Kindle Forum banner

Have You Posted to Your Blog Recently?

2M views 19K replies 2K participants last post by  William Meikle 
#1 ·
Nathan Bransford's procrastination subforum has a popular thread just like this. It's a friendly place where your spam can be cherished and celebrated.

Today, I blogged about how to write a great author bio, and your favorite gay boys from In Living Color's 'Men on Film' made a guest appearance:

Let's Talk About Bios, Baby. Let's Talk About You and Me.

Okay, your turn.
 
#1,102 ·
#1,104 ·
rexjameson said:
@Craig, having problems commenting on your blog. Sorry if I sent you 2 comments. It didn't say anything about the comment being accepted, under review, or anything. Very weird.
Sorry if there's problems.

I use some very standard tools... WordPress as the blogging solution, plus the Akimet plug-in to weed out spam. And my comments are fully moderated, meaning they don't appear until I approve them.

I have a couple other plug-ins as well, one called CommentLUV, which attempts to identify you by your email and insert a link to YOUR latest blog post, as a nice "thanks for commenting" type of thing.

I'll look into my blog and see what the issue is, and if it's fixable/what I need to do to fix it.

Also, I have noticed WordPress itself is having some troubles lately... esp. with Stats, but it might be affecting comments as well.

EDIT: Both your comments are now approved and live. I suspect the issue has been either the problems WordPress has been going through this last week or so, or maybe there's an option I need to click in Akimet to generate a "Your comment is pending approval" sort of message.

Akimet sometimes categorizes legit comments as spam, even though I can overrule it and rescue them easily. Something about getting a "hashcash value of '0" which is something I don't even pretend to understand.

But here's why I use Akimet: my author's blog is only a few months old, and I've received something like 36 or 38 legitimate comments. Love every one of those!

In the same amount of time, it's blocked over 200 spam comments, most of which are nonsense and/or links to porn sites.

My older blogs have it worse... one that is about five years old has a ratio of 21 legitimate comments to about 36,386 blocked spam comments... almost all of which, again, linked to porn sites.

So that's why I use the Akimet plug-in...
 
#1,108 ·
I posted about learning what I was doing wrong when it came to backstory. The post is in two parts as it got long as I used an example from a work in progress to show the issue and then my fix which will be posted tomorrow.
http://theselfrescueprincess.wordpress.com/
 
#1,111 ·
#1,116 ·
#1,118 ·
Short Story Ebook Tip

If you want your short story ebook sample to be useful, move the bulk of the "front matter" from the front of the ebook, to the back...

-David
 
#1,120 ·
Went off on holiday to the endurance races against which I set a book and picked up 3300 fans who made about 125,000 views of my posts, simply for name recognition.
http://coolmainpress.com/ajwriting/archives/702
You are also welcome to visit the Facebook page I used for the work:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Iditarod-a-novel-of-The-Greatest-Race-on-Earth/193084334057961
and the page on my publisher's netsite where my readers will be able to relive the race with me:
http://coolmainpress.com/iditarod1012011.html
 
#1,122 ·
In science and engineering fields, having another engineer review your work is considered helpful. Pointing out errors, logical problems, etc. in a scientific paper is encouraged, and part of being a research engineer is understanding that these reviewers are trying to help you. That doesn't mean that arguments aren't had, but at the end of the day, you realize that the peer review process is there to help you towards your goal of not only publication but also conveying all of your research to your target audience in a way that is legible and fit for dissemination.

The vast majority of indie authors, on the other hand, appear to be so focused on publication and getting their work appreciated, that they don't realize that their work is not ready to be published and their books might benefit from a peer review process. Because of bad experiences with conveying constructive criticism to other authors, many authors appear to have given up on constructive criticism entirely.

Today's post is about what I perceive as the broken peer review system in fiction.

http://therexfiles.blogspot.com/2011/03/broken-peer-review-process-in-fiction.html
 
Top