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If I have to name two out of a gazillion of a blogger’s worst enemies, it would be, 1) crappy internet connection, and 2) Spam.

Okay, I’m not exactly a blogger, seeing how I abandoned my own blog like this (geez, months of no updates). Let’s just assume I am a (borderline) blogger, for the sake of simplicity.

So, how does a crappy internet connection harm you then? Well, if you are like me, and you care for everything that comes out from your keyboard, you’d clog your tube (read: use the internet extensively), for research and the wellness of your post (even if you are sure that most of them will end up in the Drafts section anyway, uncompleted, or just stopped being an interesting topic anymore).

Research.

Let’s say that you are writing about the ways a baseball cap would make you look cool in every occasion, you would want to search for images of those aforementioned caps to put in your post. Maybe one or more images of people actually using them and looks cool. In a situation like this, a crappy internet connection would surely put your anger to the same level with Jack Bauer.

Cap fail

from http://www.flickr.com/photos/benkimball1/3862934209/

Additionally, you’d want your post to be enjoyable to read too. The experts have said that you should have valid opinions and a correct and readable writing, in order to succeed at your endeavors in getting your points accross. That’s where the browsing on the web comes in. Fact-finding. Read about it beforehand to know what you are talking about. Arrange your points so that they are easy to understand.

Questions like, “Is this true?”, “What about that?”, “Could they understand?” are some of the questions you have to constantly ask yourself, whenever you feel like telling someone something.

…

Okay, I’ll admit it, it’s damn hard to write a good post. Heck, even this post are not remotely useful. There are little facts in here, not to mention the ultra-subjective sentences and opinions that are coming from the unicorn’s land. But at least, yes, at least, try to use your language right. Try to check for typos and the meaning of words and the correct way to use them in a sentence before publishing it. Wear a helmet before presenting yourself to a skyscraper construction site.

All of this, off course, have the drawback of throwing you further from ever posting a single article on the web. Every now and later you should not think too far and just post whatever crap you are writing, regardless of amount of time you spent preparing it, just for the sake of getting something up. The writers call this a “Writer’s block”, and a good way to overcome it is to “stop thinking and start writing”. The same thing applies to artists, software engineers, and many more professions as well.

Enough of that, let’s move on to spam. It comes with publishing your blog to the web, just like Nunu following after the Teletubbies, to clean up every mess they might have made, but instead of cleaning, the spam comments are littering your blog.

I’ve found that spam comments are getting more and more creative than usual. They usually stuff their comments with links and words regarding money and stuff enlargement etc. until Akismet sniped out every one of them. But now, even you (a human, right?) will have a hard time distinguishing which one is a real comment from a reader (yay!) and which are from faceless spambots. One of my favorite was:

“Hi, this is a good post. But I think that you are missing out something. See my response here: http://www.a-seemingly-innocent-url-that-you-will-possibly-click.org”. Alex from the neighboring site has his own problem with this kind of spam. Good luck with that, Alex.

Currently I don’t have any problem with spam on this blog here. I’m thinking maybe:
1. Because of my uncommon choice of URL. I decided to follow xkcd’s style here, being the uncreative stooge that I am. I assume that most of the spambots targets domain.tld/blog/ or blog.domain.tld/
2. Because of the highly unusual amount of traffic. (Yes, it’s that low)
Anyway, here I am, throwing out assumptions again after I’ve talk about the importance of research.