Preventing Blog Comment Spam

Spammers don’t just hit email – they also know how to add comments to blogs.  Several of my blogs/podcasts have had Spam comments added recently.  One way to reduce this is to enable “Show word verification for comments.”  That will cut out the machine-generated Spam, since anyone wanting to add a comment will have to type in the word to verify.  I’ve just enabled it, so it’ll be interesting to watch.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on using Word to post to Blogger, I’m favorably impressed.  It works great – even when you have several blogs.  Really a nice interface.

Posting to Blogs from Word

Posting to Blogs from Word

I found that Blogger has now developed a tool bar for Microsoft Word that allows you to write your blog post in Word and then publish it from Word.  

This sounds like a good idea to me, especially since that when I’ve copied things out of Word and pasted them in Blogger I get all kinds of codes along with the text – all the stuff carried over from Word.  I spent quite a bit of time earlier in the week cleaning up some things I wanted to post – hopefully this will alleviate that.  It also has the advantage that you can compose posts and then actually post them when you’re ready.

Hope it works as well as I hope it will.

Caregiving Class and more

My daughter Sara and I are teaching a 5-week class for caregivers at church, so I've started a new blog (Caregiving Notes) where I'm putting information that we present in class along with other things I run across that might be useful to caregivers. We'll even see if we can't get Sara to add some things as well.

Posts to this blog have slowed down recently due to the activity with the Making Career Changes blog and doing the podcasts. But as some of that smoothes out, I'll get back to some more regular posts here.

Mom's Paints

One of the things I ended up with after Mom died was her painting supplies. Painting was something Mom took up after she retired, and became quite passionate about in the 90's. The painting supplies were packed up in a number of boxes , and have been stored in my storage unit.

Years ago I did some watercolors, and have always intended to start painting again. Last week we were in Michaels so that Eloise could buy some more knitting yarn and I picked up a book on oil painting which kind of got the juices flowing. So yesterday I went to the storage unit and retrieved the boxes of Mom's painting supplies.

I really hadn't paid that much attention to what was there when I put the stuff in storage, so it was an interesting adventure to go through it all yesterday -- and it brought back a lot of memories as well, which was good.

There are two fishing tackle boxes filled with paints -- one for oils and another for acrylics. There are about 100 tubes of oils and probably 50 of acrylics. Then there's a box of 50 or so brushes. Another box contains about 10 canvases and five or six frames. More than enough supplies to keep me busy for a long time. And worth a considerable amount of money if you've ever priced good brushes or paints.

What was even more fun was finding a couple of new things Mom had painted. We have a number of her works already, but finding these was special. One was a water color she had done in 2000, likely the last thing she painted since she never set up the oils after moving to Houston. Another was an unfinished oil of bluebonnets -- but actually it's close enough to finished to go ahead and spray and frame. And there's also an underpainting of a Lilly (all the detail done in grey tones). She did several of the Lilly, and it's interesting to see one in an intermediate stage.

The boxes also included the books that Mom used along with her lessons to learn to paint. I started reading them last night, and it provided a lot of insight into the methods she used. There's also her notebook with her notes from her lessons.

So it was a good afternoon of discovery and remembering as I start down a path of following in Mom's footsteps.

Achieving First Page Listing on Search Engines

My new blog, Making Career Changes, achieved first page listing on both Google and Yahoo within a week for the key word "making career changes," one of the web's most often searched for terms.

My purpose in writing the Making Career Changes blog is several fold:

• Viral marketing for my coaching business -- Mapmaker Coaching,
• Providing a respository of information for people who attend the Job Seeker's ministry I work with,
• Processing what I am learning as I help people with career change and job searching.

It is also an experiment in determining if what I think I have learned about the power of blogging and podcasting in creating web presence is correct. I noticed that with my other two podcasts, Drawn2Jesus and Retire2Serve, that both got a lot of attention from the search engines. I attribute that to the fact that there are a number of web directories for podcasts, and that listings on podcast directories carry weight with the search engines because many not only provide a link, but reproduce the textual content of the podcast post -- the show notes. Therefore, in addition to traditional text entries in the Making Career Changes blog, I'm including occasional podcast entries, and have listed the podcasts on several of the major directories.

The experimental results seem to be a confirmation of my thesis. We'll have to see if that translates into success in viral marketing.

Faith and Loss

Earlier this week I wrote about Faith and Job Loss on my Making Career Changes blog.

I wrote it about job loss, but I was thinking as I wrote it that the discussion really applies to any kind of loss we suffer as Christians -- death, health, etc.

Again and again through the years I've seen people who have suffered painful losses persevere, maintain their trust in God and his provision, and in the process allow God and his power and accomplishments be seen. It's counterintuitive to our world that God's power and accomplishments would be shown through people suffering loss rather than through people whose lives are going great with no apparent difficulties. Yet those that stand out in my memory as amazing examples of faith, and there are many, are are people who have suffered painful losses and persevered through their trust in God. While I don't like it that bad things happen to people of faith, I'm blessed again and again by seeing their faith, and by seeing the power of God working in them.

The "Making Career Changes" Blog

I have begun a new blog specifically aimed at helping people successfully make career changes.

Helping people navigate career change has occupied a lot of my time and energy during the past several years since my early retirement from Texaco, both in leading a between jobs ministry at my local church and through my life coaching practice. Actually, career development was part of my vocation at Texaco, where I was involved with recruiting, screening applicants, managing the hiring process, and serving as a resource development manager, as well as holding line management positions. It's a subject and an activity that I have a lot of passion for, and one in which I have developed a level of expertise.

In trying to help people one-on-one during the past few years, I've learned a lot about the process. There is no lack of information about the process -- in fact, the problem seems to be that there may be too much information spread around in bits and pieces. It's easy for someone between jobs to be overwhelmed by what they read, what they're told, and what they feel. There's also a lot of misinformation -- things that push job seekers in wrong directions and lead to defeating behaviors.

My goal is to try to put together information that will be helpful, encouraging, easy to understand, and which will debunk some of the myths out there. If you know someone facing career change, be sure to point them to the Making Career Changes blog.