Al's Blog-o-Sphere

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.

I spent about four hours today working online because I installed Internet Explorer 9.

No, there were no problems with IE9. That time was spent fixing this web page.

IE9 installed smoothly and looks nice and sleek, seems to run fast and I’m told is much improved over older versions of IE. Microsoft would like to forget IE6, I’m sure.

But, as always, Microsoft’s vision of how HTML should work is slightly different from everyone elses’. Actually, all the major browsers vary in small ways. But as soon as I viewed this blog in it, I noticed the font I am using for the titles didn’t load and the default font was displayed. A minor annoyance, but I wanted to see why it didn’t, what it would take to fix, and if it was still working in the other browsers I have. Continue Reading…