The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Somebody has been marking my comments at others’ blogs as “spam,” making me incommunicado where WordPress sites are concerned. The WordPress support guy used the term “users”—plural—which means more than one person doesn’t care to hear from me.
So, I guess I’ll stand down off commenting. Too bad: it takes some of the fun out of blogging. But it does consume a lot of time that I ought not to be diddling away, particularly if comments go directly to the trash. Oh well.
Several sploggers have been harvesting posts from Funny about Money. Most recently, a site called “The Retired Millionaire” has been reproducing passages from Funny and monetizing them. I have contacted Adsense to let them know that if they don’t bring a stop to the use of their service to steal money from me by using my work as an advertising base, they soon will be hearing from my lawyer and from the U.S. Attorney General, and to instruct them to remit all revenues generated from my content to me.
You’ll notice a new addition to the blogroll atFunnyand atThe Copyeditor’s Desk:Exposing Sploggersis a group of WordPress bloggers who are banding together to fight back. They propose to track down the owners of offending groups and to develop various ways to force them to remove members’ copyrighted material from their sites and to stop the wholesale theft. Exposing Sploggers also lists several other sites with information and resources, which you should know about.
It is against the law to use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, and profiting off that material is actionable. I am not above filing lawsuits against anyone I can catch in the act. No © symbol or copyright notice is required to establish your rights in your work, nor is it necessary to register your work with the Library of Congress to establish rights. Copyright applies to all reproducible hard-copy, film, and electronic material, and the law protects such material from the instant it is created. If you would like to know more about this, my chapters on copyright and on libel in The Essential Feature were vetted by an internationally prominent publishing lawyer, who pronounced them the best summaries in layman’s language that she had seen.
If you’re a blogger, I urge you to join Exposing Sploggers and work actively to bring a stop to theft of your work. In some cases, copy pirates have ripped off entire blogs, so that Google searches go to the thief’s site instead of to the real blog. Obviously, if you are trying to monetize your site, these crooks are stealing from your pocketbook. Even if all the slimeball steals is your ideas and your creativity, you should care. You should care very much.
It took us a while to obtain and then ensconce our new domain name at The Copyeditor’s Desk. We’d expected to apply the domain name to the site shortly after we started it, but somehow we didn’t get the process done until after we had picked up a number of readers, who now probably think we’re lost and gone forever.
If you’re an unmoored reader of The Copyeditor’s Desk, here’s its URL: http://thecopyeditorsdesk.com
Please come on back! Or, if you haven’t seen it, c’mon over. Tina just posted a squib on getting scholarly work published; in the next day or two, I’m planning to write on the progress of starting a small business. To our amazement, our little enterprise has already generated as much work as we can handle — if we get any more assignments this month, we’ll have to farm them out. We’ll let you know at that site how we did it, what worked, and what apparently didn’t work.
Very nice. I got FeedBurner ensconced on FaM, having discovered an error in the HTML snippet’s code and having persuaded a friendly IT guru to fix it, with sterling results.
Further observation, however, left the Beloved Proprietor of this website wondering. First, it became clear that the vaunted statistics we were to enjoy applied (duh!) only to those who elected to opt viewing the site in favor of having posts delivered to them by e-mail. Second, it quickly became clear that widespread complaints to the effect that stats were in error are probably correct.
Why, the Royal We asked Ourself, why are We doing this? The answer was simple: We don’t know. WordPress’s stats a) provide everything FaM needs to know and b) actually work, without requiring that one navigate to a different site. So, we decided to delete the Feedburner site, here and at The Copyeditor’s Desk.
The Copyeditor’s Desk, btw, now has its own domain name and concommitant URL: thecopyeditorsdesk.com.
Please feel free to subscribe to either or both(!), using your own choice of RSS feeds.
Funny about MoneyatiWeb is down for the count, the Mac presently residing in Apple’s ICU. I’ve been planning to migrate funny to WordPress for a while, anyway, so this little headache presents an opportunity to get moving on that project.
It’s huge, and I’m still not convinced I want to do it. The amount of work involved is daunting–just capturing most (but not all) of the posts from the Net into Word takes about an hour for each month’s worth, and Funny has been around for seven months. Once I have the copy out of the Macintosh, it still has to be stripped of all the weird Microsoft tags and reformatted for republication. Augh!
Then I have to figure out how to migrate the domain name to WordPress, a complicated-sounding process,and then pay for the privilege, one that was included in the cost of .Mac. I wonder if this is worth the effort.
WordPress has some huge advantages, foremost among them that it’s accessible from any platform. With iWeb you have to be on a Mac, a killer of a restriction, since I can’t afford to own more than one Mac. Then you have to set up the Mac so that iWeb will access your site, and that is something I have no idea how to accomplish.
On the other hand,inserting graphics in an iWeb page is extremely easy, which can’t be said of WordPress; there’s no problem with pasting copy from Word into iWeb; and you can design your own page without having to know CSS. WordPress wishes to charge you if you put ads on your site; there’s no charge for that at Apple. While Apple charges for the use of its servers, in addition to space for your website you also can back up your data there. Alotof data. Taken together, all those are almost as big as the accessibility issue. Bigger, maybe… I don’t much care for the WordPress template I’ve selected, but I don’t see anything else that makes me happier. Plus–speaking of access–you don’t have to memorize passwords to get into your iWeb pages.
So the decision is not yet taken. If the Mac can’t be fixed, obviously I’ll have to go to WordPress. But if it comes back up…well. This is certainlynotthe path of least resistance.
Turns out there’s an easy way to strip code out of word-processed text before pasting it into a WordPress page. On the extended toolbar there are two icons: one with a little W and one with a little T. Little W is for pasting from Word; Little T is for pasting as plaintext. Click on either, and a box comes up, inviting you to Ctrl-V into the box. From there you can click “Insert” and WordPress automatically strips out the annoying code and pastes it into your post.
Very nice.
Inserting images from the Mac is a pain in the tuchus, though, because you have to navigate the high seas of iPhoto, a very clumsy process indeed. And you have to rename the photo so it has no underscores, unusual characters, or blank spaces. Since my camera saves photos with a strange numerical code that always includes an underscore, this means any photo to be posted has to be renamed and then, from inside WordPress, searched out in the horrible iPhoto, to whom “organize” has a meaning known only to alien beings. In iWeb, you can simply copy and paste into your post, a much simpler process. Infinitely simpler.
If I can copy and paste seven days’ worth of posts each evening, it will take me 28 days to move all the existing copy over. Not counting new posts. Argh!
Despite having waffled back in the stay-with-iWeb direction, at the moment I’m feeling peeved at Apple again. Discovered the reason all the cute little beeps and toots the Mac emits at various actions have stopped is that upgrading to OS X 5.x.x put the kaibosh on the sound function. It now will output only through the headphones. No option to output sound through the built-in speakers exists. There’s a way to fix this, from what I could tell online, but its too arcane for me. I had no idea what the guy was trying to say as he described the process on his site.
So I’m again figuring when this hard drive gives up the ghost, it’ll be back to the PC for moi. And if I wanna keep blogging, I’d better be in a Web-based program by then.