I have no idea what this person is talking about
I recieved this email the other day and I didn’t know what to make of it. It reads:
From: [omitted]@aol.com
To:rick@bentcorner.com
Date: Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Subject: Bent CornerRick
I used to enjoy reading Bent Corner and since you changed it I went along and subscribed the articles to Yahoo and then I found I couldn’t read the comments, then I subscribed to the comments then I found I still couldn’t read the articles without subscribing to the email…so I just removed ALL OF IT.
Thanks but no thanks
I’m inferring from this that he is referring to the feed for this blog. I’ve had Feedburner doing the syndication since forever. I haven’t changed it. Anyone know what this person is talking about?
Federal Trade Commission tells bloggers to stop acting like sleazeballs
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued revisions to guides that cover disclosure rules concerning endorsements, specifically endorsements coming from bloggers. The new guidelines state that if a blogger receives money in exchange for writing a review of a service or product, they must state this fact in the review.
From the FTC website:
The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization.
So what does this mean? It means that if a blogger writes about how much they enjoy website hosting from Go Daddy, but fail to mention that they are receiving a payment from Go Daddy in exchange for the positive word-of-mouth endorsement, they are in violation of the law. In fact, even if they are only receiving free website hosting from Go Daddy and they fail to mention this fact, they are in violation of the law. The FTC guidelines state that bloggers must disclose any “material connection” they have with the product that a normal, regular consumer would not have. That means that if you are reviewing a book on your blog and you received a copy of the book free-of-charge from the publisher, you need to disclose this fact.
I think this is a good thing. Then again, I’m biased. I blog as a hobby. I don’t run advertisements here. If I say I like something and recommend it to others, it’s because that’s what I really think. If I talk about how much I enjoyed a book or a movie, it’s because I went out on my own and procured the book or the movie like anybody else. When I state that I love Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, it’s because I truly love it. It’s not because I’ve been paid by Dunkin’ Donuts or because they’ve plied me with free coffee.
Every opinion I espouse here on this blog is mine and mine alone.
My blog posts are dishonest?
I had a few people leave comments on yesterday’s post about World Soccer Daily going off the air that I felt the need to delete. To say that deleting comments here is a rare occurrence is a huge understatement.
I don’t employ comment moderation and I generally allow people to say what they want in the comment section, as long as they are the ones actually saying it. What I don’t appreciate is when someone simply pastes the words of someone else from another blog or website into my comment section.
I usually delete these comments as spam.
This morning I received an email from one of the people who left comments yesterday that I had to delete. In his message to me, he encouraged me to post his email. I’ve decided to do that as well as reply to it.
Horace Steenblatter wrote:
From: Horace Steenblatter (hsteenblatter@yahoo.co.uk)
To: rick@bentcorner.com
Date: Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 7:19 AM
Subject: Your blog posts are dishonestYou are not deleting “something negative someone on another blog wrote concerning Steven Cohen.” You have repeatedly deleted comments that I’ve left under my own name which consisted of nothing but Cohen’s own words and Chelsea FC’s response to Cohen’s words. If you were actually concerned with disseminating factual information, you would let Cohen’s words speak for themselves rather than posting dishonest information which only contain a partial account of his words. How in the world is a post about Steven Cohen’s words “not the place” for Steven Cohen’s words?
Horace, your comments were not the only ones I felt the need to delete yesterday. Not that what you were actually leaving comments. You were simply pasting statements from other blogs and websites dedicated to getting Steven Cohen “fired” from his own radio show because he shared an opinion.
That’s what radio talk show hosts do in this country. They share opinions. Nobody says that you have to agree with it. Nobody says that you have to listen to it. Nobody says you have to like it.
I’ve posted the actual quote that got Steven Cohen in trouble with Liverpool supporters. You or anyone else re-posting it in the comment section is at best, unnecessarily redundant. It’s also not even important. Cohen only voiced his opinion about an historical event. People shouldn’t be shut down or threatened with physical harm because of their opinion.
At least not in the United States of America.
