Tis The (cold) Evening

It’s late evening here in Stove Pipe City and it’s a balmy 4 degrees below zero outside and calling for a max low temp of 6 below before the sun comes up which is much warmer than what it has been (it was 14 below last night). And I just read an article on that international study that’s about to be released that we’ll be seeing significant effects from global warming within 10 years instead of 50 like they had previously stated…or was that 30? No wait–it was 20 years just a couple of weeks ago wasn’t it? So I guess by the time the weekend rolls around we’ll wake up here in the Kingdom to 70 degree weather and the trees in full bloom. Hey, I’ll trade the snow blower for the mower any day of the week. It’s darn cold out these days.

Can’t complain much though. We’ve seen a lot worse. Like 40 degrees below worse. Still, it doesn’t make meandering outside during the work week in the early AM to warm up the cars any more comfortable I’ll tell ya’ that.

One more month to go in the long haul and February is most definitely the longest month of the year. Don’t know why that is. It just seems where December (the month before the long haul) goes by in about two weeks, then the long haul hits with January which usually takes the about normal  five week month to get through then it’s February and what feels like eight and a half weeks in front of you. By the time you get to march you’re outside in a light jacket just to make you feel better. The fact that it’s still well below freezing doesn’t really seem to matter as you stand out there by your favorite tree shivering your timbers off cheering the buds on (go-buds-go…yeah buds!). After awhile and a long hot bath you finally wise up and don that old winter coat for a little while longer but it still doesn’t stop you from giving the buds the old eyeball and occasional pat as you head out dooryard.

Keep warm now.

I Hate Spam!!!

You know, there’s enough things that you have to deal with on a day to day basis that will hold you up in one way, shape, form or another without having to deal with all those idiots out there smothering me with spam when I get home from work.

In the beginning it was just email. I could deal with that, and I never seemed to get many anyway. Now I can’t sit down at the end of the day to write up a simple post without first going into my Admin and wasting my time sifting through all the “spamments” in Akismet and Moderation (that’s thrown there by the “Simple Trackback Validator’ plugin) and getting rid of all of that spam from hell before I can even think about settling back and writing something. By the time that I get through dealing with all that  spamosity I’m so downright disgusted that I forget what I wanted to post about in the first place. Like now for instance.

Thanks once again to Becky from Sprites and Bites, I now have another math style comment spam protector type plugin that plays well with the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin I have for PDA viewing called Did You Pass Math?. No java this time so the simple comment math equation should show up in a PDA no problem now.

Now I have to establish a routine here for during the work week since I’ve gotten so popular with the spammer crowd. During the work week in the evening, before supper, I’m going to have to bang into my WP Admin and take care of all the spam wherever it may be hiding (rotten slime that it is) and then wait to post until after supper when I’m in a better frame of mind to write something decent instead of ranting. Also I need to write down the various ideas I come up with during the work day so when I get disgusted with all the spam it won’t drive those ideas right out of my head.

Actually, I should write these posting type ideas down anyway. I am male you know and I ain’t gettin’ any younger either.

Hopefully this will be the last plugin post for awhile. I can understand why the blog material has gone into this direction for the last couple, three weeks what with all the WordPress versions that have been pushed out and all the compatibility problems bloggers have been experiencing with the latest WP 2.1 update. I should consider myself lucky in that aspect though since I’ve had relatively few upgrade problems with 2.1–the worst being the loss of my ‘UTW Re-tag Posts’ plugins which made tagging posts 100 times easier than doing it with the TinyMCE editor. UTW is a great plugin but assigning tags to a post(s) or trying to edit previously tagged post using only the WP Admin is a complete pain without that particular plugin.

Anyway, here’s hoping things will settle into somewhat more of a normal routine around here and I can start rambling around again. Sure would be nice for a change.

Everyone have a lovely night on me. Or day for that matter. Depends where you are you know. :D

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Had to Turn Spam Protection Back On

I stated earlier when I loaded in a PDA plugin for viewing the site on your PDA that I had turned off the ‘Math Comment Spam Protection’ plugin which didn’t show up for those using a PDA ergo they could not submit a comment.

Unfortunately another spam comment got through both Akismet and the ‘Simple Trackback Validation’ plugin (not the fault of the plugins, spammers are just getting trickier) which means another bogus external link in my stats. So I had to turn the spam protection for comments back on. Perhaps there will be a work around in the near future that may be applied so those with PDA’s will also be able to comment on blogs using both the ‘WP Mobile’ or WP-PDA and “Math Comment Spam Protection’ plugins at the same time.

Sorry about that. I just hate spam.

Modified Performancing Logo

When I removed the ‘Performancing Partners’ code from my sidebar I found that I missed having the logo that came with it. It really is a fine group over at Performancing and although they went through some rough weather recently they’ve come out the other side of it in good fashion and with an excellent attitude to boot.

So I took the liberty of loading said logo into one of my imaging programs and with a bit of modification, I came out with what you see near the top of my sidebar. I then emailed Nick Wilson of Performancing and included a copy of the modified logo to find out what he thought.

He approved and is going to ask the various members (of which I am one) to wander over and take a look in order to get their opinion as well. So if any of you wish to leave a comment, here’s your chance.

These really are a fine group of people (staff and members combined) over there that do their best to offer good advice and info in order to help bloggers succeed in their endeavors. I recommend giving them a look over and perhaps even offering the benefits of your own blogging experiences and wisdom. The world of blogging is constantly changing and growing and there is a great need for mature communities dedicated to this world and Performancing is among the best of them.

