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Off topic ads?

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I have the strangest thing happening on one of my blogs lately. One of the advertising companies I use to supply ads has been showing some totally irrelevant ads – at least on my end.

It’s on my gardening blog. I’m seeing ads for weight loss supplements and oddly enough one that says moving companies Los Angeles. Odd.

It’s especially odd when you consider that I talk about my garden, give gardening tips and discuss specific plants on that blog. Nothing close to the ad topics that have been showing up!

Do you use advertising on your site? If you do, have you noticed that occasionally your ads just don’t fit with your sites main topics?





Why can’t people just get along?

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There are days that I just hate the internet!

Seriously! As some of you know I have several websites and blogs that I try to maintain on a daily or at least weekly basis. On top of that there’s all the social sites that one needs to be a member of in order to list and promote your sites and make connections with other bloggers and webmasters.

Not to mention forums and maybe even discussion or mailing lists!

It’s the mailing lists that have me frustrated today. A long long time ago (1995 or so) I was really into reptiles … lizards to be perfectly honest. You see I’m allergic to cats, dogs and birds (yes I do have a dog now but I live on allergy meds!) so reptiles were the perfect and in fact pretty much only pet I could have.

To make a long story short – I fell in love with Chinese water dragons and Iguanas. Most people buying reptile pets don’t have a lot of knowledge about their care and it’s still hard to find good information on the net, in a pet store or even from a Veterinarian about their care …. so I learned as much as I could about Chinese Water Dragons and started my Huge website in 1995. As my knowledge grew so did my site.

Along the way I started a mailing list for Water dragon keepers. I also took over a failing Turtle list and an Uromastyx lizard list. The turtle list imploded a few years ago when people couldn’t get along and now I think the same things going to happen with the uromastyx list.

Have you ever been in a forum or on a discussion list where the posts got heated and people started picking on one another … well that’s what’s happening on my Uro list.

I only have a few rules – stay on topic, no off topic posts, be polite and take heated discussions off the list. I don’t think that’s too hard to follow – right?

Well I just gave the list a big colon cleanse with a terse ADMIN post telling them to behave or else I’d shut down the list. It’s their choice!

Do any of you run forums or online discussion lists or mailing lists. Aren’t they hard to manage when people start OT discussions or arguing? Geesh!

Comment spammer hitting my blogs heavily today!

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Wow, my blogs are being hit heavily by one comment spammer today! This guy has hit two of my blogs leaving 35 or so comments on each of them!

It’s not like there good comments either … he’s copying the comments of others or a line or two of my posts and creating his comments that way. Hitting one post after another as he goes!

I’ve marked his comments as spam, but he got smart and changed his email so I got flooded with comment moderation requests on his second go round! If I’m lucky he’ll stop hitting on my blogs this evening or won’t think to try another email address. LOL

Well I guess I’m glad that he’s not leaving links to vulgar sites, links for products or malignant Mesothelioma or make money info. It could be worse, he’s just copying other peoples comments. I’m glad I have a good memory and I can pick out familiar comments that I’ve read before on my own sites.

Does your blog ever get hit by serial comment spammers?

Tired of unwanted email

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I wish there was a decent way to ensure that you wouldn’t get unwanted email … I mean I can’t even stop my friends and relatives from sending chain letters and joke mail. LOL Why do I hope to get email advertisers to stop sending me junk?

I did discover something that helps me “quarantine” the unwanted email. I now run all my email through gmail and then have it forwarded to my main email accounts from there. Google is pretty good at picking out spam so a huge portion of my unwanted email stays in my spam folder at gmail now. Seriously it’s cut out about 80% of the email that I used to have to sort though daily. No more ads for get rich schemes, IT job search or strange health products! I just check my gmail spam box every few days to make sure no real mail is getting stuck there and then delete all the spam.

I still get too much mail though! Probably because I have so many websites – between approving comments and getting direct email through my contact forms … and that unwanted email from relatives I have enough email to keep me busy for at least two hours each day! Speaking of “spammy relatives” my husbands cousins have time to send at least four chain letters or joke emails each day, but no time to send an email to tell us that his uncle has been in the hospital since Saturday? Now that’s bad.

Do you get too much email too? Too much spam or stuff that you just don’t care about?

What are your favorite Firefox Addons?

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I was just writing on my main blog about my quest to find an addon for Firefox 3 that will let me open multiple links in new tabs. You know, when you want to visit several sites on a blogroll … it’s nice to be able to open 10 or 20 links in new tabs at once.

I used to have an addon called Linky but that doesn’t work with Firefox 3 so I’m looking for a replacement.

My quest also made me wonder what your favorite Firefox addons are?

I don’t like to use too many addons as I find it slows down my browser, but there are a few that I really like to use:

Twitterfox – allows you to see new tweets in a browser popup.

Stumbleupon – the Stumbleupon toolbar. I only enable it when I want to stumble.

SEO for firefox

SearchStatus – displays the Google pagerank, Alexa and Compete ranks of sites being viewed.

Google toolbar

Google Gears – helps pages load faster

Entrecard toolbar- makes it much easier to view Entrecard sites

Adsense notifier – allows you to see your Adsense totals in the status area or top of your browser.

So what Firefox addons do you like to use?

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