If you’ve ever been a first time poster here, you will know that your comments don’t show up right away. I moderate pretty much everything unless I mark you as approved. I also turn off comments after a post falls off the front page. I just get way too much spam in the form of comments.

Lately, though, I’ve gotten some comments that fall somewhere in between “helpful” and “spam” and I sort of don’t know what to do with them! I think they really are spam, and I never approve them, but they always give me pause.

This is because they don’t look like spam. They look like they’re from real people and legitimate businesses. The websites look real, their emails look real, they seem to use their real names, and of course they link to their businesses, which is the only part that really looks like spam. They offer advice and suggestions and point me to their businesses in a way that appears to be more “helpful” than anything else.

For example, lately I’ve been posting about baby stuff and I’ve gotten several of these comments with suggestions for baby stuff. To paraphrase, “If you want to take cloth diapers to the hospital, try this diaper bag in a colorful print so it won’t be mistaken for trash. You can buy them at my store.” And so on and so forth.

I even got one for the yarn post suggesting I look for a certain brand of sock yarn at their store… but what bugged me was the suggestion to look for a brand I didn’t mention and do already happen to have. THAT is spam. I was saying how I wasn’t going to buy yarn yet this person was plying me with something I not only expressed no interest in but expressly said I wasn’t going to buy even the ones I was interested in. Blah to that! Delete.

So.. surely I’m not the only one. Do people approve these? Are they truly spam? And how do these people find my site anyway? Surely they’re not regular readers, they’ve never commented before, so do they regularly google for new posts about certain subjects? To top things off I feel sort of bad deleting them, until one annoys me, then I delete them all. Blah! I am much confuzzled.

Yesterday I managed to delete over 1000 unread emails in my inbox. I have over 700 left to go. And THEN I need to review the emails I have read, and get rid of those I don’t need to keep. I really need to organize my emails better! Google’s whole search instead of organize idea is Not Good.

I’ve been thinking about re-categorizing some older entries. I have no idea if it will just “save” those posts or if they’ll actually be republished and upset a bunch of feed readers! So I apologize in advance if that happens.

I read about blogrolling.com on Kerflop’s blog, in her own search for how to rein in the mighty blogroll. I thought it sounded interesting enough to try out!

So now there’s a small blogroll section in the sidebar. It’s small, it’s only craft blogs at the moment, but hey, it’s something. It will expand if it pleases me. I do like how you can have a small amount of random blogs listed from my blogroll. It should refresh the list with a different random list every time the page reloads so, in theory, everybody should get exposure without it taking up 10 scrollable pages to list everyone.

I don’t know that it’s ideal, but it is making me happy! Links make the web go round, right? After all, I had been toying with the idea of making my own very small list and manually changing it whenever I found the time. Yah, right! This is much better. I hope!

The only thing I would change about this project building cartoon is in my experience, what the customer “explains” and what the customer “envisions” are often entirely different things! I swear I’ve had customers ask for what the Analyst designed!

[via Kerflop]

I decided to change my “on the needles” category over there on the sidebar to “projects in the works” because apparently I have more sewing projects than knitting these days. Who knew?

I thought I’d attempt to categorize them.. K for knitting and S for sewing, etc. But then my felt dolls are a bit of a mystery. I could do F for felting but then I often felt knitted things and which is that? Er.. so I’m not going to worry about it. I’m sure I’m the only person who feels to need to keep track of my own projects, right? :)

Incidently.. if anyone has a CLUE why I have a 20 pixel space on the right hand side of my blog I’d love to know why. My brain cells can’t handle it right now and it’s annoying me. Ta!

When we moved to Wordpress, I nixed the navigation on my old website. It annoyed me. I was aiming to simplify things.

Part of that navigation was a “links” page. I didn’t like the huge rolling blogroll list on the side of the content on the main page, so way back when I had created a separate page for it. (I wanted to do the same thing for archives but it never worked quite right.)

Having nixed the navigation, I was left without a blogroll. Using Google Reader as my feed reader means I can’t easily (that I know of) import my blogroll to my blog. My blogroll is loooong. Longer than I care to enter by hand.

To complicate matters, I have a helluva time organizing my blogroll. I have many categories and a lot of people could belong to multiple labels. I primarily read crafty blogs (mostly knitting), a few mommy blogs, blogs of friends, newly found green blogs, and other random things. But lots of the crafty blogs I read are also mommy blogs. Some of my friends are mommies, some aren’t. I have friends in Louisville, and friends in Seattle (for geographic organization). Some of my friends are crafty, some aren’t. It just intersects like crazy!

Therefore I’ve been lazy about organizing a blogroll on my new blog.

I feel bad about this though. Links make the internet go round, right? So I need to put my blogroll on my blog. Without navigation, without it being crazy long, and in some sort of comprehensible order. This isn’t going to be easy.  One thing is for sure: I don’t think I can possibly list everything on my feed reader. I’ll have to play favorites. What on earth am I going to do?

Prelude no. 15 used as a theme for Halo 3 adverts. I’m neither of a lover nor a hater of video games but for some reason this really annoys me. Chopin was definitely a lover. Sigh.

On the other hand.. I bet a lot of people haven’t been exposed to this kind of classical music before. Still.. sigh. Chopin just always makes my heart rip just a little bit.

P.S. This is a nice rendition.

P.P.S In case anyone wonders, this is my favorite Chopin tune of all time and I hope to play it before I die :)

I know it’s been down a lot. I don’t know why and I don’t know what will fix it. I apologize profusely. Is irritating but we haven’t been willing to make the leap to a completely hosted solution yet either!

Sigh. Technology.

I just ran across BurdaStyle’s newly updated website which styles itself as “open source sewing” (via Adorn Blog). This obviously caught my eye since the phrase “open source” is oft-used in my house.

At first I was suspicious.. do they really mean open source? Although I haven’t signed up yet, this line gives me hope:

And most importantly, we want you to get involved: We’re offering our ideas, expertise and downloadable patterns to the BurdaStyle community, and we hope that you’ll contribute, too.

And then I thought about it for a few more minutes. There are actually many features of the online crafting community that could be considered open source. Many people post their own original patterns and designs on their blogs. People who read those blogs then take those designs and make their own versions — often with their own tweaks and changes to suit their needs. Rarely does anyone get pissy about a “stolen” design, most people seem to think it’s great people are making things at all. What’s lacking is a central location, a repository, if you will, to house these designs and track changes to the pattern, or forks, to keep the comparison going.

I wonder how this BurdaStyle website will function? I’m looking forward to joining and checking it out. If nothing else, I’ve been looking for a sewing community to get some wisdom and ideas from, so at the very least it should serve that purpose for me! I love the idea of people being about to contribute and track patterns — I wonder how the Burda website will grow? I wonder if BurdaStyle will fill a similar need as Ravelry has done for knitting and crochet?