Darkness. It's a Good Thing.

I'm back for one simple reason. Blogspot allows my Firefox plug-in to render the background black, as I prefer. Wordpress, on the other hand, forces, compels the user to accept a bright, blinding white background. No one in their right mind should stare into the bright lamps of a modern monitor for longer than 2 seconds. I can only conclude that the Wordpress developers are complete buffoons. At any rate, I'm no longer a Wordpress cheerleader. Their editor is excessively complicated and their software is just not easy to use, not well-designed at all. Maybe for 2008, not for 2018.

Adieu

I like some of the posts in this blog, but they are fairly well-hidden by a deluge of not-so-great posts. In the past, I used to curate the blog, deleting posts that I felt did not reflect my higher self, those posts that seem inspired by lower impulses, base fear, greed or anger. Anger seems in plentiful supply now-a-days, served up by the media, and the flames fanned by public figures, who should know better, but they are just there trying to make a living off of the process. It seems to me that communication is a double-edged sword. There is much good that comes, much positive potential, but also there is a negative potential.

At any rate, I am rather bored by this blog and can't imagine anyone really finds anything of merit in it, beyond the occasional google search of a technical conundrum in, perhaps, some old version of Linux, which probably could have been fixed, had they merely upgraded to a newer version or better hardware.

I have ideas for new beginnings and want to leave this one behind, but I will not delete it. Instead, let it remain as a memorial to a period in a life, reflections on various political and social currents of the day.

One thing to bear in mind at all times is Heinlein's law: the two more plentiful substances in the Universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity.

Am I stupid sometimes? Without a doubt. My immune system does not annihilate all microorganisms of Stupidity. I am sure there are colonies thriving within me, and rogue cells, and the like. I regard myself as one example of a large population of an early model, an early breed preceding that which will come after us. Perhaps in the future, if H. Sapiens does not manage to mess everything up, which we do tend to do, perhaps in the future, there will be a better race, but I hope it will also be better from the moral perspective, most of all, and not merely more intelligent, stronger and fitter. The saddest outcome would be a race of supermen that had no scruples, bloodthirsty, cruel geniuses always at each others' throats. It remains to be seen. Hopefully, the process will be taken quite out of the hands of H. Sapiens and guided instead by a higher intelligence of some kind, artificial or else spiritual and natural. That is the prediction I leave with.

Share? Nah.

In the beginning, everyone found sharing and baring on the Internet to be fun. Share information, that others might see fit to offer information in return. Bare one's soul, to receive praise and consolation from an admiring audience.

Now, there are always the dark thoughts, who is making money off my content? When will this site be hacked, and all my personal information stolen? Who is mining this content of mine for nefarious or unfriendly purposes? Who is stealing it and pushing it off as their own?

Of course, on this blog, I have a sophisticated security system that defies anyone to steal my content. The security system is known as Low Quality. I post crap on here, because I know several things, which I will share with the Internets:

1. The first law is that no one cares. This law, people tend to forget, but one should keep reminding oneself that ultimately, no one cares. We are animals seeking to fulfill innate drives, and all the ideas and art are interesting but a bit of something in the background.

2. The second law is that all original content will be stolen, but this becomes more likely the better the content is. If you harbor a desire to feed thieves, sure, post your best work. Your reward will be to see another take credit for all your work.

3. The third law is all sites get hacked, because no one cares about security, people only care about making money. Review law #1 for clarity.

4. The fourth law is that occasionally, crazy nutcases get involved, and will find some way to hurt or harm anyone that they notice, and getting out there on the Internet gets one noticed.

With all these brilliant rewards awaiting you, aren't you just thrilled to post all your best art and ideas on the Internet for everyone? Don't you just get a warm fuzzy feeling about that?

Opinion Repository

This blog serves as a safe repository for my opinions. No one really wants to hear another person's opinions, so the best place for opinions is in a little-noticed blog that nobody reads (except bots). Loudmouths that share their opinions with others unasked aren't terribly popular. No one gives a crap about what other people think.

