Tag: blogging

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The Blood KnightSorry I haven’t posted much here lately. The main reason is that I’ve been re-reading Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series before picking up The Blood Knight. (I’ve also been spending time at the Comic Bloc Forums discussing the Flash relaunch.)

Re-reading The Briar King and The Charnel Prince both followed the same pattern: I read half of the book over the course of the week, then finished it on the weekend. I started the new book, The Blood Knight on Saturday morning and basically spent the weekend on the couch reading. About ¾ of the way in I realized acutely that, no matter how fast I read it, there would still be one book left when I finished.

It’s funny, when I first read The Briar King I didn’t like it much. I think mainly I was expecting something less steeped in medieval Europe (based on The Waterborn and The Blackgod). I picked up The Charnel Prince anyway, and liked it much better, and quite enjoyed The Briar King when I reread it.

One thing that’s unusual about this series is that there’s no Merlin figure. No Gandalf to show up in the first few chapters and explain what the Ring is, who wants it, and what has to be done with it. No Moiraine to explain who the Forsaken are, and what it means to be the Dragon Reborn. All the characters are pretty much figuring things out as they go. And they make mistakes—pretty nasty ones in some cases.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Greg Keyes and Neil Gaiman are the only authors whose work I will buy in hardcover, sight unseen. Looking at Keyes’ website, I realized that I actually own a copy of every book he’s published. There aren’t too many authors I can say that about.

Only 1½ years until The Born Queen…

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Remember how LiveJournal, TypePad, and related sites were down the other day? The official line was that “Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack.”

It turns out that the DDOS wasn’t aimed at 6A, LJ, or any other part of their network. It was aimed at Blue Security, an anti-spam company, who decided to re-route their web traffic to their blog—a blog hosted on TypePad. So instead of their own site going down, it took out Six Apart’s entire network of millions of bloggers.

Classy move, guys.

I do admire Six Apart’s restraint in not pointing fingers themselves. If it had been my site (though in a way, I suppose it was, since I’ve got an LJ blog, even if I don’t update it very often), I would have been royally pissed off.

Sure, Blue Security didn’t launch the attack—but they did choose where to redirect it. Maybe they thought Six Apart would be able to handle it. Maybe they thought the attackers were targeting them by IP and not domain name. Maybe they were panicked and didn’t think. Maybe they thought things through, but 6A got bitten by the now-all-too-familiar law of unintended consequences. They could easily have pointed their domain name at empty IP space, or to localhost. Redirecting it to a third party was less like deflecting a punch and more like the “Do it to Julia!” moment in 1984, or the classic joke, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.”

(via Spamroll)

Update: Additional articles at Computer Business Review and at Netcraft, and a Slashdot story.

Update 2: According to Blue Security, the DDoS was not targeting their website by name, and the DDoS didn’t attack their blog until after they had already redirected the website. So it looks like it was less a case of them redirecting the attack and more a case of the attackers chasing them.

*Sigh* Must remember to collect all facts before engaging in righteous anger.

Update 3 (May 9): Apparently “all the facts” as reported by Blue Security don’t add up… (via JMason)

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Molly Holzschlag writes about the Accidental Blogger Effect—what happens when you post something offhand that somehow ends up as a prime search result, leading to that offhand remark taking on a life of its own. I made a comment about how Another One Bites the Dust turned into a 3-year-long thread about Frosty, Heidi and Frank, but it occurs to me that the often-viewed Fallen Angel cover art I posted about last week is the same phenomenon.

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It’s hard to believe, but it’s been three years since the first post on this blog. I still think of myself as being kind of new at this, but at this rate, we’ll be in the old guard. Or at least the new old guard. 😉

Topics have shifted around. It started out as a personal blog with Sci-Fi overtones, and slowly took on more of a focus on humor, comics and tech. Posts in the early days were divided 60/40 between me and Katie. These days it’s more 90/10, partly because we’ve both shifted a lot of the personal stuff over to LiveJournal. Strange photos started showing up very early on, making up what are now the Strange World, You Must Be Mistaken, and Signs of the Times categories.

The site started on B2 and moved to WordPress when the project forked.

Even the title is subtly different. It started out as “Ramblings,” with a “K²” icon to the left. After a while, the icon became part of the title, and it’s been known as “K-Squared Ramblings” for most of those three years.

According to the WordPress Dashboard, we now have 912 posts and 961 comments Continue reading →

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Making the rounds this week: IO Error’s critique of “nofollow”, the link add-on that was supposed to stop comment spam, but hasn’t even slowed it down. He suggests that it was never intended to: it was simply a sneaky way to lower blogs’ rankings in search engines.

Now, I don’t have a problem with the idea of being able to tack a note onto a link and tell Google not to treat it as an endorsement. But the way it’s been implemented in most blog software—blindly applying it to all links in comments—is overkill. Legitimate, useful, interesting comments should factor into the resource’s ranking, for all the reasons IO Error provides.

Where rel="nofollow" does help with comments is in devaluing the spam that slips through your filters overnight. If a search engine bot happens to crawl your page between the time the comment hits and the time you see it and remove it, nofollow will at least make the spam less effective. Of course, you only need it active for a day or two (depending on how often you check). Once you’ve cleaned the junk out, you want what’s left to get the rank boost it deserves. I’ve been using the No Nofollow plugin to do this since March.

In short, I don’t think that rel="nofollow" is a bad idea in itself. It’s just being used the wrong way.

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Since joining BlogExplosion, I’ve noticed something interesting about surfing it. First, I tend to see many of the same blogs over and over. Second, when I’m actually reading these blogs, by the time I log out all my new credits have been used up by people looking at mine. This leads me to this conclusion:

The only people who see this site through BlogExplosion are the people who are logged in at the same time I am.

If you have a routine where you spend a half hour on BE every evening, or 1 hour every Tuesday, or whatever, chances are the same people are seeing your blog over and over again.

Just to experiment, a few days ago I took 10 minutes late in the day and logged in from work. I don’t think I saw a single familiar blog.

So what’s the answer? Vary your BE routine as much as possible. Don’t assign your spare points when you surf, pick a random time, log in for 1 minute and just assign them. Make a banner and assign points to it the same way. Talk someone into signing up with you as a referrer, and get a share of their points.

Otherwise, you’ll get the same audience every time… and chances are they’re either regular readers by now or they’re tired of seeing you.

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In hopes of bringing in some more readers, I signed up with BlogExplosion yesterday. I’ve spent some time last night and tonight surfing through their system, and I’ve seen some interesting blogs, some boring blogs, and some infuriating blogs. (Politics… why did it have to be politics…)

If you’re coming here through BlogExplosion, feel free to skim for 30 seconds or explore as much as you want. This is the group-blog of a twentysomething married couple in California who enjoy computers, sci-fi and fantasy, and comics (OK, one of us likes comics). Each of us has other, non-blog stuff online as well.

Enjoy your visit!

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