Adam’s Peace

This is just to let everybody know that I’m going to take a short break.

No, I have not reached the burn-out stage yet. Posting 3 articles per week has been a challenge, but I had the inspiration and motivation required to crank out these posts.

In order to keep my inspiration up, I’m going to be cutting back on how many posts I write, and I’ll be taking this week off. I’m considering taking things a different direction when I come back, but only time will tell.

If I find another massive burst of inspiration, be assured that I’ll resume the 3 posts per week that I have had recently, though I doubt if I’ll allow myself to post more per week than I have been, simply because that seems to be the edge of quality v.s. quantity. Over the next few months (excluding this week), you can expect one or two posts per week, on random days of the week. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so that you’ll know within the hour when I write a new article.

I have a quick update on the comment guidelines.

Rule No. 1: If you are a human, make it clear that you are a human.

Those are all of the rules that I have for commenting on this site.

The reason why I am making this guideline is because I have been noticing an increasing amount of “vanilla” comments… These are comments that really don’t say anything specific, so could be written on any blog in the world and could be just as valid. For instance, saying “Hi, I just found your site and I think it is amazing” is something that I consider a vanilla comment.

These aren’t bad in themselves… The problem, though, is the way that I have set up my comment system. After a person gets a comment approved on this site, they are free to post any additional comments without it needing to be moderated first. Unfortunately, a lot of people who write spam-bots also know about this feature in Wordpress, and hope to use it to their advantage. Their tactic is to write a vanilla comment, then have their spam-bot wait a couple of days, after which it will send a large number of spam-filled comments. If the blog owner approved their first comment, they’ll soon find themselves buried in spam.

Personally, I don’t have the time to manage spam outright. This site has received over 6,000 comments which were either deleted by the anti-spam plugin that I use, or which I marked as spam after it appeared in the moderation queue. If it weren’t for the anti-spam plugin, I would simply not have the time to approve any comments.

I think that comments are great things. If you took the time to read my (admittedly lengthy) articles, then you should be rewarded by being able to share your views. Additionally, people with approved comments are able to, and even encouraged to, put in URLs to other sites, including (and especially) their own sites.

If you’re going to cheat, however, and you would rather use a spam-bot to add links to your sites, then I don’t have any sympathy while I’m deleting your comments.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you should notice that I wrote a note about commenting…

If you’re currently waiting for one of your comments to come out of moderation, send another comment. If you think that I previously sent all of your comments into the auto-delete bucket, and you can’t send new comments, then you can always use my contact form.

If you’re a spam bot, and you can understand what I’m saying… well… perhaps you deserve to have your comments approved as well… I’ve written plenty of programs, but I can safely say that I’ve never talked to one before.

Honestly, I want to approve every true comment. I simply don’t have the time available to guess about a vanilla comment and guess wrong.

Here’s a quick update to point out that I now have a post rating system located at the bottom of each post.

I was thinking of going through all of my posts and picking what my favorites have been, but then, life happened, and I haven’t been able to effectively pick my favorites… Also, what I think is good and what everyone else thinks is good may be completely different, since my ego is involved.

So, in order to save myself some time, and give a more objective sampling of my best posts, I have installed a rating system that updates a list in the sidebar.

Please be honest with it… I don’t know who votes for what posts, only what each post gets ranked, so if you enjoy a post and find it useful, give it a full five stars so that I’ll write more posts like it. If you think the post stinks and is useless, (like this post) then just give it one star. Everything else… well… just use your best judgment.