Furthermore, the comment section of my blog is not for you or anyone else to treat as their own personal blog. If you want to re-post content from other blogs or other websites, get your own blog and do it there.
Do not do it here.
I get email
Occasionally people read something I’ve written and feel moved to email me about. Here’s an email someone just sent me:
from: Michael Elmore (elmoremj@googlemail.com)
to: rick@bentcorner.com
date: Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 9:15 PM
subject: Steve “Scum” CohenWhy do you have so many posts defending Steve Cohen, what he said was clearly out of order and yet you continue to try and justify his statements. You are just as much a scum bag as him and without being blasphemes I have to say you need to find new friends other than the wretched Cohen who spouts evil from his putrid mouth!!!
For the record, I haven’t written a blog post “defending” Steven Cohen since May 2. I’ve since blogged about the controversy, but not to defend Cohen. In fact, my last blog post mentioning Cohen was to criticize him for asking listeners for monetary donations.
And for that I get called a scum bag? Michael Elmore has a point. If you are going to spout evil, you really should do it from a putrid mouth.
I once heard the origin of the term “scum bag.” It was pretty disgusting.
The ease in which you take offense offends me
Heidi at The Beat posted about the new blogging crew over at Blog@Newsarama and she made the analogy that they were like the characters in the movie The Dirty Dozen, the 1960’s World War Two movie staring Lee Marvin. In the movie, Lee Marvin is an Army officer that takes a bunch of condemned soldiers off death row and turns them into commandos to take part in a deadly suicide mission behind enemy lines that nobody else wants to do. The movie always struck me as being kind of goofy because I think history shows that the Allies in World War Two didn’t seem to care an awful lot about risking the lives of it’s soldiers.
Watch the first hour of Saving Private Ryan to see what I mean.
Heidi made the The Dirty Dozen comparison because like the condemned soldiers in the movie, the new Blog@Newsarama crew have been, in her words, “made sport of by the Nazis soon after landing in Brittany“.
In her analogy, the Nazis were other bloggers weighing in on the new Blog@Newsarama team. If you guessed that someone claimed to take great offense to this Nazi comparison you would be correct. If you guessed that it was the people actually being compared to the Nazis in The Dirty Dozen, you would be wrong.
Two of the people from Blog@Newsarama commented on Heidi’s post.
Lucas Siegel wrote:
The only other thing I’d like to put here is that, honestly, a killed-in-action metaphor in relation to myself is, well, offensive. You may or may not have read in our introduction post or in the comments section of the blog in question that I served in the Army for six years. I’ve served overseas, in a warzone, and seen people actually get killed-in-action. I assure you, it’s not something to be used as a joke under any circumstance. Thanks.
So let me get this straight. Getting killed in action in a war zone is not something to joke about or to make reference to lightly, but it’s OK to bring it up to score points in a silly Internet discussion? The Dirty Dozen was not real. There was no actually commando unit in World War Two comprised of death row inmates. Heidi made a comparison to a movie of fiction.
Lucas Siegel wasn’t the only Blog@Newsarama blogger to claim to take offense. Sarah Jaffe quickly chimed in.
She wrote:
Gee, thanks. I love not even being slagged off properly and compared to victims of Nazis since my family actually was killed by Nazis. Wow, classy.
Once again, they were movie Nazis. They were not real Nazis. They were actors playing roles in a movie.
I don’t really understand how people become so easily offended. The moral indignation some choose to display when they are exposed to something they claim to be offended by always seems so fake to me. I just don’t get it.
Upgrade to WordPress 2.6.2 or your blog might die!
Well, maybe it wont die, but it might get hacked. This upgrade fixes a security flaw in WordPress that allows blogs with open registration to have anyone’s password reset to a new random password. That means you wont be able to log on to your own blog because you wont know what the new password is.
The individual that reset your password wont know what it is ether, so this security flaw is mostly just simply annoying. The problem is that there is also a problem with the randomness of the randown password generator used by WordPress. It turns out that it’s not so random afterall. [WordPress Blog]
Yes, by all means read The Bent Corner
Today I noticed there is a comic book related column over at Pop Syndicate called Bent Corner. It’s written by an individual named Isaac Magaña. There is even a The Bent Corner forum dedicated to the column.
