Blogger Headaches: Stat Spam

If you have a Blogger blog and enjoy checking your site stats, you may be seeing a bunch of links popping up from random sites that don't seem (on the face) likely places that would be linking to a genealogy blog.

I won't humor the idiots foisting fake stats on our blogs by naming them, but if you check your Blogger stats, you're likely to see one or two listed. One I get constantly is a goth site, another is an auto injury attorney's site. All of them, in my opinion, suck.

Anyways, just thought I would give a heads-up to fellow bloggers who may make the mistake of clicking on these false referrers, thereby giving the b*tards the view traffic they so sickly crave.

If you totally don't know what I'm talking about, there's a nice post from a Blogger help guru here. For those who do know what I'm talking about, the post is still an interesting and informative one, when it comes to the web's greasy underbelly.

Graveyard Rabbitin' [Personal]

Just wanted to let everyone know that I am rabbitin' up a storm over at my Graveyard Rabbit blog, Graveyard Rabbit of Contra Costa County!

Thanks a million to Terry Thornton for bringing a fun new endeavor into my blogging mix.

Quick Post to Blogger via iGoogle [Quick Tip]

If you use Blogger to wield your virtual pen and muse on all things genealogical, it just got a little easier.

Blogger recently announced the release of the iGoogle Blogger Post Gadget. Meaning as soon as inspiration strikes, you can take it to "print" without even leaving your iGoogle page.

The gadget is a little stark (I'm using it right now). There's no preview, no keyboard shortcuts for things like formatting and anchor links, and no auto-fill when you tag your entry. There's also no access to advanced publishing options like timeset publishing.

Overall, great for a quick jot, but not so hot for more in-depth blogging that requires a more robust feature set. Worth a try though, as anything that makes getting those blog posts out quicker is great, especially if you use your blog as a notepad for research and ideas.

This all reminds me... since iGoogle's massive redesign, we're due for another Site Review on what's new and great (or not so great) about this latest revamp. Keep your eyes peeled for that post coming soon!

Covering Your Copyright Back [Site Review]

If you are a genealogist and blog, or if you have any content online which you consider to be proprietary, you may be interested in a few websites which aim to provide easy searching for misuse of your own content on sites across the internet.

CopyrightSpot.com and Copyscape.com are both simple enough to use; simply enter the URL of a page of content you would like to search for (you can also enter the address for an RSS feed), hit search, and the sites report back with sites that have duplicated your text.

No News is Good News?

I used my blog as a trial:.



Both sites got some results, which was impressive, but on a usefulness scale they scored pretty low. Particularly, CopyrightSpot listed a variety of sites which graciously list my blog on a blogroll; as these blogrolls tend to include a snippet of new posts as they scroll through the roll, they come up on the copyright search as potential content crime!



Copyscape came up with similar results, although from some different sites. Because the duplicated text in these cases were dynamic (i.e., they scroll through the roll and then disappear), click-throughs on the results, which would typically highlight occurrences of duplicated text, only resulted in a message saying the sites "appear to have removed your text":



The sites work well enough for what they purport to do (the search engines obviously have no way of delineating real plagiarism from quotes or blogrolls), so are worth checking out for a quick check on how (or if) your content is being used by someone else on the web. In this case, no news definitely is good news!

[Via: MakeUseOf.com]