Saturday Evening Post

The adventures this week were fun, tiring in a way which does not make one wants to rip the hair from one’s head and enlightening. Big news is the most understated way to describe the announcement. Clyde is loaded for bear. Grab your cuppa and snuggle in. Let’s talk.

 M3

We have a large number of new lurkers. I am not calling names; well, not really. Some of the new followers are not ready to leave comments just yet. They have connected through M3 to social media (mostly on G+ and the 5,000 page) where they are more comfortable with the platform.

Check the box!

All newcomers need to know there is an itty bitty box you need to check stating you are not a stinking spambot. Although it has not completely eradicated the spam, I have managed to get the spam down to a manageable two to three hundred comments a day again.

The other box everyone should be checking is the CommentLuv box. CommentLuv is the number one choice of M3 Readers as an exit strategy. Yes, M3 Readers go from this blog to yours.

If you get lost, click on the Welcome Home! button at the top left. There was a new update this week.

Updates

About Momma got a new update this week as well. The big news was added there. Have you seen it? A few from Twitter stopped by to see what was up. Thank you for the Facebook likes once you got there. What am I being cryptic about?

Big News

T3 is live! Free to Amazon Prime members, T3 will be in the Kindle Lending Library until late October. If you are not a Prime member, it is not priced at the top of the scale, so it is not going to break the bank.

If you would like a hard copy, please purchase through CreateSpace. The price is the same, but my royalty is far better. Is anyone interested in the cheat codes for getting through CreateSpace in one pass?

I still have a few copies left to distribute to those willing to write reviews. If you are looking to get your hands on one today, let me know.

There are some bloggers who helped get T3 into print over the last few years. If you are not already acquainted, meet…

The Aware Writer

Suzzle Cakes

Passionate Project Management

A few other special people are listed in the credits and acknowledgments, but you will need to get the book to meet them!

And for all of you who think this book will tell you nothing because you do not have toddlers, you may be surprised how much of the methods in it will let you know about yourself, your friends, your adult children, teenagers (yours and everyone else’s) and those annoying people in your office, inbox and comment box.

Follow Up News

For those of you who made it this afternoon to Hold On, Ethel! there is an update on the piracy of M3. It appears my email to the Automattic CSR was übereffective. Using the terms “piracy” and “copyright violation” got the attention they deserve. What took nearly four days to do, took less than thirty minutes to undo.

The underlying issue of the xml file in WordPress’ possession is another animal altogether. Requests for me to take down the banner are being and will continue to be met with a firm NO. If you have not seen it, do go look. It is one of my favorites of the clipart graphics which M3 has posted.

Meanwhile, the RIM developers of the BlackBerry app have been given my information and the error reports to attempt to reprogram their app not to malfunction in the favor of WordPress.

Right Turn, Clyde!

Right turn, Clyde.

What was originally planned as a complete right turn has derailed into a swerve. Last week’s lament of dysfunctional websites was not meant to be an introduction to the dysfunction of M3. However, it has left us with much fodder for discussion. Let’s let that discussion live on the last post. Instead, let’s talk about basic knowledge.

Read the Instructions

Many a chauvinistic joke has been made about the inability to read the instructions. In the virtual world, we are graced with hundreds of thousands of websites touting the ease with which we can begin using the functionality of the site. In our rush to be “blogging in five minutes”, many of us fail to read the instructions.

Some such instructions include the prohibitions of the things we really want our blogs to do. Some are tips and tricks to getting the most out of a particular feature. (See last week’s SEP on pictures and bandwidth.) Some are even instructions on how to get the scripts not to sabotage our own inability to read the instructions.

Terms of Service

I agree I have read the terms of service and agree to hold you harmless for however I could abuse myself with your product.

To say I am anal about reading the terms of service could be likened to calling the Hindenburg a minor aeronautical misstep. Amid all of the lines claiming the website is not responsible for anything you do to abuse the functionality of their site are revealing tidbits about how much of your labor the site is going to retain in the event you misuse the script and lose what you have done. On this clause, WP is able to hold onto the xml (shadow copy) of M3 from its days in the “free” blogosphere.

When I severed service with them, said xml was not to be retained after the 301 was in effect. (A 301 is a line of code which tells a browser the web address you are looking to view is no longer on the server where it came calling, so it should browse somewhere completely different.)

This misbehavior is like moving to a new house, but the real estate agent replicated all of your personal belongings, like the plaster of Paris hand print your child made in kindergarten and the contents of your underwear drawer, in the house for the next resident. (Why does this sound like a good plot twist for a novel?)

Jargon

Meant to make clicks of users, jargon is the pet names communities have for the features they use. For instance, “reblogging” is a watered down version of the cyber crime “scraping”. M3 Readers have been seeing the end cap to posts prohibiting reblogging of M3 posts since the functionality rolled out to all WP blogs.

While I have no issues with sharing, and provide numerous widgets and memes to make sharing simple, the reblog feature has an added bonus for WP which I do not abide. By reblogging, you are creating a post on your site. You can put in a “comment”, which is in actuality an introduction to the post from the other blog.

A link then attaches to the tail of your “post” pointing your audience to what you reblogged (saving you from reading the instructions on how to link out with the WYSIWYG).  The original blog gets a comment/pingback to let the blogger know a post has been reblogged. Sounds innocuous, right?

That is a matter of opinion. One of the biggest bragging tokens for blogging platforms is the number of posts they traffic in any given day. Since a reblog becomes a post on your blog, how many of the millions of blog posts on WP are merely the sharing of posts written by others?

To my mind, reblogging is the equivalent of hitting “share” on social media. While there may be 1,000 copies of one meme graphic on social media, there are not 1,000 original, independent posts.

Having seen more than my fair share of websites which claim to be content curators which are nothing more than blogs using the reblog feature, I would venture these bloggers with three and four thousand “posts” in actuality have none. They have a link farm.

Integrity

In the entire charade, I have come to the conclusion laziness has invaded the blogosphere. Alternatively, the designers of the reblog feature are attempting to make the blogosphere into a social media platform without the necessity of running any extra interactive or homogenizing programming than the Reader page.

Until next time,

Red Signature

~~~~~~~~~~


Who would do a review of T3 for me? What do you think of the reblog feature? How do you feel about scraping and piracy? What do you think an appropriate punishment for intentional copyright infringement should be? Do you read the directions and the terms of service before you use a website?

© Red Dwyer 2012
Re-Blogging of this or any other post on The M3 Blog
is expressly forbidden.
Copyright and Privacy Policy available
in The Office. 
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27 Comments

  1. The prob with lurkers is once they have been lure out, you kind of want them to go away 😉 Some people are lurkers for a reason.
    Friggin Loon recently posted..Great ScottMy Profile

    Reply
  2. On target as always. Tricky wicket regarding shadow copy.
    tess kann recently posted..IS a Picture WORTH a Thousand Words?My Profile

    Reply
    • They have their days when I wonder if they think no one is watching or if they merely think we are too stupid to know what they have done. I went in and stripped out everything in terms of posts. Here’s hoping no one ever gets through again…The banner remains.

      Reply
  3. noor

     /  July 11, 2017

    you kind of want them to go away ? Some people are lurkers for a reason.

    Reply
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