• This week I’m going to share some things I’ve learned about blogging. I’m not an expert, but I think that so many of you that visit here don’t have a blog, read many other blogs (at least not cheapo personal ones, but of course maybe you read news etc. similarly) or know some of the funny and interesting things that go into writing and publishing online. Like I said, there are ten thousand “How to write a Blog” experts out there and I’m not one of them. I just thought it’d be fun to share some stories with you.

So one of the things you may have noticed about somegosoftly is that it is free. I’m not going to make any ad revenue over here, and I’m not a niche blog, I’m a girl sharing stories and thoughts with her friends and family. WordPress has a free .com program, and also a .org paid and customizeable option. If I ever graduate, that would be my dream. I could make my own theme- with better fonts and colors and graphics (what you see here allows me the header (the big orange thing at the top) and to put whatever I want however I want on the right column, that’s about it). So free means I have to deal with a few things like that.

Free also means that they take care of a ton of things I’m sure I couldn’t handle on my own. With a .org site, you have to install plugins to make the behind the scenes things run smoothly. With a .com site, they do it for you. For example, there is a spam filter. Believe it or not as of today:

Akismet has protected your site from 34,436 spam comments already,
and there are 4 comments in your spam queue right now.

There have been some pretty funny things in my spam filter from time to time. Here’s two I wanted to share with you.

In this screen shot (click to enlarge), you can see I get a ton of junk, all just trying to throw their own links in the comments so you guys click on them. Imagine if I had to go looking all over my blog to find these things on old blog posts? I love the spam filter…

And this one (on top) made me laugh today – most of the time it’s not even words but sometimes it’s a coherent, albeit moronic, thought:

So, let me know if you need a pink chocolate cell phone.