Now, I think that social media is stupid, by its very design. Place your personal opinions and personal information on a public venue where anybody can scan them to learn all about you. In the first place, people underestimate the number of hostile eyes. They don't realize, people have bad intentions for gathering information. By giving away information, one serves one's enemies.

The beginnings of social media stretch back far into the days of BBSes. Even back in the BBS world, there was danger, but now the danger is ten-fold, because social media encompasses the globe, and everyone is in on it. I have known people to get in trouble on their job because of what they wrote on social media. It is better not to write anything that is attached to a real name. Everything you write or post goes directly to your current and future employers, friends, lovers, foes, co-workers, and so on. It never ends.

Censorship on Facebook and Twitter is a gift. Everyone should be censored. No one should post anything. That is the perfect ideal. Anytime someone is censored, they should write a thank-you note to the censor and mail a check for a hundred dollars. The censor is your friend.

I've never understood why they call it social media. People are sitting at home, alone, in front of a computer screen. How social is that?

Blogging and the Ban

What's the common denominator between NORML and Linux Mint? Neither site's blog posts comments from yours truly. I suspect it is due to the unwelcome baggage accompanying the innocuous comment, namely this url. The censoring editor, whoever that may have been, took a gander at this web site, grew afeared by the opinions, and decided the safest path was to ban the comment or the commenter. There is a prevalent trend now of avoiding controversy by not posting urls. Urls are distracting, first of all, and there is the danger a visitor could leave the site for the site of the url.

In time, I forget I'm censored, or suppose myself mistaken in my assumption, because I'm never sure about anything, unlike Donald Trump. I like to be fair and give second chances, and besides, there are technical reasons a comment could fail to post. With all of that in mind, I try again, months later, typing from one to three paragraphs in a comment, only to encounter the same result, which is the vaporization of my verbosity. I don't mind that I try and try again, wasted effort though it is, because I like confirmation of my assumptions. On each occasion when my comment fails to post, I perceive a door remaining shut, and that is a good reminder, if nothing else. Of course, as with everything, there are advantages and disadvantages. It is easier to move past a closed door than an open one, where one might feel curious enough to look in on occasion to see what is inside and offer assistance and advice. There are those that I can help and those that don't seem to need help. Through the years, I've gotten better at sorting the types and then moving on.

Where I Get My Traffic

You may wonder where Glorious Igor gets all his traffic. Like for instance if you have no life and actually give a hoot about some over-the-hill blogger.

The answer is like I said before, 99% of my traffic is spam and malware sites from Russia that target and want to infect me and probably other bloggers. I don't know whether the KGB is still in business these days or whether it was renamed to some other acronym, but Putin's a bad actor and certainly spreads evil tentacles through cyberspace trying to infect, annoy or otherwise harm perceived and actual enemies.

A dumbass novice blogger or technically unsophisticated blogger would out of vanity click on one of those sites and expose their computer to a malware attack and also reveal their IP address, so that even if their computer is not compromised, their identity is, at least in part. Once someone has an IP address, they have a pretty effective way to determine who is who, unless the visitor is using a proxy or public wireless, etc., but even then, there are trails and there are trails...

I never click on such sites. If I don't recognize the site, to hell with it. I am somewhat interested in the search terms that lead people to my blog. That is perhaps the only valid and useful stat. I know that people read me because of dungeon crawl, solydx, and to a lesser extent other linux thingamajiggies. I know that people could not give a damn about my opinions on philosophy, my stories and my opinions on politics, but I also know that I don't give a damn whether they give a damn, and I write what I please anyway. Sometimes people do read my stuff by accident no doubt and once in a blue moon, I think when someone is under the influence of a substance, they will leave a comment letting me know their reaction. That can be fun, although a lot of comments have spam links or are left solely for the purpose of promoting another site.

99% of Traffic is Spam

There. I've said it.

99% of all traffic to this blog is generated by spam affiliates from Russia and the Ukraine, the unsavory crime-ridden ghettoes of cyberspace, and other locales in eastern Europe and China.

Why they waste their time scanning this blog probably has to do with mentions of Putin and other keywords, but even before I started blogging about that, they were responsible for at least 50% of the traffic.

