500 Miles . . . and Counting?
I began writing The American Writer on December 24, 2009. Five-hundred days later--tomorrow--I'm still writing it. These 500 days have felt like walking 500 miles. Sometimes; not always. One of the things that encouraged me to keep writing three days a week was the statistical information provided me by my blog host.
But over the last few months, I've begun to receive so many robotic comments--literally, computer-generated--which are also forwarded to my e-mail, that I began researching how to stop it. Getting over a hundred "comments"--all with business or corporate origins--every day became so time-consuming and frustrating that I contacted my host to find out what to do about it.
My host told me I needed to "filter"; to do that I needed to upgrade. They told me the service I bought wasn't enough. What they meant was that if I want something to work the way a normal person would expect it to work, I have to pay for it special. I get it. I should have known that filtering out SPAM, which is included in the service, doesn't mean most of it. It means a little bit of it. So if I want to have it work against most of it, I'll have to pay for the privilege. So I did.
Except . . . I arranged to move my platform from Quick Blog Cast to Wordpress. It will include the "filtering" and will allow me more choices and flexibility in producing this blog. And I'll have more accurate statistics for determining what blogs work and which ones do not, and to know how many hits I'm getting on the blog. I used to see the graph line go up, wanting to believe that the blog was taking on new readers, yet still suspecting that many of those "hits" were robots invading me with comments.
As I write this I realize that maybe filtering is a mistake. Do I really want to know there's only three of you?
Posted by Tom Eubanks at 5/6/2011 1:32 PM 
Categories: Rants and Raves, General Blogging, Marketing Yourself
Tags: Less is More Rant
Categories: Rants and Raves, General Blogging, Marketing Yourself
Tags: Less is More Rant
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