Do Follow

I was over at Dirt Digger's blog, "Blunders with shoots, blossoms 'n roots", the other day and noticed an icon I hadn't seen before. "Spread Link Love Do Follow," it said. What in the world? So I clicked on the "Read More" link. Yes, I'll follow any link given a chance, even ones I have no clue as to what they are and who doesn't want to spread the love?

It turns out our wonderful blog hosters automatically put the "nofollow" HTML attribute on our comments. I had no clue. I don't go in and read the source code from my blog very often. For those that are clueless to what I'm talking about, "nofollow" tells the robots that spider the web to not follow the link, but more importantly it means your link is considered not important and isn't counted in calculating your ranking on search engines.

They do this to try to keep spammers out. They figure if spammers can go up in search engine rankings by posting, then there will be a lot of spam out there just waiting to happen. Does it? I doubt it. People still have to type in that annoying list of letters to post a comment. And I have power. Muhahahah! (I was actually at an evil laugh contest the other day and the guys can do it so much better than the girls, but in print we are all the same). I can delete any comment that I don't like. I haven't used it yet, but I can.

Also I take umbrage to them calling my commenters unimportant. I love my commenters. So from now on you will be counted. I've changed my template to get rid of that tag. Now if I could only figure out how to change my comments page, I can add an icon.

Working on my Blogroll

I've been working on my blogroll like I promised. I decided just to use Blotanical's widget for the blogs that I follow there. I'm using it since it doesn't take up a ton of space; it is easy to drop in; and it updates itself if I update my Faves (thanks Stuart). There are a few on this list that haven't posted much recently. I'm not going to remove them yet since we are under a blanket of snow and no gardening posts seems reasonable right now.

I'm still working on my non-Blotanical blogroll. I chose to put in a drop down list so you won't have to scroll down terribly if you want something else from my sidebar. Do people like that choice? Do you prefer to see them all at once? I personally hate scrolling so try to minimize that. If I could put my labels in a drop down list I would.

As to the blogs on the list, I'm trying to keep to the people that have been keeping up with posting, at least up to the end of the gardening season. Right now it is just alphabetical and as you can see I'm hardly done.

My Rant About Other Bloggers

I have a beef with some of you bloggers out in blogland. My husband has been traveling for work a lot recently. No I'm not blaming THAT on you, but my husband being gone leaves a lot of my evenings free to waste time on the internet. What do I do (besides studying up on tomato breeding)? I play "Follow the Blogs".

The game involves taking one of my favorite blogs, then following a few links from their favorite blogs, then following a few links from their favorite blogs, then.... Well you get the idea. It is fun to see what kind of blog pops up. Some are funny, some are serious, but mostly they are good to read. I do however have issues.

The first issue is that I don't know who these people are. Some don't have "about" pages and some people put their about pages on the bottom - after I've had to scroll down pages and pages. Really I'd love to see the photos of your pets, but I'd like YOUR blub above theirs. I tend to follow the gardening blogs and without the info of where you are, I can get freaked out. I start reading about you picking your first tomato and I have to look outside at all my snow to assure myself I haven't gone insane. Yes you live in Australia or Florida, but my mind is still firmly rooted in New England. Ok not so firmly rooted. Really my mind is trying to break free from all the snow, but it's stuck in the frigid weather.

My second issue is with comments. I love someone's site and want to tell them so. I spend a little time writing then click to post it and I can't. I have to log in. In some places at least they tell you that before you log in. But either way, I'm not logging in to a site I'm not already a member of. I have enough user IDs and passwords to remember already.

The third issue is your blog rolls. First why don't you have one and if you have one, why don't you keep it up to date? I hate clicking and finding out that person hasn't blogged in two years. Umm. . . you noticed that I myself don't have a blogroll. Err really I had one at one point. I started updating it and messed it up totally. The easiest thing was to just take it down and start over. I promise I'll get to it. Stop nagging. But in all seriousness, so long and thanks for all the blogs. This weekend I'm off to an enchanted land where everyone would understand my last reference.

Creative Commons

I've noticed in the gardening blog world that people are so afraid of having their work copied. Over the last year that I've been reading gardening blogs I've found outraged posts about finding one of their photos elsewhere on the web. Or someone has copied some of the text.

My question is "Does it matter?". Is it hurting you? Most of us gardening bloggers don't make money on our work, so it isn't taking money out of our pockets. We do it for the joy of it. We do it to connect with the other gardeners out in the world.

If someone uses one of our photos, it should not be an issue to us. In fact we ought to want them to use our photo and link back to us. We ought to want them to quote our blog and link back to us. The attribution to us is what we really want. We want to be noticed. What we don't want is to languish in some strange circle of hell where you write and no one listens, where we scream to be heard, but we are surrounded by an empty wasteland.

Luckily there is a middle ground between copyright and public domain. It is Creative Commons. Creative Commons even has degrees of rights that you can keep. Personally I'm going for the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. What does that mean? Well if you use my work you must attribute it to me. You can't use it commercially, or put another way, if you make money on it, I had better be making money on it too. You can build upon it if you like and change it, but you have to pass it along with the same license.

I love the idea of Creative Commons. I first found out about it years ago from Cory Doctorow. He is a science fiction author who publishes all his books online with a Creative Commons license. He writes why he does this. Just scroll down past the "What's Little Brother About" section to find it. Or read that section too. It is about his latest book which is fabulous and very scary. He claims it is a young adult book, but I'd recommend it for adults too.

Why Do I Blog About Gardening?

I recently received an email from an old friend that wanted to keep in touch more. He has been reading my blog and seemed to think that you had to be proficient to blog. I actually think a better barometer of whether you should blog is if you have the time and whether there is something you are passionate about. Passion is easy for me, but time is certainly an issue. For me it takes a long time to blog, though I'm getting faster as I go on.

As you all well know, I picked gardening as my passion to blog about. My sister-in-law wondered why I would pick that with all the things I do. When I decided to blog, I had to pick a subject. I didn't want a generic blog about me. I immediately came up with two subjects, gardening and conversations with my daughter. The second is immensely more interesting. My daughter is in the autistic spectrum and her mind is quite fascinating. She certainly doesn't think like anyone else I've ever met. However she doesn't talk much and is off at college for part of the year. So there would be very few entries. I really wanted to blog daily. The garden is a perfect subject for this as it changes every day - at least in the spring through fall. I'll see what transpires in the winter.

The big question is why blog at all. Everyone has their own reasons I'm sure. My friend, I think, would do it to keep in touch, which is not an unusual reason to blog. Many people have personal blogs that their families read. My reason is, I think, very unusual.

I have been beadweaving as a profession for six years now. Before that I was programming; before that momming; before that painting; before that I got my degree in chemistry. I tend to hop between things. I love to learn. Beadweaving is very methodical for the most part. For some things that I do it is very creative, but there is still a lot of production work. Even the creative parts use only a small part of my brain. The rest stagnates. I thought about taking classes again, but instead decided to write.

Writing for me is hard. I'm not horribly bad at it. I did succeed in APing out of my freshman English course in college oh so many years ago (ignore the sentence fragments I'm always putting in my blog). But I struggle; I'm slow; it is hard for me to write; and it challenges me.

My first choice in writing wasn't actually to blog. It was to write short stories. I really think I couldn't do that alone. I needed someone to bounce ideas off of and to contribute their own ideas. I asked my son if he wanted to collaborate. His answer was a vigorous "NO!". Darn. That would have been fun.

So I blog for the challenge of it. At some point it will be some other challenge, but for now it is blogging. One should never become complacent with their lives.