Head Rambles

Grandad February 5th, 2007

I wonder if people wonder what that little button is on the bottom of my pages?

That little button that says “Kick it”.

If you don’t know, it belongs to a very neat Irish website called - wait for it - Kick.

Now I still don’t know that much about this Blogging lark. Herslf knows f*ck all, Ron and Dick aren’t talking to me after the episode of the Java, or Javascript or whatever it’s called. And I have no one else to talk to at the moment except the dog. She is a very intelligent dog and can converse all night about politics, and economics, but she’s not well up on blogging.

But, as far as I know, there is a site out there called Digg? Apparently Kick is the Irish version of Digg. If you like a story, you click the button and that adds a vote to your post. You can then look up the most popular posts and get an idea of the good ones. That’s a great idea.

What is very clever about it is that you can’t vote for yourself. If you try, then a vote is subtracted from your score. Sneaky!!

I did think of joining up with Digg, but I am a very small plankton in the ocean of blog sites. I would get eaten by the bigger fish.

So I joined Kick, because at least I’m a minnow in the Irish pond.

To give you an idea, I would be ranked at about 142 in the international scale, but I rank around 8 in Ireland. That makes me feel a bit better and is good for the old ego.

There is one thing that confuses me though. If I submit a story to Kick, I automatically get one vote. That’s fair. And if I don’t get any more, it sort of vanishes into obscurity, which is also fair.

But I always seem to get one other vote. So all my stories end up with two votes. Which is strange. There is one person out there, who hangs around and says to himself “Aha” Grandad has posted - I’ll give him a Kick”. I think I have only had one post [maybe two] that he [or she] has missed so far.

It’s not Herself, the dog, or Dick because they aren’t members that I know of. It’s not Ron, because he doesn’t read my site very often, and anyway, as I say he is thick with me at the moment. It could be Goerge W or God but I doubt it. So I’m baffled. Whoever you are - thank you anyway.

One of my stories has got nine kicks at the moment which is nice. That’s a lot in the Irish scale of things. Especially, as not only was the story politically very incorrect but I even put in a P.S. - “I bet I don’t get Kicked for this one”. Maybe people saw that as a challenge? Maybe they are out to get me [ah - the old paranoia again]?

Another thing that is strange is that I did a couple of posts over the weekend, that between them got 31 comments. That means a lot of interest [unless of course I'm just writing to myself under various nom-de-plumes to bolster my ego, but I don't think I am]. But neither story got kicked. They both stayed at 1. So no one liked them, but they wrote a lot about them. I had decided they were destined to be failures and they’d slide to the bottom of the Kick-pond where they would fester in the mud. But I tuned in this morning and they both suddenly have been kicked! My anonymous fan is back!

I posted a little mental ramble this morning [what I like to think of as a 'mind fart'], and I didn’t even bother entering it into Kick. I thought people had lost interest.

I’ll stick a Kick button at the bottom of this. It is there purely for illustrative purposes. I am not asking you to klick it because that would be canvassing, and unfair to others. So don’t. Unless of course you want to.

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Grandad February 5th, 2007

Something very strange is going on with my spam.

My spammers are starting to talk to each other on my site.

At the begining of the year, Ron installed a thing called Askimet in the site here, and it stops all the spam. It is very good. So far it has stopped 1,600 comments being posted that would have been unsavoury, to put it mildly.

All I have to do is go in and check every now and again that it’s not making any mistakes. So far it has only made one, which isn’t bad. I then delete the rest.

For the last week or two though, the spam seems to have changed.

Instead of just trying to sell me viagara and send me to casinos and porn sites, the spammers are starting to make comments. And what is even stranger, some of them seem to be commenting on previous spam. They are even complaining about themselves.

I went in to check this morning and I found the following spams. I have put them in the order I received them. I have left out any that included a link, so all of these remaining ones are just messages. They are unedited which may explain the odd bracket or two. They all come from different spammers.

Now, I always believe in replying to letters [my mother taught me that], so of course I replied to them. I have included my responses, for what it’s worth

Are they strange? Or what?

It is possible to delete all this spam? - Yes. No problem

Is it ok? - Well, that depends. If it is not immoral or illegal, then I’d say go for it.

( spam ( - I know!

Not bad, it really can occur - Most things can occur. Unless they are impossible.

COol - You like it?

Fucking Pidors! Spammed so much( - No need for that kind of language

Awesome, man - Yeah. Cool, dude

Looks nice - Thanks

Spam really sucks( delete it - I have every intention of doing so

Glad to hear it - I take it you are referring to the last comment I sent?

Hello! informative nice site, excellent design! - Thank you very much. Though I wouldn’t call it informative as such.

So much spam ( - I know. Terrible. Isn’t it?

Thanks man, i agree - About so much spam?

Hello! interesting nice site, excellent design! - Thank you so much. Why don’t you vote for me in the Irish Web Awards?

I think they may be having a nervous breakdown. Should I have added the phone number of a good clinic?

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