Blogging Cautions & Comment Appreciation

This is one of the few times I deviate from the blog's intent and write about the blog itself and the experience of posting.

A new blogger’s learning curve is steep and caution is one’s best guiding consideration. The opportunity to write without an editor, to choose what one wants to write when he or she wants to write it, to apply grammatical correctness or not or simply to rant is my motivation for blogging.

Over my relative recent blogging experiences, I have come up with the following three cautionary statements:

In 2007 I was introduced to blogging in a graduate class and my assignment was to post while on a study tour in Rome. I naively thought that once I was finished, somehow the blog would disappear into a black hole in Cyberspace or the “host” would simply delete it when no more posts were made and thence never to be found again. But there it was one evening in 2013 when I was curious enough to look for it. It was academic and quite wooden in its style but then again, it was a product for a graduate class.

Here is the first caution: only write that which will not embarrass you in the next 48 hours or in the next 48 years.

The statistics a blogger can accumulate are interesting for the blogger if not for anyone else. However these statistics, particularly for new bloggers, are tainted with electronic searches that skew the number of visits recorded. I had a particularly great day insofar as visits to my blog goes until I analyzed the sources and found that the majority were spam induced with no real persons behind some of the visits/hits.

The second caution: “Curiousity killed the cat!” Meow . . . do not “click” on "spam" links (which only the bloggers can see in their statistical accounts). The best way to not get more spam is to resist curiousity – ignore that which is not familiar. If you are curious, copy and paste the address into a search question such as: what is blogsrating.pw (one of those afore mentioned garbage sources) and you will get sites and be directed to discussion boards that warn of the whole spam realm. If you connect to the "spam" website through your traffic sources list, you will trigger more spam induced communication to your blog.

It is because of this that I enjoy receiving comments from real people. My statistics ring truer when I receive comments. I know that there are “real” people reading my blog because of the emails I get, the comments on other people’s flicker and facebook pages about this blog and of the comments that do appear in response to particular posts. However, there is caution to be had here as well.

Caution number 3: This one is more for your information than a caution. Very often, commenters, especially those with retail interests, will leave comments with links to their websites. You can choose to post these comments or not. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. 

And so, your comments are a pleasure to read but also provide a very real "real people" acknowledgement to this blog and I am forever grateful for that - no matter how many or how few.