How original.
I had this blog a lot longer then the Pop Syndicate column has been in existence. The first column under the name “Bent Corner” was posted in February 2007. I first registered this domain back in 2005. I had a blog with the same name over at BlogSpot long before that. I also blog quite a bit about comic books.
Didn’t anyone over at Pop Syndicate do a quick Google search of the name before using it? I’m guessing not.
Fellow blogger Jesse Jace of Chorus, Isolate, Confirm recently had a similar experience. Jesse regularly writes a feature entitled Portrait of a Badass where he points to someone from the world of fiction who he believes is truly a bad ass. He’s been writing these features for years. The blog We Are Not Journalists then came up with their own “Portrait of a Badass” feature. Jesse called them on it and I think they changed the title.
What struck me odd about the Portrait of a Badass controversy was that nobody over at We Are Not Journalists bothered to Google the term before attempting to make it their own. I couldn’t imagine creating a name for something without first checking to see if anyone else already created that name.
Like the name Bent Corner.
WordPress sucks with the intensity of 1,000 suns
Not that I really know how intense 1,000 suns are, but I can imagine. I’m just getting tired of dicking with WordPress.
Yesterday I had a problem that resulted with nothing but the header image loading. I ended up fixing it be reloading WordPress 2.5. So far, so good. I would like to upgrade to the latest build of WordPress, version 2.5.1, but when I do just that, the RSS feed to my blog dies. Why? Who knows. I’ve read on the WordPress forums about other people having the same problem, but I haven’t read anything that solves the problem. It’s just another one of those WordPress “mysteries”.
marvel_b0y is no more
I read on the Internets that marvel_b0y — the low level Marvel Comics staffer and anonymous whistle blower type blogger — is no more. His account on LiveJournal is history.
They killed marvel_b0y. The bastards.
First they killed Black Goliath. Then they killed Captain America. Now they’ve killed marvel_b0y.
Who’s next?
I enjoyed reading his posts about what goes on in the bowels of Marvel Comics. Not only were they interesting, it was obvious the muckety mucks at Marvel were not too happy with his posts. Marvel lawyers sent marvel_b0y a cease and desist letter on letterhead decorated with goofy looking Marvel superheroes. If the goal of a cease and desist letter is to intimidate, I’m not sure including the likeness of Iron Man or Captain America is a good idea. Iron Man has become a dick and Captain America is dead.
My hope is that marvel_b0y will return. Normally when Marvel Comics kills someone off, it doesn’t last very long.
Comment moderation is for asshats
If there is one thing I hope 2008 brings is an end to comment moderation. You read an interesting blog post and you decide to leave a comment. You put your thoughts down in the most coherent way that you can, making sure your grammar is correct and your spelling is right. You then type in the series of fuzzy letters and numbers appearing on the screen to prove that you are not a robot. Why is it that a robot can be programed to drive around on the surface of Mars and send back photos but it can’t be programed to type “er57z” when it appears on the screen?
You then press Enter and wait for your comment to appear. Instead of seeing the comment you just posted, you see a message that says something like this:
Your comment has been submitted and will be viewable once it is approved
Why must my comment be approved? I typed in the short string of fuzzy numbers and letters proving that I was not a robot. Why then do I have to have my comment approved?
I just don’t see the point. Why do some bloggers do this? What are they afraid people are going to say? Are they worried that they are going to be called a derogatory name or that a disparaging thing is going to be said about their blog? If so, it’s time to grow up. Stop being such a pussy. Either let people leave comments or don’t. Don’t insist on micromanaging each little thing someone has to say. It’s pathetic.
The thing I hate the most about bloggers that insist on approving comments is that they never inform you ahead of time that they will need to approve your comment. They could save everyone a whole bunch of time by letting that fact be known ahead of time. Not only do I not what to leave a comment if it must first be approved, I don’t want to read comments left by other readers. If the comment section doesn’t truly reflect what other readers are thinking, I don’t want to waste my time reading it.
