Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I spent some quality time with the site today, upgrading and updating things. Several plugins, things that work behind the scenes, have been updated and the main blog engine is now at the latest version.

There are a number of “themes” available that need updates, but most of them I am not using. It would probably be wiser to remove them. So I got looking at them and decided I didn’t like the one I was using. So, instead of it, I went back to one I had in the past, which I like a lot better.

It’s called Tigopedia Reloaded and I made a customized copy of it where I made a lot of custom changes. I always liked it and feel it a better look than the blocky, too white thing I was using.

I just cleared out a bunch of comments that were being held for moderation. The spam filters I have on this site work pretty well. Nothing gets through them. Unfortunately, legitimate comments from first-time commenters are almost always held for review.

Most of the spam comments are just link spam. Someone, probably a bot, posts comment filled with links to other sites. They do this so that they will get better ranking in search engines because it looks like a lot of sites link to them. Easy to stop.

The ones I laugh at the most, though, are the ones that sound like a sincere message from someone who want to help make my site better and get better placement in search engines. The tip off that they haven’t even looked at my site is they always talk about improving my site to make more money. Ha. Money is the last thing on my mind here. But they think that I need their service to improve my SEO – or Search Engine Optimization.

I’m convinced that SEO actually means SnakE Oil.

Everyone loves something for free. I got this email recently.

After a few years with the old theme, I decided to change things and use a new theme. It’s a little stark, but has a nice clean feel. A few things need to be tweaked, but that just takes time.

Some older posts may look odd, or not work quite right. I may or may not go back and fix them.