Family Treasury of Myths from Around the World
We’ve read more than half of the myths by now, most of us were familiar to us but four of them (from Africa, Japan and India)were completely new. Those that we did know are retold in a different light in this book, which is helpful for making the point that myths have come down to us in a variety of versions. Bear in mind that the myths can be quite violent. In all, it’s another wonderful book I have Paperback Swap to thank for.
Since I moved a couple of my websites to a new server, I’ve been taking a closer look at the logs. I was surprised to see that my marga.org site – my personal site, which mostly includes my recipes, food blog & restaurant reviews – is getting a healthy 6,500 hits a day. Yay! Some closer look at the logs, however, paint a less rosy picture. About 1/4th to 1/3 of my hits are from search engine robots, and probably as many more hits come from spammers.
Spam traffic falls into two main categories: referrer spammers and comment spammers. Referrer spam robots hit your website repeatedly pretending to come from a given site, so that that site appears high on your stats file as a “referrer”. If your web stats file is public (mine is password protected), it will be spidered by google and the listed referrers will count as links from your site to theirs. That helps the referrer appear higher on google searches.
It’s amazing just how many of these junk referrer sites there are. I’ve only been blocking them for a week, and then only the top junk referrers to my sites, and I already have 80 sites blocked by my .htaccess file, in addition to all referrer websites from .ru (Russia) and .pl (Poland). I anticipate that for every junk referrer I block, another will take its place at the top of my referrer stats. I’m not sure if there is anything I can do about this beyond manually blocking them. Google, on the other hand, could just stop indexing stat files and make this problem moot.
Comment spam is significantly less annoying now that I moved to using wordpress as my blog software. Comment spam are just comments left after blog topics, whose main purpose is to link to the spammer’s site. WordPress has a very useful plugin called Akismet, which identifies and blocks most of the comment spam. It’s amazingly accurate.
I’ve been moving my blogs over to my new server, and it’s been a very time-consuming project. Whether we like it or not, blogs are not easily portable – specially across blog software. I knew that there was no real fix for the “broken url” problem – Movable Type, the blogging software I was using before, and WordPress, the one I use now, assign different types of urls to blog posts, so it’s impossible to keep old posts where they were. My “solution” has been to have two copies of my blogs, one at the old URLs and a second one at the wordpress-provided URLs. It’s not pretty, as that means there are duplicates of all my blog posts out there, but I couldn’t figure out another solution.
Setting up the new blogs has also been very time consuming. WordPress is pretty bare when you get it, to increase functionality you need to find, download and activate plug-ins, which may or may not work as advertised. No sooner do I find one that does what I want, than I come across a significantly better one and then I have to change – I’ve exported four blogs so far, so it’s not trivial. But all these are expected annoyances, so I’m not going to complain about them. Instead I’m going to complain about the unexpected ones:
-My ISP: dreamhost.com. I decided to change ISPs in the first place because my home server is too slow, specially when it was running MT. One of my friends has been using dreamhost for years, and he highly recommended it. And it’s dirt cheap: about $110 a year for unlimited disk storage/traffic/domains/mailboxes, with a significant discount for your first year (use code MARGADREAM for $50 off for your first year hosting). But it’s been MUCH slower than I anticipated, pretty much as slow as my server at home. Now, the problem may not be dreamhost, it may just be WordPress, one of my biggest problems is that this program occasionally hangs up. In any case, it’s annoying.
-Greedy search engine bots. I hadn’t realized this before, but over half my traffic is from very annoying search engine spiders. The biggest culprit is Bing’s msnbot. Yesterday alone it downloaded almost 1766 pages from my San Leandro Talk blog, which only has 32 postings. I now disallowed it through the robots.txt file, and Bing has sent out its bingbot instead, but that one so far has been respectful. Other bad bots are the one from Yandex, a russian search engine, and from Amazon – but nowhere nearly as bad as MSN.
I finally got a new eye prescription a few weeks ago (and I’m sad to say that I finally need bifocals), and decided to order both contacts and glasses online. I’d done the former many times before, but was a little bit weary about the latter. Whenever I’ve gotten glasses I had to have them fitted. But I figured I wear contacts all the time, and I only needed the glasses for emergencies, so how bad could it be? The answer was “not too bad, but not that great either”.
I ordered the glasses from 39DollarGlasses.com because the glasses were cheap. Frames + lenses start at $39 + $5 shipping, but with coupons I got my glasses for a total of $33. Right now they’re running a $15 off promotion, so you can get a pair for as little as $29. The glasses themselves arrived very quickly. I placed the order on a Saturday, and they were delivered early in the week, maybe even by Tuesday. The frames themselves are clearly as cheap as they can be, they are not very flexible and I think they will break easily. The prescription seems to be accurate, but I can’t really tell. They do feel a little bit weird, but that may be because they are narrower than I was expecting so the frames are in my field of vision, that’s disconcerting and annoying. Still, for a pair of glasses to wear very occasionally they’re OK. I’d order from this company again, but next time I’d make sure to look for VERY BIG glasses 🙂
I ordered the contacts from AC Lens. This company did not have the lowest prices, but some of the companies with lower prices weren’t well reviewed. When you order from AC Lens, they order directly from the manufacturer who then ships to you. For that reason, the service is not as quick as it’d otherwise be. I also ordered the contact lenses on a Saturday and they arrived the following Saturday. I wasn’t able to use a coupon when I ordered, but they have them occasionally so check before you order. The contact lenses I got were the ones I ordered, so I can’t comment on customer service.
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