I have a humor website, Web Pickups, that I post to on a regular basis. Recent posts draw in the auto commenting software. Not to say that the software doesn’t find older posts to bother, just that the newer posts are at the top of the list.

Some times I think that I should post these comments on the blog for the comedy value. I doubt that my real visitors would get the joke. Many of these auto comments are so far off topic that they have some comedy value. Like comments about the wonderful article and the great writing style on a post that only contains a picture.

Many people that use this auto commenting software do not learn how to use it or set it up. They also are not aware enough of keywords to target the comments properly. I occasionally run across a blog that does not hold comments for approval, but most blog owners that care leave at least the default process in place.

The default handling for comments, and the options, are under the discussion link in the settings panel of the admin area. The default is to hold a comment unless the commenter has a couple of comments that have been approved. Another default setting is to hold comments with more than two links in the post body. My comment policy states no links in the post body, and I enforce that most of the time. Of course, auto commenting software doesn’t read the comment policy anyway.

Going through the Web Pickups Blog comments is almost refreshing at times. I have allowed a few of these comments when they are well targeted. I did that more before I had much experience and realized that most of these comments are not written directly by a real person. The blogosphere would be a better place without auto commenting software just as the email inbox would be a better place without email spam.

I submitted my latest article last evening. The email confirming the receipt of the article was time stamped at 10:28 PM last evening. I have just received the article approval email time stamped at 8:17 PM this evening. That is less than 22 hours from submission to live article.

This is great service. Ezine went on an editor hiring and training binge either late last year or early this year. Articles often took most of a week to process through the system. Having an article live in less than a day is great stuff. Each article is checked by at least two editors, and must pass muster.

The article is about viral emails in support of my Web Pickups site. You can find the article here:  http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Humorous-Or-Sexy-Viral-Email—An-Internet-Tradition&id=4532436

Yesterday I wrote and submitted an article titled ‘The Humorous Or Sexy Viral Email – An Internet Tradition’ in support of my site Web Pickups. It may be live on Ezine Articles tomorrow. I just checked and they are processing it now, 4 of 5 steps complete. (I will try to come back and link to the article when/if it goes live.)

While researching the history of viral email I ran across the name of an early website that posted these emails called ViralBank.com. (For obvious reasons I will not make that link live, but you can easily chase it if you wish. ) I did a Google search and came up with the listing for the site. I clicked on the link but the page did not load. I got a server time out message from FireFox. I checked with the Internet Archive (also very slow yesterday) and found some past pages filed there. I checked with Who-Is and found that the site was first registered toward the end of 2000 and that the registration is still current.

Today I tried to visit the site again. This time the page loaded, more or less. There were several database errors listed. What did load looked the same as the last updated page from the year 2007 that I saw on the Way Back Machine. It appears that the site is no longer being maintained. The Internet Archive showed that the peak year for number of indexed pages was 2005. It makes you wonder, did the owners get bored with maintaining the site or did they move on to other things? The viral emails on which the site was based did not slow down at that time to the best of my recollection, and are in fact still going strong today.

The research for the article turned up some interesting facts. The Internet as we know it got off the ground in about 1995 when the last of the commercial restrictions were lifted and Yahoo was born. Email actually predates the Internet by many years. Email was originally conceived as a method for different users of time shared main frame computers to communicate with one another. Most of these installations were not networked as we know it today. There may have been terminals in various places, but they all hooked back in to the mainframe in a star pattern. When the Internet as we know it came into being email was carried over and has been called the killer application of the Internet. Email became one of the driving factors of the Internet as people perceived the necessity of having an email address.

I have added a blog to the Symmetrical Backgrounds site. I will be writing and collecting articles on various aspects of web design and website building in this blog. I have added the first reprint article to the blog and will be adding more content in the coming days. Stop by and visit the new blog if you get a chance. You can click this link: The Simple Web Design Blog to go directly to the blog.

It is good that I made this post, I had forgotten to update the site nav, so there was no way to get to the blog from the main site. I did have a link back to the main site from the blog, but no link to the blog from the main site. Maybe the robots will have an easier time of finding the blog now.

I opened a new blog the other day, The Keyword Kove Blog. I wanted an alphabet soup background for this blog.

I found some images and made a few backgrounds from which to choose. Some of the designs were interesting so I thought that I could add some more soups and put up a gallery. I did this last evening.

The process that I use builds a symmetrical image from a part of a larger image. The result is an image tile that can provide a seamless background image for a page. The process produces some interesting geometrics. Often the subject picture is not recognizable as such but the background produced can have intricate designs.

Check out the new gallery at The Soup Kitchen Gallery.

Two nights ago I put up a new blog, The KeyWord Kove Blog. I look for hot keyword searches and write up a blurb or short article on the subject. Keywords are used by the search engines to determine the most relevant information to return for a given search. One of the words that I found had been referred to earlier in the day on a forum post that I had read. I did the post last evening. When I looked at my traffic logs for the new blog today I notices a Google search that had resulted in a visit. I followed the link TO THIS GOOGLE SEARCH. It is on an international version of Google, but the post was returned in the number one spot:

The KeyWord Kove is an experiment in the power of keywords. The blog is less than 48 hours old and located on sub-domain space. The post was less than 12 hours old when the search that returned the KeyWord Kove article was carried out.

