Iowa Dave's Blog

Spammers are trying to clutter this blog with links to various merchandise of the “not-sold-in-stores” variety, if you get my drift. I expected it. Happily, our defenses seem to be working.

It does seem a shame that a person should need to defend a blog against commercial expropriation. But it is really no different from the real world. Put up a structure, and sure as mud:  someone will want to scribble on it. Whether by poster or graffitti, it amounts to theft by use of your name, location, or property.

I do welcome comments, however. Please do consider responding to what you read here. Let’s have a conversation.

I have a request for regular readers. Consider signing up for the “RSS feed”, which enables your browser or e-mail program to inform you when new content appears on the blog. One other thing: if you like something you read here, feel free to share it with others.

Several readers have been kind enough to e-mail me asking what happened to the blog over the weekend. Short answer: the files were lost in a catastrophic server crash. Non-technical translation: the company that “hosted” the blog on the web had a computer malfunction that wiped out everything I had stored there.

It means that most of what I wrote the past five years is no longer available. Let it go. There is plenty more where that came from.

I am in the process of setting it back up. A new web hosting service is on board. The blogging software is up and running. As I write this, I am waiting for the world wide web’s name servers to get the word on my new location. Once you see this, the necessary changes will be complete.

Most blogs allow comments. Mine has not, in an effort to deter “comment spam.” However there have been some improvements in defensive software, so I expect to enable the comments capability of the blog software in the near future.

“RSS feeds” are another popular blogging feature that I kept turned off in the past, for spam prevention reasons. But RSS is quite popular. It allows people to receive new blog postings automatically, if they wish. I plan to enable RSS feeds from the new blog. If that doesn’t mean anythying to you, no problem. Just continue to visit as you have done in the past.

If you had this blog bookmarked in your browser in the past, it should work with no changes. Here’s hoping for a return to normal blogging in the next day or two!