More about WordPress 2.3
I’ve already written about my frustrations with the newest upgrade to WordPress, Version 2.3. I haven’t really changed my mind. If anything my level of frustration has only increased.
Most of my frustrations center around how the new version handles tagging. It heavily incorporates the use of tags. In the process, it makes many popular tagging plugins incompatible. Tagging plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior. I used that particular plugin for my tagging and I really loved it. Now it doesn’t work. Not only can I not tag new posts with the plugin, none of the existing posts that were tagged with Ultimate Tag Warrior have tags now.
They are now tag-free. Now if I want these posts to have tags, I must go and edit each and every post and ad tags.
Not only are most of these older posts tag-free, They don’t have categories either. While upgrading WordPress, I had an option of converting existing categories to tags. This is what I read Convert Categories to Tags screen:
Howdy! This converter allows you to selectively convert existing categories to tags. To get started, check the checkboxes of the categories you wish to be converted, then click the Convert button.
Keep in mind that if you convert a category with child categories, those child categories get their parent setting removed, so they’re in the root.
I screwed up and pressed the button. It didn’t occur to me that when I converted categories to tags, I would be deleting the categories from existing. That’s precisely what happened. All of my existing posts (over 300) were left without an assigned category. Why couldn’t WordPress convert categories to tags and leave categories intact? I now have over 300 posts labeled as “Posted in Uncategorized”. I now have to go and manually edit each and every post if I want to change this.
Upgrading sucks.
The easy way to a leaner meaner css stylesheet
If your blog or website uses a css stylesheet, chances are it’s not as neat and tidy and it should be. It’s probably bloated with code it doesn’t need. The larger the css stylesheet, the longer it takes to load and process. Manually editing a css stylesheet for neatness can often times be a real pain. Worse, it’s entirely possible in the name of optimization to accidentally delete needed code. I know this because I have done this.
Not anymore. Clean CSS is a web based tool that cleans your css stylesheet. Simply paste the code from your css style sheet and then select the options you need. Press a button and Clean CSS does all the work for you. It cleans and simplifies your css code making the end result a smaller sized, more efficient file. I was able to compress the size of my css style sheet by 17%.
Cross platform fonts
Not all fonts are recognized or supported by all operating systems. The following fonts are good for Windows, Mac, and Linux/UNIX.
- Andale Mono
- Arial
- Arial Black
- Comic Sans MS
- Courier New
- Georgia
- Impact
- Times New Roman
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
If you incorporate any of these fonts into the CSS style sheet of your website, it will have the same look across all platforms. Windows, Mac OS, UNIX, and fake UNIX (Linux). At least it will look more similar then if you called for a font only used by one platform.
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Follow me @rickrottman
I still hate comment moderation
I blogged once before about how much I hate it when bloggers ask readers to leave a comment and then after the reader takes the time to write a comment, the comment is withheld from being posted until the blogger gets a chance to first “approve” the comment.
It smacks of micromanaging and I hate it.
Early yesterday morning I tried to leave a comment over at Lifehacker. It was concerning a post about using cat litter to de-stink dirty, smelly shoes. Personally I thought it was a stupid piece of advice. If your shoes are smelling badly, I don’t think cat liter will fix the problem. If cat liter was really so magical, why do most cat boxes smell like cat urine and/or cat fices unless you clean them on a very regular basis? Smelly shoes are a sign that your feet have produced a ripe environment for bacteria to flourish.
Cat liter wont fix that problem.
Anyway, I tried to leave a quick comment, but after submitting my comment, I was told that my comment must fist be “approved”. If I had known that beforehand, I wouldn’t have bothered leaving a comment.
And that’s the thing that bothers me the most about blogs that resort to using comment moderation. They tend to keep the fact that someone must fist approve comments before they show up, a secret. The result is that if you read through the comments, you tend to think people are reacting in a way that very well might not be the way most people are reacting.
It’s dishonest.