Brads Blog

While doing some remodeling of my blog, one of the things I wanted to do was put avatars in the comments by using the Gravitar plugin. The way it works is, you simply sign up by giving up yor email and a password, then you will be able to have an avatar to display in other blogs that have this plugin.

I went to sign up for this, but after hitting submit, the page simply reloaded. I tried this several different times, then I even went with a different email that is on a different pop server.

After failing all attempts, I went to the forums. I thought there was hope. Many others were having this same problem, and the administrator was manually activating everyone. I was disheartened to see that there hasn’t been an administrator reply to any requests in a LONG TIME!

Just a few minutes ago, I sent the admin an email, and I hope I get it worked out soon!

Here what I really have a problem with. This is an excellent idea and all, and seems to be promoted pretty well throughout the blogosphere. The big problem is that someone is asleep at the wheel! If you don’t want to mess with it anymore, I’m sure someone would buy the site!

Well, it’s official. I’m on vacation. I punched out this morning not to return to the grindstone until Tuesday night.

We are traveling to Iowa to attend Katie and Kent’s wedding. We are putting the dogs in a kennel and we’re only going for the weekend.

We figure the trip should take about ten hours driving. Strangely, I’m looking forward to it. We have been planning ths trip for nearly a year now, ever since they announced the engagement.

We are staying in a hotel, but my wife has made the arrangements and I haven’t mustered the balls to ask if they have WiFi available there. She knows how I am! I’m suprised she hasn’t scolded me for wanting to take my laptop with me!

Maybe you’ve seen it, maybe the spammers slipped one in on you. It’s the blog comment spam that doesn’t appear to have any links in it until you realize that the punctuation at the end of a sentence is linked.

Would someone really benefit from dominating the keyword, or keyperiod or keyquestion mark?

When someone does a Google Search for Bradsblog, I’m number one. Lucky me there’s not a lot of Brads Blogs out there)

It works out because I have many links out there with “Bradsblog” as the anchor text.

When I do a Google search for a single punctuation mark, the search does not execute. I tried Yahoo and MSN search as well, with the same result.

What is the goal of punctuation spam? Are they really trying to gain strength in SEO or are they actually thinking someone will hover and click on the period?

Earlier this week, I posted that I was shopping for a new theme for my blog. I got to tinkering around and realized that if I did that, I would be spending weeks working on getting all the plugins I have moved over to a new theme, and that simply isn’t worth it.

However, I have decided to start making some changes to the current theme.

After reading Yvonne’s Blog, I was inspired to Spice up my comments area.

I went ahead and installed the Comments Quicktags plugin, and as you can see in my comments area, the neat little buttons it created. I like this a lot.

One of the other subtle changes I have made was I added a sitemap for Bradsblog. I did this by using the Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress.

There are a lot of other ideas bouncing around in my noggin about the design/layout and will continue to make improvements. One day soon I’m going to do a major makeover, and maybe even go away from the green and black.

I was reading today an article that explains how a new website called Spiral Frog will offer up free music downloads, legally. They will be able to do this by selling advertising on the site. I will be anxious to see how this pans out!

Well, Roxie is adjusting to her new home well, except when she is left alone. She doesn’t like it at all! She is displaying some signs of anxiety, in the form of a brown, fluid mess on the carpet.

Our vet suggested putting her on “Puppy Prozak”, the diluted form of human Prozak. This should ease her nerves.

We picked up a ninety day supply and the vet said it should start kicking in within a couple of weeks. I’m hopeful this will “Do the trick”.

Well, it’s closing on four years ago we made the silly decision to lease my wife’s Honda Odyssey. With that, we have not yet decided if we are going to buy it outright, or shop around and find something a little newer.

My wife would like something a little bit bigger, we have car seat issues to deal with. We test drove the Chevy Astro mini conversion but it was big to drive, and didn’t gain very much interior space. We also drove the Chevy Uplander and we weren’t very pleased with it.

The next phase is to revisit the Honda Dealer and see what we can do.

I know what I’m NOT going to do, and that is lease another vehicle.

OK, after I got an email last week and watched the Power Point Slideshow about how Mars would be visible, and as large as the moon, I fell for it.

I only found out it was a hoax when I read on Cory Holt’s Blog about it being a hoax.

I’ve been putting it off forever it seems, upgrading my blog from 1.5 to the newer 2.X version. I am always weary of these sort of upgrades. I surely don’t do them right away, let someone else work the bugs out. Now that it’s been done, it turns out it was rather painless and took less than ten minutes.

Just when I thought I had my comment spam under control with Akismet, the die hard comment spammers found a new way to sneak in. They do it in the form of a trackback. I noticed my first one yesterday, then this afternoon I found two more.

I have also noticed increase comment spam on the about page. I’m going to have to do some tweaking in this department.