Good Monday morning to you! Maybe you didn’t even notice, maybe you missed me. Whatever. I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks and I haven’t done much blogging. Then this weekend, I was really going to buckle down and do some writing. That didn’t happen either. What happened was, my attention was diverted much like the mouse by the cookie.

I signed on to blog, and realized that I hadn’t updated WordPress in a while. I thought I was up to version 2.9 when I realized that I was still on 2.6! Well I figured, it should be easy enough to click that button that says update all my blogs, right? Right. It was easy alright. Done in a minute!

Except that when I went to a couple of my blogs I realized that some things have gone terribly wrong. This blog, for instance, was not showing any posts at all! On the backend, some menu options have either disappeared or not working at all. It turns out, some of my themes were not quite compatible with the new WP. So I got down to tweaking and hacking.

So I tweaked one thing, which led to another, to another, and so on… you know the drill. Before I knew it, the whole weekend had just about gone and I hadn’t written a thing on the blogs. The good thing is, I got all of them upgraded and they are now all working again!

Once I fixed all the bugs, I was able to appreciate more the brand spanking new Wordpress 3.1 and all its added features. I’m loving it! I love that plugins can now be added on without having to download files and upload them again to your server. You can do it all right here! Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, yea, I know it’s been out a while and you’ve probably been on it since it came out. For me, it’s all new. I afterall just came from the bowels of 2.6 to 3.1.

Another good thing about being forced to do some of this backend maintenance, it keeps this idle brain of mine going. I had forgotten how to do some of the simplest stuff and was at a lost for a while at all the new coding, but I muddled through. I felt quite accomplished for having figured some things out without having to call tech support!

On one of my blogs, I even managed to revamp the theme and added one on those cool image sliders on top! I’ve been wanting one of those for the longest time and I finally managed to get it done thanks to free WP theme designers who incorporated it into their design and pretty much made everything automated. I’ll be implementing this on my food blog soon. It’s in desperate need of a makeover but I have been to afraid to tinker with it.

So to celebrate this accomplishment, the girls and I treated ourselves to some good eats at the Asian Market. It was a good weekend!

I just de-spammed a bunch of comments that had inadvertently been caught by Akismet. I like getting comments on my blogs! Really! That’s why all my blogs are set to Do-Follow. So please do keep leaving comments.

HOWEVER, I cannot in good conscience publish comments that were obviously left just for the benefit of the link and the comment itself is not even related to the post. Take a minute to read what I’m really saying and leave a meaningful or at least relevant comment. And please don’t tell me again that a loan of any kind will make my life easier. LOL! That’s how I got in hot water in the first place!

With that said, let’s keep blogging and commenting!

P.S. as soon as I have some time I’ll add the Comment Luv Plug-in. I love that thing!

There was a time when many of us had never heard of blogs. We had no idea what blogging was all about. But through word-of-mouth or however we happened to stumble on to blogging, many of us found something satisfying and rewarding about getting our thoughts down and publishing it out there for all to see. Blogging gave people who only dreamed of getting published a venue where random strangers can run across their creation and maybe pause long enough to read a paragraph or two. That is all what most of us could hope for.

Some of us secretly hoped no one would ever come across our writing and peek into our souls. But at the same time, we all had that small niggle within where we hoped someone would notice and actually validate that maybe our writing is worth reading after all. Then a comment or two started filtering in and we were like teenagers whose crush is reading their slam book. Butterflies flutter in our belly as we wonder, ‘Does he get it?” “Does he see the real me now?” “Does he like what he sees?” And we write more, we bare more of ourselves, hoping they will come back and maybe even learn to love us. Blogging is addicting like that.

Then the blogging explosion happened. We heard of bloggers who are now earning lots of money. Some bloggers have turned pro, where this became their full time jobs. We heard of bloggers who gained fame and are now hobnobbing with the rich and famous. We heard of bloggers who became ‘real’ authors because of their blog. We see them now on the book circuits talking about their success from blogging to books. At least one that I know of had their blog made into a movie.

Fame and fortune from blogging. Who can resist? I admit, I have blogging envy. I want to make lots of money too! I want to be famous. I want Oprah to invite me to her show and talk about what a terrific blogger I am. I want to walk the red carpet at least once.

I am not alone in my envy. There are, apparently a lot of us out there. The difference is, I am still where I am when I started. Largely blogging for myself, churning out my own convoluted content and still welcoming every compliment that comes in the comments and still crying over mean criticisms then deleting them. Yeah, that’s still me. I haven’t gone out of my way to reach for more than just having the venue to spout off about me. So no, I’m not rich from blogging yet nor am I famous.

What I am rich in though, and famous with, are the friends that I have made from blogging. I made some good friends that I have never met through blogging. And for anyone who claims that friendships made on the blogosphere are shallow, superficial and will never amount to nothing, they are wrong. The people that I have made friends with are precious and they are as loyal and as loving as the friends we have outside of cyberspace. These friends will be there when you need them… whether it’s a shoulder to cry on or a posse to watch your back, they are there for you. So I guess, you can say, yeah, I’ve got it made as a blogger. I have riches and facebook fame. What more could I ask for, right?

This is just me again, talking to myself. Hope you enjoyed eavesdropping.

Some people never learn. Or maybe they just don’t care.

They start teaching us as early as grade school that plagiarism is unacceptable. This lesson is pounded into us all through our school years and into our professional careers. If you work in certain industries, the consequences of plagiarizing someone else’s work can be disastrous.

Publishing, for instance, is zealous about the issue of plagiarism. Any hint of plagiarism can ruin reputations and destroy entire careers in an instant. In its early days the internet didn’t have as many protocols for duplicate contents but nowadays there are more regulations to dictate what is acceptable  or not. However, it is still very difficult to implement and administer those regulations. It is that difficulty and the facility of anonymity on the internet that gives a lot of people leeway and to some extent permission to steal content that isn’t theirs.

Today when I signed on to Facebook, an issue regarding a fan page for a blog posting photos and content from other blogs cropped up. When we checked out the blog for the said fan page, it turned out that there was not one original recipe on there, every one of his blog posts were stolen from other bloggers. If you’re a blogger or a follower of blogs, you probably already know that they are usually quite nice and accommodating. But don’t ever, ever try to steal their content and claim it as your own because they will come down on you harder than a ton of bricks.

Well this guy had a ton of bloggers come down on him today and just as he treated all the bloggers he stole from, he is not getting any kind of link juice from any of us. His viewership may have shot up today as we combed through his archives looking for duplicate contents, but I hope that his whole blog will be shut down soon so no worries about the increased views. He’s been reported on facebook and on blogger, his blog host, and also on a couple of his advertising affiliates.

If you’re curious, here are some blog posts from other bloggers:
Thou Shalt Not Steal Blog Posts
A Thief Was Found
Beware of Scrapers
Beware! Plagiarist from The Peach Kitchen