Self-promoting Symantec did no one any favors by revealing their discovery of Regin and should be fined several billion dollars or nationalized outright. Symantec did not discover the Regin virus until too late, and its discovery is more in the lines of a confession than a scoop. I do not use overpriced Symantec anti-virus, a system resource hog. Why pay for these ineffective antiviruses that cannot detect viruses, when quiet, effective Microsoft Security Essentials (or Windows Defender) is 100% free?

Russia really needs a lot of  cyberespionage directed at it, and if the NSA is not responsible, then the NSA would be irresponsible. Under Putin, Russia represents evil incarnate, and any means used against it are justified, in the same way that any means are justified against the HIV virus or Ebola. Putrid Putin has the same level of morality, philosophy and aesthetic taste as the Ebola or HIV virus, which is to say none at all, and he has the same influence upon the world. To support Putrid and his Putridity is to be aligned with evil. I hope to see the day when Putrid is put in the ground where he belongs. Dump his carcass in the same pit as his soul-mate Stalin. He murdered Russia's democracy.

The Internet's Not Fair

We didn't evolve to use the Internet. Period.

We evolved to live in a world where we could whisper and not usually be heard. A world where we could say disposable, temporary things that then become mere hearsay. A world where we could speak our minds, in other words.

The Internet is unforgiving. It never forgets and it never forgives. This is one excellent reason to strive toward anonymity in one's public postings. Yet one must also remember that if the fancy struck them, law enforcement could unmask an anonymous person in all of five minutes at maximum. Very little effort is required and apparently no warrant these days, when the Bill of Rights is held as an obsolete document binding common folk only and not anyone in government.

So I do feel sorry for the random folks that just don't get the Internet, just aren't prepared for the modern world we live in and just can't deport themselves online with the requisite caution. Working people such as this public school teacher can lose their jobs over ill-considered utterances along the lines of Kill Whitey. Sitting around at home in the evening while in one's cups leads folks to say their heart-felt desires and fears, as has been the case for thousands of years, but today it brings profound social consequences. Perhaps lack of social awareness and lack of discipline is sufficient cause for a teacher to be fired. Teaching has always been a politically and socially sensitive role. Socrates was put to death for less. For my part, I would prefer that the teacher be granted a reprieve in exchange for a public apology, because this could be a learning experience not just for her but for students and teachers around the country as well. Let the teacher be if she apologizes and retracts the offending words, with the understanding that any additional offense will result in termination. I would also recommend that she should get off Twitter, get off Facebook and stay off. It's not hard and would be for the best. What is so great about being connected 24/7? We need to disengage ourselves sometimes.

Through long and painful experience, I have learned to, first of all, moderate what I say, so that nothing said is violent or threatening, unless it be toward the official enemies of the country I live in. In my best state of mind, I don't approve of violent of threatening impulses, but a plant will absorb certain elements of the environment it finds itself in. In the second place, I control which venue of the Internet I express my opinions. A little-known blog is a good sandbox to deposit my perhaps controversial opinions, which nobody cares about in the first place. People aren't terribly interested in other people's opinions, it turns out, unless those opinions coincide with their own. As we conceal certain portions of our body, we also should conceal certain portions of our thoughts in order to get along with others. I want to get along not only with those who think as I do on politics, but with everyone that I possibly can. If a so-called conservative likes me first, then finds out in stages that I am liberal, then I am a good ambassador of the liberal cause, and he may have cause to question his opinions. If first the conservative find out I am liberal, then they may never like me at all, because tribalism kicks in and they view me through a distorted lens.

If You Booze, You Lose

Based on the content of the some of the comments I've received, particularly from Anonymous readers, I am recommending the Freethinkers Alcoholics Anonymous web site to help those damaged and impaired minds kick their addiction to alcohol. Hell is found in a bottle. Remember, if you booze, you lose. Be a winner. Stop drinking, and start Thinking. Turn that frown upside down!

I Am Not a Free Teacher

I did not volunteer to be the free teacher of the Internet. When strangers leave profane comments, I delete. I can think of about twenty reasons that profanity is a bad idea and no reasons why it is a good idea. The English language is wonderfully complex, with many choices of words available. I suggest that individuals with limited vocabulary study hard to expand their vocabulary and browse a couple of books on etiquette. On the other hand, don't take my advice. Ignore it. Let life be your teacher...

