Raoul Pop

This weekend, I (or rather my photos) reached an important milestone. I/they crossed over 100,000 views. That’s amazing as far as I’m concerned. In the relatively short span of four months, I got to the point where I’m getting more than 1,000 views per day, and have now reached 100,000 views. It was just back in October that I passed 10,000 views, and here I am today.

I’m really happy with the progress I’m making, and even more than that, I’m happier that my photographic skills are visibly improving. I’ve learned so much in these past four months, and have benefited so much from interacting with fellow photographers, that my success is doubly sweet.

This next “milestone” is somewhat dubious, but it’s worth mentioning. A few days ago, I reached over 30,000 spam comments, right here on my blog. Yeah, it’s disgusting. But, none of them made it to the live site. All of them got caught by Akismet, my WordPress spam prevention plugin. I featured Akismet in this post I wrote at the start of January, and I meant every word I said about it. The only improvement I could make to it is a CAPTCHA. I find that more and more spam comments make it to the Moderation Queue instead of the Spam folder these days. Spammers are either using fresh batches of IP addresses or finding ways to sneak past Akismet’s spam filters. Still, NONE of them make it to the blog.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to reiterate my very ardent wish that ALL spammers (in particular sploggers, spam commenters and feed scrapers) be flogged publicly. I would gladly volunteer to perform this duty myself. I think they all deserve it for poisoning search engine results, making blogs uglier, decreasing my content’s rank, and littering the Internet. I don’t know how likely this is to happen, but a fellow can dream, can’t he?

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