July 7, 2014
Dear Reader,
Announcement one:
For whatever reason everyday for a month I’ve gotten email notifications of a comment to approve or not on my blog. I scroll the comment with anticipation before realizing it is spam. Either wordpress.com dropped the ball on their filtering system, or spammers outsmarted them.
I decided to hell with comments, I don’t get many anyway. WordPress.com makes it tricky to block comments. Typing my concern into google helped. On the settings feature I unchecked ‘allow comments on new posts,’ and I checked ‘after 14 days disable comments.’ Most of my spam was from older posts. Saving those two setting features should work. And it won’t delete the real comments I received.
I’m sure experts recommend allowing all comments, but who wants to read spam? I’m not allowing any future comments on this blog. People can still email me since my that’s listed on the about page.
Announcement two:
I read The Circle by Dave Eggers. I learned a few years ago that fiction should not be moralistic. Even though Dave Eggers is too blatant with his viewpoint the topic of emerging technology is timely. I recommend my library friends read it because the themes of intellectual freedom, and privacy with social media. The book questions if all technology should be blindly accepted. A lot of social media has invasive potential on individual rights and privacy.
In addition to the conspiracy theme of the book, it highlights how social media changes everyone’s interaction to each other. I decided that I’m going to use social media less. I will continue to blog on a weekly basis, but compulsive regular posts hurt my cause. I’m calling it the dork factor. No one can possible be interested in everything I do. I’ll blog once a week, and post on facebook when I got something to say, but I’ll consciously avoid posting daily.
Thanks for your time,
Matt Allison, founder of mallisonwhat.com
Mallisonwhat's Blog 