Internet Trolls

Slate Magazine has an interesting article on internet trolls. I had an internet troll comment on my blog just this week. He left homophobic insults, expecting me to be outraged, to respond or just to publish his inflammatory remarks. I did none of the above. I deleted his comments without a second thought, grinning at the thought of the time he wasted typing them in. I have experience with the most savage and sophisticated Internet trolls, both as a forum moderator and web site admin.

You know what baby? Igor was not born yesterday. Nothing outrages me and nothing surprises me. I've seen it all. I know that trolls have zero interest in the truth, zero interest in goodness, and maximum interest in discord, evil and chaos. They are sworn to the darkness. They are like arsonists or rapists, except they operate online because it's easier and doesn't expose them to mace, gunfire or arrest. They are fulfilling a little need that isn't getting satisfied elsewhere. Internet trolls are not difficult to identify, understand or deal with. The only question is which can of pesticide to spray on them.

I had a good friend who believed all comments should be published even if they contain death threats or bomb formulas. He was an ultra-libertarian. I suppose that if a rapist came along, he would spread his legs in the name of freedom. That is his prerogative. His site, his rules.

I play by a different set of rules. A stranger that seeks my attention had better unball his fists, wipe the drool from his beard, zip up his trousers and speak in a civil tone of voice. Otherwise, the door is shut, locked and bolted, and if need be, the police are on their way. End of discussion.

Closed Forums

I've noticed an increasing trend of closed forums on the Internet. Some forum admins don't even know their forums are closed. Their registration is broken or inept. Kubuntu's forum is a case in point. I tried eight times to register for that forum. It's like trying to break into Fort Knox. Linuxgames is another web site that one cannot register for.

I do not require registration to post comments on my blog. I even allow anonymous comments. All I require is the solution to a simple CAPTCHA, because that's what Blogger offers me in terms of anti-spam tools. Yes, I still get a spam comment maybe once a month. I delete it. Problem solved. Deleting a spam comment takes maybe five seconds of my time. I don't force my users to squint their eyes at a graphical image of blurred, semi-legible words or numbers. I don't care who they are or what their email address is.

I have some advice for forum admins that are wondering why few people post messages on their forums. The problem is you. You raise the hurdle too high, and most people just aren't going to bother. They will go somewhere else. I do not know why someone would go to the trouble of maintaining a forum and then set a big barrier in place to prevent people from using it. That wastes everybody's time.

When I was a forum admin, and I was one for many years and in many different places, I developed elegant means of dealing with spammers. The most effective method is a blacklist. Mine seems to bounce the majority of spambots now in existence. I regularly add new IP ranges when I notice some bots slipping past my defenses. Traps are helpful too. Captcha works, but I am not a big fan of Captcha, because all too often, forum admins choose an impossible Captcha that humans have difficulty solving. I have grown to hate the complicated versions of Captcha, the ones that use a combination of an image and text. There are better, simpler methods available, such as requiring the solution to a simple mathematical problem, such as, "What is fifteen divided by three plus four, written in numeric form?" The answer is 9, but it is an answer that very few spambots are prepared to offer at this time, and if any ever do, then additional wrinkles could easily be added.

The reality is that your fancy-pantsy semi-legible or illegible Captcha isn't going to stop a determined spammer, who can and does hire humans to complete registration. Outfits like E-lance offer cheap labor--online labor--all over the world for hire for often unethical endeavors.

