Essentral

I’m feeling the spirit of NaBloPoMo, it brings bloggers closer together, readers and blog authors closer too. I may have blown the latter by posting less lately than when I wasn’t supposed to be posting every day. (No self-psychoanalysis on that — I’ve had a lot of external causes, and they are no fun to read about either.)

Feeling the NaBloPoMo spirit, I’ve joined the grassroots “You Comment, I Follow” movement. In other words, I’ve removed the “no follow” attribute from comments on my pages. “What the does that mean and why should I care?,” you ask, and no wonder. It’s gibberish. Allow me to explain.

Thee are search engine robots (’bots, spiders) which index what’s on the Web for Google and all the other search engines. They index every thing unless stopped by a special tag, inserted in the HTML. One such tag for hyperlinks is the “nofollow” attribute.It stop a spider from following a hyperlink on your page and recording what you have inked to. The default setting of most blogging software is to have all links in comments set “nofollow” to try to stem the flood of spam in comments. When your blog is linked to by others, it increases your ranking with the search engine. It’s not just an ego think, high rankings mean higher portentail income from your site.

Many bloggers feel it’s had a bad side effect, encouraging “junk” comments, or simply aren’t that interested. The Do Follow crowd realy appreciate people who take the time to stop and comment. If the author of the comment has a website, why shouldn’t they get the benefit of the link back to their own site?

There’s been a grassroots movement to spread the practice of taking “nofollow” out of comments. It goes by various names, “NoFollow Free,” “No Nofollow,” and “U Comment, I Follow.” You’ll see badges and signs on blogs’ sidebars with those terms. I’ll be adding one like this:

Cute, isn’t it? This one came from a set at Randa Clay DESIGN, she is an awesome designer. There’s a set of them, five or six different colors for your use hosted at Andy Beard’s “I Follow” BUMPzee page. There are Do Follow lists and directories, Do Follow communities within the blog aggregator sites like BlogCatalog, etc. It’s really a major movement.

Now if you aren’t a blogger, at least you know what all these slogans and badges mean, and have an example of what a measure of energy bloggers put into all concerned with their blogs.

Essie

p.s. I’m pleased to say that I just applied to be in the “Do Follow” Blog Directory .

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I really ought to have a look at a bottle to see if I am mis-spelling “Excedrin.” But you see I can’t because I buy the generic version (in huge bottles).

I have blown three days of my NaBloPoMo self-set goal of a post per day all month. That does not mean I am going to quit trying, no, because the spirit of the thing is the thing. How is that for a brilliant sentence? Actually I had some good reason to be away as I went right from coming down with and getting over a mini-flu to having strange times on the websites due to an upgrade of WordPress. This affected people for whom I am the webmaster so there was no taking my time letting that hang while I tended to my blog. I’d much rather have been bogging, it goes without saying. That was some pretty frisky behavior on the part of solid, old WordPress. There’s nothing like fixing something you have never encountered before. I like the geeky challenge in the abstract, but it happens at the damnedest times!

I hoped to be more lively, be entertaining, not feeling so dull-witted when I returned to post but I think the best thing is to confess my dull-witted feeling before the world and move on. And I really do have to move on, it’s time to leave but I also have a picture to share.

You may have all seen things like this in the mass media, but I had not seen any still photos, only very smoky TV footage until pretty recently. This is one is from a set of pictures of the San Diego Firestorn, and explains in part why it is called a “firestorm” and not just “a fire.”

I’ll be back soon.

Essie

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