Month: April 2009

Terrible With Words

I’ve been trying to write this post since July 29 (and I just spent like 10 minutes figuring out that exact date). That mere fact ought to just emphasize my entire point.

People tell me all the time how good I am at writing. Every English professor I’ve had since being in college (when I actually started putting half an ounce of effort into any work) has been what Mike dubs a “Danny fan.” Everybody in Ecuador loved my blog once they discovered it, and I have been amazed by the extent of my readership Stateside.

Now I’m not tooting my own horn by any means. I’ll just go ahead and tell you that I feel like almost everything I write on my blog is half-finished, not well thought-out, and uses too many “I”‘s  and parenthetical phrases (I think you’ll notice them now that I say that, and I’m only partially joking). Consistently, my sermons are written on Saturday night, and Lord knows if I have a paper due, especially online, it gets turned in at 11:59PM, barely finished, with no planning and only enough references and four syllable words to fake someone into thinking it says anything of any value.

Edit 3/10/2018: This has been in my Drafts folder for nine years. It’s unfinished, and I don’t know where it was going. But it was interesting, so I published it.

Table for Twelve

I’ve been to many a Maundy Thursday service, but most of the ones I remember have been here in Elizabeth City. According to my mom, I attended one at St. Paul’s UMC in Clarksdale, Mississippi in which we took communion at a table set for a Seder meal. I have no recollection of that one, though I do remember my first or second year at First UMC when we actually did have a Seder meal during Holy Week.

It was the former type of service, though, in which I got to participate last night. We continued our Lenten virtual tour of the Holy Land with a digital trip to the modern-day Garden of Gethsemane.

Edit 3/9/2018: There was probably more to this post. It was in my drafts folder, and I decided to publish it. I wish I knew what the rest of this story was or where I was going with this thought. But nine seasons of Lent later, I have no clue.

Comments and Security

Last summer a ton of people told me that they would leave comments on my blog if they didn’t have to register a WordPress account on dannypeck.net. Before anyone gets bored reading my reasoning below, IT ONLY TAKES 5 SECONDS TO REGISTER. So PLEASE register! I LOVE comments, and registering will NOT send you spam or require lots of personal information.

The reason the I choose to have the blog software force registration is that I just don’t want spammers clogging up the comments or my inbox. I get an e-mail every time someone posts a comment, so I can stay current on what’s being said and make sure that I actually read anything anyone says to me.  So if there’s spam, it hits both the site and my inbox too. Anoyance for you who see the comments, double annoyance for me.

Now, obviously, I don’t have a high-traffic blog. Some people can quit working and live off income from their blogs. If I bothered putting ads on my site to try to make money off this thing, I’d make about 40 cents a year. So if I only get my friends and people from church looking at my site, why am I worried about spammers?

You’d be amazed.

For the last several weeks I’ve loosened the security restrictions on my comments. Instead of requiring a login, anyone could post a comment. I was going to keep track of all the spam, but after about the first 3 days, I gave up on that. I deleted 42 spam comments off my wordpress software this morning, and that was only from about the last two days. I have gotten eight more spam comments between 11:53pm last night and 11:24pm tonight. And most of them have been full of meta tag keywords or simply nonsense or just links to more spam web sites.

No one but Michael Turner even noticed that they no longer had to be logged in to leave a comment. Plus, I get really excited whenever I have mail. And every time I check Thunderbird lately, there’s seemingly something to read. But an inordinate amount has been “You’ve got Spam!” for the last two weeks. I’ve been marking all these comments “Spam” so that WordPress would get smart and start automatically blocking some of it. But not even that has been able to slow the incoming barrage of psuedo-comments.

So I’ve reverted to medium security, and logins are now required again.

I apologize for the minor inconvenience of having to register and then to log in to make a comment. But please know that my small security restrictions are not to keep YOU from responding to my thoughts (or lack thereof). It is to keep you from having to wade through kilobyes and kilobytes (some of these spam comments are loooong) and kilobytes of random crap written by an artificially intelligent bot to get to the kilobytes of random crap written by me.

It’s also so I know who wrote it. People sometimes don’t bother to write their name in what becomes an otherwise anonymous comment. I’m not worried about accountabiliy or anything. I just want to be able to thank people who bother to read this.

So again, apologies that I am taking a few second more of your time, but it actually saves your eyes and my inbox a lot of trouble. And thanks to those who actually read.