Bluehost Keeps Subtracting Features

I figured out where all of Bluehost's development goes. They pay their developers to subtract features or make them difficult or impossible to use. There was a time when I could download a log of all site transactions--that stopped about a year ago. Now it's a huge hassle, for no reason other than Bluehost hates its customers. There was a time when I could backup the SQL database. Now that is completely impossible. Bluehost instead gives me the option of a full-site backup, which never completes but just gives me what amounts to an error message saying, "Sorry, but we at Bluehost do not know how to program computers. We're still learning, and you're stuck with us while we're in training diapers!" I see the reason why. Bluehost wants me to pay $20 for the upgrade to "Backup Pro". That is, if I want to back up my web site, I have to cough up more money now. Bluehost is basically sticking a gun to my head and saying cough up the dough or say goodbye to all your hard work. I wish Bluehost would just quit jerking their customers around and leave CPanel alone. All their changes have been negative with consequences for their customers. I am sure of one thing, I will not be renewing with Bluehost whenever renewal time comes around. I will spend ten, twenty, however many hours it takes to backup my database using SQL statements, but one thing is certain, I will not pay even $0.01 for additional captivity with "Bluebeard," the web-hosting pirate. I like a company that does what it says and sticks by its word, not one that pulls dirty tricks out of the blue to rake in more cash.

Namecheap, the Worst Web Hosting Company

Namecheap, Inc. just sent me an invoice for--well, I don't know what. They expect me to pay a bunch of money because, I guess, they need money. I haven't hosted with them in years and my domain is no longer registered with them. I'm not surprised their morals are amiss. Namecheap is possibly the worst web host in existence. Their service was lousy, with unexplained bizarre errors, and their tech support, which I frequently had to use, was foreign, incompetent, unresponsive, and uncaring. I was never so happy as when I abandoned my Namecheap account and moved to a different host, even though it cost me financially to do so. Namecheat is more like it.

The host I recommend is Bluehost, a class act all around. They may be Mormon-owned for all I know, but they do web hosting right, and on the extremely rare occasion that I have needed their tech support, I have talked to real, live American techies on the telephone who know what they are doing. I've never been talking to a Bluehost representative without feeling like they are intelligent and, perhaps more importantly, care. I've used Bluehost for many years. I don't know of any other web host that is as good as they are, although it's true I haven't tried many. Bluehost is even recommended by Wordpress, which I think is very impressive in itself. Their founder runs the entire company on Mac or Linux, scorning Microsoft. I've followed his blog off and on through the years. I doubt we would agree on politics, but as far as computers go, I think we are in agreement.

For the past couple days, my site on Bluehost has become inaccessible around midnight every day without explanation and stays slow until the morning. So I can't recommend Bluehost without reservation. I need to become more cautious about my enthusiasm for things. It seems like the very moment that I praise something, that's when I discover its shortcoming. In the case of Bluehost, I discovered their nightly slowdown about the same time that I renewed for two years. However, I think that this may have been a temporary glitch, possibly due to Wordpress attackers.

If this is the only post any visitor to my blog ever reads, then so much the better. Namecheap caused me hardship with their unexplained errors and incompetent service.

7/30/2013 Update: This post against Namecheap has been attacked on over ten separate occasions by spam comments linking to malware sites that try to infect people's computers with viruses. My policy now is that whenever that happens, this post will be updated to be the front-page, very first post; or else I may post another message about Namecheap and its sleazy, unethical business practices. There's no way that Namecheap can get out of their well-deserved poor reputation. They are going to have to live with it, no matter how many spammers they hire.

Coarse Comments

Sometimes I wonder whether to turn comments off, as some bloggers have already done. Google feeds visitors to just a handful of pages on this blog, for the most part, and those posts tend to concern narrow, technical topics of limited interest to me, such as Blexbot scrapers, or my method for cheating in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or Kubuntu 13.04. I wrote them, true, but they are not subjects that I find to be of great or abiding interest. The popularity of these posts reflects what people tend to search for on Google and also the stringent competition on Google for philosophical topics. Whenever I write on philosophy, I can almost guarantee no one will ever comment on the post. My site finds a little niche in the search engine database only where narrow, obscure and complicated technical topics are concerned, because there are not enough writers in the world on these topics.

The quality of comments is occasionally deplorable. Recently, someone commented that Blexbot programmers "should be hung from a tree," which I deleted, because that is a horrible thing to say, for many reasons. Such sentiments, common though they may be, will not be published on my watch. I do believe in censorship, where threats and insults are concerned, and this was a key matter of disagreement between myself and a former friend of mine. Some words are precursors to (s)words. That swords not be drawn, let such provocations remain unsaid.

