How time flies. It seems like yesterday when I sat down with my friend Deanna Roy and created this website and blog.
Within 36 hours, the site appeared on the first page of a Google search for my name. Before the end of the first week, I was number two on that page. At the one-month anniversary, I was still camped there below a link to ripoffreport.com and an article about the bad professional practices of a City Group Smith Barney employee in San Diego named Tosh McIntosh. But today, I noticed that bad boy has been shoved down a few places. Maybe if I keep this up, I can push him off the first page and avoid any guilt by association. Attributed to me, not him . . .
This effort remains a personal exercise in commitment to an idea far more than an avenue for interactive communication. In retrospect (and an excess of naivete), I probably expected to draw more visitors, most of whom I thought would be friends and acquaintances doing me a favor. What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly the far-reaching power of the internet would attract some of the strangest knocks on the door.
The first comment waiting for moderation was from Tower Bar Hauling in the UK. It had a couple of links and a portion of a sentence having something to do with a smoking section in the Eiffel Tower with a view. Since that time, the array of such visitors includes online poker, skin creams, pharmaceuticals, hot body boobs, videos of all sorts of unmentionables, toy wagons, Pell grants, physical therapy training, depo insurance, and credit card debt emerging loans, just to name a few.
Comments with nothing but links telegraph themselves as junk. But although some, even from strange sources, might be genuine, I don’t know enough about this to differentiate between comments that are sincerely offered and those that are not. Like:
“Hey your blog design is very nice, neat and fresh and with updated content, make people feel peace and I always enjoy browsing your site.”
“Valuable info. Lucky me I found your site by accident, I bookmarked it.”
“This is an epic post, maybe I should add add this blog to my blogroll?”
“This post is very useful. Thx!
“Great read! You should definitely follow up on this topic!!!”
“Hello there, might I post content to your blog ? Tell me in case you are interested.”
So, in spite of the apparent compliments, I remain cautious. The volume of questionable comments hasn’t yet reached the point of being intrusive. If that changes, I’ll add a plug-in to screen the stuff. In the meantime, the logbooks continue to demand attention, and there’s a lot left to say.
