them. How do I know for sure?

I suppose what they really meant was “If you are interested, please contact us.”

But, maybe they really are only looking for interesting affiliates. In which case, am I out of luck?

Ever feel like you have an imaginary audience?

Not you, of course, but the not you who are not reading this, but the ones you hope are out there, but aren’t entirely sure if they really are.

Exercises in futility?

Perhaps.

Maybe sometimes.

But, you know, you get one person and then maybe that one person tells a friend and then it starts to snowball.

Until you end up boring them all and you’re back at square one.

But, then, we you ever really past square one?