Another person commented that "lol cheating is fun," in reply to a hack for a game, which struck me as ungrammatical, evoking the image of the writer sitting by his computer with a long silvery thread of drool hanging from his open mouth and a dozen empty beer cans by his feet. I invest time and thought into my posts, and if a commenter lacks the ability to do the same, then their comment does not need to live.

I've had worse comments, too, like the one from the meth fan who cursed me in several comments, for no apparent reason, until he revealed the irritant by arguing "some people can handle their meth," which may be up for debate, but foul and abusive language curtails all debate and cedes the field to the other side, me. Former meth users, such as musician Rufus Wainwright and comedian Margaret Cho, two prominent celebrities, have come forward and revealed that meth caused them pain and suffering, along with disturbances in their relationships with other people. Although the same can be said for alcohol, this is not quite the case with a substance like marijuana, which is non-toxic and does not harm the human body. Margaret Cho called marijuana "a vegetable, not a drug," an assertion that I think has some merit, because it is certainly not harmful in the same way that other drugs are harmful. One can use too much marijuana, just as one can eat too much asparagus, but the effects are not as serious as using too much alcohol. Alcohol can and does kill its users in a variety of ways, whereas marijuana does not. On the other hand, I do not believe meth is safe for humans, and have said so here, although I allow a possible exception during battlefield tactics, for which meth has a certain historical basis deriving from WW2. For civilians, I find it difficult to imagine any scenario where meth would be useful medicine, although along with other substances, it could possibly enhance the end-of-life experience for those about to die. I dislike advocating blanket rules that cover all situations, because as an engineer, I know that the devil is in the details. There will be cases that are unforeseen, because who among us sees all?

The CAPTCHA Insanity

Dear fellow bloggers, if you don't want comments on your blog, then just say so. I typed a fairly lengthy comment on one prominent Linux blog, only to be confounded by the blogger's spambot-trapping CAPTCHA. He's installed a virtual Fort Knox on his blog. I had to decipher not merely a distorted word, but also an out-of-focus picture with a three-digit number on it. In nine cases out of ten, I could not read either the word or the number. My vision is close to 20/20, but after a dozen failed attempts I conceded defeat. The blogger did not receive my comment and will never know that he turned away his reader. Contrast his policy with my own. I allow anonymous comments and have nothing more than the generic CAPTCHA. I'm not torturing people with cryptograms. Yeah, I receive a spam comment once in a blue moon, especially on that post I wrote about Namecheap (the worst web hosting company in existence today), but I delete them. If I notice an upsurge in spam, then I change my settings to hold new comments in the moderation queue, so that they are not published unless I approve them. That completely defeats spammers. And for the record, I do not censor people who disagree with me. I prefer to argue with them! I do censor profanity and vulgarity, because I don't think it's cute or clever, and that sort of thing can impact my search ranking on Google.

Please knock it off with the crypto CAPTCHA insanity!

Blog Status

I updated my public .htaccess blacklist, in case anyone's interested. I assume someone is, because that post has received 11,000 hits, and they can't all be bots. My guess is that people are using it as a resource to check up on an IP address. I can tell you that from using it, the number of bots getting through declines by about 99%. Some will still get through, but the list grows over time due to my efforts, and those that get through, don't get through for long.

My efforts to monetize this blog via AdSense have fallen flat due to a technical error on AdSense's side. I left a message in their help forum but haven't received any answers. They do not permit ordinary mortals to contact them via email. So I will leave a post on my front page into perpetuity that points the finger at AdSense, which is broken, dead as a doorknob, kaput, game over on my site due to an AdSense bug. I imagine their developers are too busy drinking coffee and eating donuts to work on boring stuff like code.

I like working on code and am pretty good at it, but I am not allowed to do so anymore, because all the programming jobs were given to foreigners. I believe that politicians in Washington, D.C. right now are working on ways to eliminate even more jobs so that they will make a bunch of money on the stock market. The politicians are bribed, bought and paid for by corporations and don't care about America or, much less, American workers.

