Blogging, Busyness, Spam
I began this blog primarily to write about my coming trip to Israel and the West Bank, now just six weeks away (more on that in my next entry). But now that I have the blog, I end up writing about other topics as well, though that’s hard to find time to do. When a few blogless days go by I find myself thinking that one news story or another is something I could write about, or should write about, or would even like to write about if I had the time. Over the next few days I’ll try to catch up a bit, but I expect I’ll never update this blog as frequently as many others do, or cover as much ground.
As I sit here writing, the blog spam keeps coming in, something I hadn’t anticipated but which many others have already commented on (like ChuckO). As I understand it, people spam blog comments to boost the number of links to whatever website they’re pushing so their sites turn up higher in Google rankings. First I got a dozen or so porn-site comments, which I deleted, and then they stopped, at least for now. Then I started getting endless comments pushing an online gambling site — probably well over a hundred so far. Originally I set up the blog to allow commenting at will, but I’ve now changed that so comments with suspicious key words or too many links are filtered out and don’t get posted until I approve them (so I have to waste more time going to the blog site to either approve or delete each piece of spam). I apologize if this delays your posts. If anyone has a better solution to this problem, please let me know! I’d hate to have to turn off the comment system.