If one has any doubts this should be a strong indicator of the power of keywords. I will be interested in further developments, and I will keep you informed.

As I was doing my update to the directory page I noticed that things were seriously out of whack with The Cartoon Page. I had started a rebuild on the site, putting the cartoons into galleries by category, but I evidently got distracted and had left things in a less than optimum state. There was a box for a left nav section, but I had never filled out my list so the box was blank. I had ad space on the right but no ads there. And the site was still a full fluid layout that could get strange with images.

I brought the design up to the current state of my art. I still have to redo the galleries, but I did the necessary mods on the templates and tested them. There are a few operations required on each gallery, but everything is done by software now that the templates are available. That will save many hours over doing it all by hand. I uploaded the new front page and gallery index page, and the other necessary support files to make it all work. When I finish this post I will put the galleries through the wringer and upload them.

I also need to take a new screen shot and upload it to the directory site. Then it will be on to other things. I have posted a bit of content to a couple of sites including a new blog that I put up last evening – The KeyWord Kove Blog. This new blog is an experiment into the power of keywords. Now if the bots will only pay attention we may see how the experiment goes.

I have just uploaded and tested the new pages at Wink’s WebSite Directory. This is just a directory of my sites, although I did upload a couple of auxiliary pages. I may put up a few more pages if I get around to it, but this is just a directory of my sites.

There were a few sites that were missing from the list and a few domain names that I lost over the winter. I put up one more blog today and included it in the directory.

The old directory was a link list with a short description of each of the sites. The page had become rather long with the addition of sites over the last couple of years. The blogs were not listed at all, or only mentioned in some of the site descriptions.

I broke the list down into categories and listed the blogs by category as well. I did a screen shot of each of the sites and blogs and added them to the short descriptions. The old single page site is now around a dozen pages. There is a lot more color and the blocks of text are broken up by the site thumbnails. The thumbs are just of the header with a bit of the page background on each side. They are big enough to read the site name and get a sense of the design.

The layout is two column with nav and a comment box on the left and the directory of sites on the right. There is minimal advertising on the site, a Google banner unit in the header and a text link strip at the very bottom. I will also include my hosting company affiliate link in the footer below the bottom nav.

Please stop buy and visit Wink’s Website Directory. Thanks!

I am embarking on a rebuild of the website directory page. The time could probably be better spent, but some things you just need to do. There have been several additions to the stable and a few domain names that have fallen along the wayside.

I intend to add a bit of color to the directory in the form of thumbnails for the sites. Since the list is getting long and the thumbs will take up additional space I am breaking the directory into site categories. I have begun the rebuild but am still thinking of the best ways to present the information.

I will probably upload the changes in waves. First wave will be to break the list into the categories and make the other site tweaks that I intend to make. Then I will add the thumbs a category at a time and upload the necessary files.

I don’t expect the rebuild to draw any more traffic to the site, but it should make for a better user experience for my visitors and may result in more click throughs to my other sites.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Almost !00% of the comments that I receive on my various blogs comes from auto comment spamming software. I know this to be true because I can see it in the traffic logs. I see exactly the same comment on several blogs on the same day.

I have a website that echos email humor. I post things that come to me via email on this site. I had added pages to this site faithfully for a while, but had not added much for several months. It had become too much work to build a new page whenever something came in that I wanted to post.

I had started to use WordPress blogs on several sites and decided to put up a blog on the WebPickups site because of the ease of posting. Posts on WordPress sites tend to get indexed more rapidly than regular pages.

Now we come to the part about the auto comment spamming software. Since this blog has become one of my higher profile sites it is targeted by the auto spamming software. I have not fully investigated this type of software, but there must be a facility to add keywords to the search for posts to spam. Most of the comment spammers do not do a very good job with these keywords so the comments seldom bare any relation to the posts they target.

No place is this more evident than on the humor site. I sometimes feel that I should approve some of these comments just for the comedy value. If my visitors realized what was going on it would make the comment posters look like real idiots. Having a comment like ‘wow this is great information and very helpful to me’ on a joke could be classified as comedy on its own.

My advice to those thinking of using this type of software would be “don’t bother people with your spam”. This is a bit unrealistic just like giving the same advice to email spammers would be. People are lazy and the sales pages make these things sound like a gift from God. Just remember when reading a sales page that the page is designed to put money in the owners pocket. There are good products that can be moneymaking tools, but if it sounds too good to be true it probably is not true.

The second piece of advice if you must use the software would be to use very long tail keywords if the software allows for that. You will reduce the number of comments placed but will improve the chance of getting a comment approved. Don’t expect to get comments from auto commenting software approved on high page rank blogs. One might slip through occasionally but the owners of high page rank blogs have high page rank because they care, so are not likely to approve spam comments.