Trying Ads Again

I decided to try adverts again, because I put a lot of effort into the blog over the years, with a big wonky zero in the way of return. Many people come here and find the information they need to solve the problem at hand and then leave without so much as a thank you. Even if I only make five bucks a year, in ten years time, I'll at least be able to buy some bananas. I like bananas.

Well, it looks like Google Adsense is programmed by morons. Adsense sent me an email saying they put my account on hold until I update my tax info. I'm not permitted to update my tax info because my account balance is below $10. Thus, my sites are on hold forever or until Google hires intelligent programmers. I'm on hold forever.

Blogger Fails in Firefox

I've been using Blogger since 2009. Starting around 2012, Google made ill-conceived changes to Blogger that have made me dread editing my template's html or css. I have given up on maintaining a custom template. The Template and Layout functions of Blogger are horrible. Blogger has crashed Firefox so many times that I've lost count. How does Blogspot set about crashing a computer? Constant and nonstop hits to web sites like twitter, facebook, and google's own. Continual processing for no apparent reason, endless loops just burning the cpu up until 100% of the processor is in use, accomplishing nothing whatsoever. Blogger crashes Firefox on both Linux and Windows systems, I might add. It doesn't matter what kind of computer I use or how much memory I have or how fast my Internet is or which operating system I choose. Blogger will crash Firefox in a heartbeat. It will also bring a computer system to a crawl and force a reboot.

Like most things, Blogger devolves rather than getting better. I suppose Windows doesn't set a good example in that regard. The only thing Google cares about is making money off AdSense, but I can't see running ads on a web site where I cannot even edit the html or css at all without the computer crashing. I certainly can't recommend Blogger to anyone who wants to start a blog, unless they like rebooting their computer every five minutes.

On the plus side, I do like the stock template. It's nice and dark and seems more pleasing to the eye, although I could ask for a bit more color. We have color monitors--shouldn't we use them? Black and white seems, well, a bit of a throwback to the 1970's, when I actually had a black and white television set. It's a sign of age if one can remember watching television in black and white.

I would have preferred the option of selecting and installing a new template rather than being pressured into doing so by a kludgey editor that crashed my computers. Nobody likes being forced to do things.

Confessions of a Blogger

The reality as I see it is that most blogs have no readers--or few, if any. The lion's share of traffic consists of bots. Bots with bad intentions, mostly--content scrapers and hackers angling for derivative traffic. ?!Buzzword?! What is "derivative traffic," igor? Well, pardon my jargon, but derivative traffic is traffic that derives from somebody else's labor--writing, photos, what-have-you. Capiche? There are sites on the Internet that have stolen my content, such as it is, despite what may be regarded as its uncertain value. There are many sites on the Internet that rate my site, analyze my site, give every manner of statistics, and give previews and archival history of my site. All of that comes from bot traffic, from unattended software programs hammering this site day after day collecting data.

On this blog, my best estimation is that 90% of the hits are non-human bots. Of the humans that do hit the blog, most are searching for answers to narrow technical questions, and most hit about a dozen different posts that are the most popular posts on my blog. That would include the Dungeon Crawl Cheat, although I don't know how many Dungeon Crawlers actually bother installing the batch file nowadays. Not many people know what batch files are anymore, and I reckon those that don't would be worried about a virus. The batch file is useful mainly for my own purposes. I can't imagine playing Dungeon Crawl without it. I like to have control over death. Isn't that a natural human desire?

Why so many bots? I get asked that question often, especially when I explain that ninety out of a hundred hits to any given web site are non-human. Well, hackers figured out a long time ago that they could exploit weaknesses in human nature and in search engine technology to drive traffic to their own web sites, where they make money off advertising, install malware, flog some worthless software, or just increase the value of an url that they plan to sell later.

Gee, igor, that sounds like an easy way to make money! How come you don't do it? Ha-ha, I've thought about that and a lot of other easy ways to make money. I won't say I'm above temptation. But even though our government sets such a poor example, I still find some value in ethics. I don't want my legacy to consist of crap web sites and increased distortion and confusion on the Internet. I've always been on the other side of that war and have invested too much effort in fighting bots to change hats now. I suspect the government is behind some of these bots, using them in an effort to monitor and exert some degree of control over the flow of information.