Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

1. I started laughing when I saw, on Amazon’s listing for Irish Spring soap in bulk, a price “used and new.” Hey! You can buy used soap at Amazon! Woo-hoo!

2. Don, in the back office (as opposed to this, the front office), is chuckling: he’s reading my blog. In the same RV. Not six feet away.

3. Raven’s Roads just got upgraded to PR4 by Google.

Image derived from supermoving under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

There’s no need for me to post BlogRush’s link: it’s getting enough buzz as it is. I did install it, though–for about five minutes. If you were quick, you might even have seen it.

Here are five good reasons why I won’t be installing the BlogRush widget any time soon. (more…)

Today was kind of fun. The book contest made it to The Contest Blogger and thus the little squareses have been full of new faces and icons. There are still a few days to enter to win some books. What’ve you got to lose apart from a large number of hours reading some good books?

I think I’m done with the new design. (more…)

I find it soothing once in a while to dive headlong into a creative project, even when I have other things to do. When I saw the Gridlines theme it was round about the same time that I realized the current theme I was using was all over the place. I would see the same theme two, three or more times a day just in an hour’s surfing. It’s a lovely theme, and that’s why, but I wanted something a bit more unique.

I already miss having all the time in the world to do this kind of thing, but for all that, I appreciate what I can do. (more…)

I can’t see straight any more, so it’s time to stop.

Still to-do:

1. Add archive page
2. See if I can get the popular posts plugin to work (or maybe you could recommend one that you use?) (more…)

blogosphere game fairly: they do their own thing but don’t hesitate to help each another out. But taking advantage of generosity like this bothers me. It bothers me because it’s just plain greedy, and it’s rude.

I’m one of the old-fashioned ones.

I’ve had something on my mind, these last few days. It started when I introduced the no-nofollow plugin and immediately got at least two comment spammers. The plugin allows links in comments to be counted by such sites as Technorati and to count towards Google’s page ranking, but it also allows people to cynically show up just to increase their ratings. Others put a keyword in place of their name, which means they get traffic generated from that keyword.

Mostly, people here seem to be playing this blogosphere game fairly: they do their own thing but don’t hesitate to help each another out. But taking advantage of generosity like this bothers me. It bothers me because it’s just plain greedy, and it’s rude.

I’m one of the old-fashioned ones. (more…)

Gravatars are “globally-recognized avatars”.

They’re a way of tying a little image to your email address and, on suitably set up blogs (like this one, hint! hint!) they will appear in, say, comments and various favorites.

Why not grab one? It’s a dead easy setup and sort of fun to see pictures instead of generic icons.

I installed a different nofollow program–this one means you must post a certain number of times before your link starts to “follow.” This will a) catch link spammers (both the automated and the human sort) and b) give those of you who comment regularly a bit more of a reward.

ETA: I’ve just had my first link spammer: someone who comes to post on my blog specifically to increase their page rank. This sucks. If I suspect that anybody is doing this, then I will simply unapprove all comments by that person, and if they persist, then I will happily consign their entries to Akismet spam. I’ve also changed the specific number of times to post to a more general “a certain number of times.”

This update also gives me the opportunity to wave at A Gentleman’s Domain. I explained to him what trackbacks were and he realized he’d never had one. So, if they are enabled on his site, this site should send him one. Read the Thursday Thirteen about the socks. It is quite funny.

The last few days, I have been adding some bells and whistles pretty cool tools to my site. I thought that you might like to know about them. In a week or so I will write another post with links to all the different plugins I use; I want to let them run for a while to see if I need to make any changes.

Changes

1. I’m definitely into building a community and making this a two-way blog. Therefore, I have added “Recent Comments”, “Most Typative in August” (i.e. top commenters), and “Recent Trackbacks.” All of these include your url, if you give one, so it gives you an extra point on your own quest for more links. I also have the blog set up to send trackbacks where possible. I have been playing with little tiny ravens. ;)

2. To give people something else interesting to read, I put in a “related posts” plugin. This is an idea I ganked from Ordinary Folk. Unfortunately, I had a slight nightmare with tagging and some posts are incorrectly tagged. I am slowly going back and fixing those. Please understand that if a post “relates” to something very unrelated, I’m not cynically trying to suck you in. I just made a boo-boo. ;)
   
   The tags are not public; this will stop me creating a Google disaster. I may put up a tag cloud page sometime if I think it might be fun. ;)

3. I just installed the “nofollow” plugin, with a one-day delay. In other words, comments you make on posts count as links, for the increase of your linky goodness scores after one day. The one day gives me time to delete spams from Akismet. I’m waiting for the blogroll code.
   
   I am also part of the “You comment, I reply” movement.

4. I added “subscribe to comments” to comments. If I happen to reply to you individually, you should already be getting an email. However, in cases where you just said “cool” (for example) and I simply want to acknowledge you, I’ll probably be doing some “reply to several people at once” comments. Therefore, checking the box will let you get your acknowledgement (but it means you will also get notifications of every comment posted after yours.)

5. I installed “Buy me a cuppa” mostly because I thought it was cute and funny. It’s like a tip jar.

6. I installed a different “add me” widget. This one makes it easier to grok which services you’re recommending the article to (Technorati, Digg, etc.) It’s also smaller.

7. If I got it right, my feeds should now go out “full.” I still intend to put the “read more” cut on longer posts for the front page, to keep that a sensible size. Even if I do that, the feeds should go out in full format. I think that’s better.

8. Gravatars. You might notice little blue icons or custom icons next to the lists of commenters etc. These are called Gravatars–you can give yourself an icon (symbolic picture) which can be used on any site that has the gravatar plugin. It recognizes you based on your email address (and, I think, a cookie.) Click here to get a gravatar. I have been amusing myself by noticing how generic icons are slowly being replaced by little tiny pictures.
   
   I like little tiny pictures.

9. I added widgets for MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. It is sort of fun to see, visually, some of the people who stop by. Today I found a third service which I promptly lost, but when I find it again you’ll probably see a third box unless it starts slowing things down too much.
   

I think that’s it!

I’d like to recommend this plugin.

It adds a little icon next to each comment and if you click on that it puts you in the comment form but specifically tied to that comment. This means that if you reply directly to your reader, she or he gets an email with the reply and doesn’t have to either keep on checking or reading everyone’s comments on that point, which can be many, and none relevant to that one reader.

It also plays nicely with that same reply-to-comment plugin. It doesn’t appear to work with nested comments, though.