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An Evening’s Ramble

Cow Writer’s Block
**A beginning afterthought**
(This image is copyrighted by the author but was found in Google
Image Search and was even able to be right clicked and saved
on the original website. So–did I violate something here or not?
)

Now to the post itself…

So here I sit, staring at my monitor with my mind a complete blank. There are some who may state that myself and a blank mind are synonymous and I justly ignore them as I should but needless to say it does happen occasionally. Be that as it may, this blank-mind thought then brings to er…mind (blank or otherwise) a question:

Is it alright to blog about nothing?

Well—it’s my blog isn’t it?

So I have to ask myself yet another question which is; what is this particular blog all about? Ah, yes…I almost forgot. Random Thoughts and Ramblings.

And that’s exactly what it has become and as far as I’m concerned that’s just fine.

I have found as this blog has gone from one platform to another and through 200 or so posts, that it’s always been a rather random and rambling thing, never being able to settle on just one subject or set of subjects. Instead it seems the happiest just meandering around and once in a while bouncing from one subject to the next like some slap happy canine poking about a sunny summer meadow filled with wonderful smells and various things to chase about. Bounding in and out of the tall grass with a big sloppy grin on his face as it were.

Now there’s a nice image to think about in the dead of winter up here in the Northeast Kingdom. A nice warm, sunny meadow. I can almost smell the evergreens lining the forest’s edge up ahead. Aaaahhhh!

So I suppose everything is alright then and this thing is headed exactly in the direction it should be heading even if it is a path that wanders here, there and everywhere.

Always a work in progress.

Got My Page Rank Back!

I happened to have my SEO Quake Firefox extension enabled while I was checking out my FeedBurner ‘burned’ feed and saw the Google page rank was a 3. So I loaded up the blog and once the main page had loaded up popped my old page rank of 4! Okay, so there’s a bunch of 4′s out there. The point is that was my page rank when the blog was at WordPress.com and it’s been a bit irritating to see nothing but a big fat 0 sitting where the 4 used to be.

Of course my opinion is strictly subjective here as you might have guessed.

Meanwhile me and my honey have been under the weather lately and it’s hitting me pretty hard now (tis the season and all that ya’ know) so I’m going to bow out this evening and have a hot cup of tea and then head for slumberland.

All this under the weather stuff doesn’t have anything at all to do with the fact that I service and inspect home medical equipment just as it comes off of rent I’m sure!

Uh-uh–and bananas taste like chicken. :-)

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Got a PDA? Added WP-PDA plugin.

Becky from Sprites and Bites told me about the simple WP-PDA plugin that detects the browser agent and loads a special theme for viewing specifically on a PDA. By what I hear, the plugin works just great for those who have PDA’s.

Me–I don’t own one so I guess I’ll just have to wait until someone leaves a comment and tells me if it works okay and what a wonderful blog I have. :P

Happy mobile viewing all.

Update 01-27-07: On receiving feedback from the above lady (I don’t have a PDA myself–no wireless up here so I can’t test the plugin) I have removed the above plugin and installed the WordPress Mobile Edition instead which uses up less bandwidth for mobile users. It does this by displaying links to the posts instead post snippets plus the link.

I also removed the ‘Math Comment Spam Protection’ plugin as well since it will not show up above the comment box when viewed on a PDA which also means those with PDA’s cannot successfully submit a comment. Becky has contacted the author of the “Math” plugin to see if there is a work around available. Until then, I’ll leave the ‘Math Comment Spam Protection’ turned off.

Ain’t I a nice guy though?

Some Badly needed WordPress Plugins

Lots of spam comments in Akismet lately.Hmmmpff! Must be getting popular.

I went into my host’s cPanel to check my stats and low and behold I found two of the sites linking to my blog were “xslut.***” and xslut/blog.***”. It seems that Akismet (a most excellent plugin) had a problem recently and a couple of spam comments (spamments? comspams?) got linked into my Just Thinkin blog before Akismet came back online and snagged them off. So I wandered over to the WordPress 2.1 compatible plugin list found and installed the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin and the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin, added a bit of code into the Comments.php file for my theme and vi-oh-lay(!)…the plugins were up and running. Hopefully I won’t have anymore “barely legal” type links to my blog anymore. Definitely not acceptable!

While I was at it, from a suggestion from Becky at Sprites and Bites, I installed Subscribe to Comments which gives the reader an option to subscribe to the comments of any particular post. It also allows a reader to unsubscribe as well which is even more important. :P

So now, with all the new plugins tucked snugly into the blog, I can rest easier knowing that I will no longer find nasty type links in my stats (knock on head wood) and that my readers will be assured they can receive those massively important ‘Just Thinkin’ comment updates I know they all just gotta have–I will now head towards the bedroom and a good night’s sleep.

Pleasent dreams from Stove Pipe City.

Update 08/06/07: Although the above anti-spam type plugins listed are still valid for the latest version of WordPress (currently 2.2.2) for new blogs and blogs without a lot of hits per day, for the blogs with a fair to high amount of traffic I recommend adding the Spam Karma 2.3 plugin and dropping the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin and the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin since SK2 covers both areas if the plugin detects a comment might be spam and it does this very well.

For further info please refer to the Plugins I Use page which resides with the other pages at the top of the header image that keeps an constantly updated list of the plugins I use on this site. Most of these have been installed for a significant period of time simply because they work well and do the job.

Thanks for visiting!