Recently in Site Stuff Category

I have updated my contact page with new and important information regarding my contact information, since learning of fraudulent activity taking place with another blogger who also does product reviews on her blog.

Emily at Busy Mom, and her blog, were used to obtain free products from a  popular baby store and website.
Emily was able to track down the person(s) responsible for this thanks to the baby store and some of her friends, but this story has shown us all the lengths that people will go to to try and get something for free by any means necessary, including fraud and impersonation.

My contact page has been updated to inform everyone of the ways that I can be contacted, and how I would contact you.
I, Kat Cooper, am the ONLY person who writes on My Single Mom Life and KatScan.
I will ONLY ever contact you, or reply to you, from the email address mysinglemomlife-AT-gmail.com
If you should ever receive any type of advertising request, product request, or a PayPal invoice, from ANY OTHER email address, it is NOT me.
If you should receive any of those types of emails, or any email, from someone claiming to be me, or someone claiming to work for/with me, please forward the email to me at mysinglemomlife-AT-gmail.com so that I may investigate and prosecute the impersonation and fraud attempt.

Thank you.

I have a comment policy, it is now here for you to read.

You are invited and encouraged to post your comments on my blog.
Offensive, racist, abusive, and spam comments will not be tolerated and will be deleted.
Anonymous, threatening, and harassing comments will NEVER be published.
Please keep your comments on topic.
Comments are set to close after 3 days to prevent spam attacks.
I reserve the right to post the contents of any email that I receive in regards to this blog, and to identify the sender.
Thank you for reading and for your comments!

That's my comment policy and you spammers just can't seem to comprehend it.
You think that you have the right to post your garbage comments with links to your crappy websites that sell crappy crap.
I don't care if you want to post your damn resumes in my comment form, but if the url you leave leads to some crappy site that sells crappy crap or whatever crappy crap you're linking to, not only am I going to delete your comment, but I'm going to mark your comment as spam.
I will also blacklist your ip address using .htaccess and my blogs ip banning feature.
Spammers are the scum of the earth who try to take advantage of blogs and the bloggers who own them.
In just the last week, I have had to close off the comments on practically every single entry that I've written because of you.
This makes it so that my real readers, my friends, can't leave me any comments.
That's not fair to them or me when you go on a spam comment spree leaving up to 20 spam comments in less than 15 minutes.
This is my blog.
I own it, not you.
I make the rules here, not you.
You have absolutely no right to post your crappy spam comments on a website that I own and pay for.
 
If you really want to post your spam comments on my blog, then pay me for it.
Every spam comment that you want to leave, will now cost you $5.00.
You can PayPal me $5.00 within 5 minutes of posting your spam comment, and if you actually pay me the $5.00, I'll leave your spam comment in place on my blog.
You can send me the $5.00 through PayPal to this email address, mysinglemomlifeATgmail.com, swapping the AT for an @.
 
If 5 minutes has passed and you haven't sent me $5.00, I will delete your comment, I will mark your ip as a spammer, I will block your ip using .htaccess, and then ban it using the ip ban feature of my blog.
I'm trying to be fair here, I really am, but I've had it with what you think you have the right to do.
You want to post your crappy spam comments on my blog, but it's my blog that I own and pay for, so pay me for your spam comment and I'll let it stay.
 
I will, however, edit your comment and mark it as SPAM so that my readers will know that you are a spammer who paid to leave the spam comment so that they know to not click on any of your links.
You're wasting your time and mine by posting your spam, so either pay up, or get deleted and banned.

Thanks!!

I've been sitting here for the last 3+ hours doing some site maintenance.
Movable Type version 4.12, does not come with a close comments on old entries function, and every plugin that I found that was supposed to close comments on old entries, has not worked.
I know how to install plugins, I've installed a few different ones, so I know that I installed it correctly, it just doesn't work, so I've been sitting here manually closing comments on my old entries.

Luckily, I haven't written too many entries to have to do this manual close on, only 427 entries.
I've only been blogging at this site since July 2008, so it hasn't really been a long enough time to build up thousands of entries like my other blog, My Single Mom Life, has.
I've been writing at MSML since February 2004, and I've racked up 5757 entries, and have 21,373 comments.
That's a whole lot of comments!

Anyway, I'm going through and closing comments on all of my old entries because of spammers.
They have found this blog and the old entries and have taken a liking to those old entries.
Perhaps they think that because they are old, that I won't notice their spam comments, but spammers are totally stupid.
BOTH of my blogs are on comment moderation, all new comments get emailed to me for approval.
Here on KatScan, when the comment moderation email comes in, I have 4 options to deal with it.
I can approve it, view it, edit it, or report it as spam.
Once I report it as spam, I can go straight to that entry and close the comments on it, so this close comments project that I am on, isn't that bad actually, I've already closed the comments on probably more than half of my entries already thanks to those spammers.
I know that I just wrote a post similar to this on December 21st, and I know that I said that there were maybe only 50 entries left that needed to be closed, but I underestimated that number.
There's maybe 100-150 entries left that need to be closed now that I've been manually closing them from entry # 427 and moving backward to the newest entries.
It's not a long process at all, MT 4.12 rebuilds the entries very quickly.
But I have found an issue though that has me completely stumped.

On just some of my old entries, the posts are completely gone.
When I get to the edit entry page, the only thing typed there is the post title.
None of my post is there.
I click on "view" and there's nothing on the published page, only the comments people have left and the leave a comment form.
I click on "cached snapshot of page" in the Google toolbar add-on for Firefox, and there's no cached snapshot to copy, and I've gone to the Wayback Machine to try and find the posts, and they aren't there either.
Lucky for me, there aren't many missing entries, perhaps 18 at the most, but it is quite the perplexing issue.
It's such a perplexing issue that I've posted at the MT forums asking for help.
I have no idea what happened to those entries, why it happened, or how to prevent it from happening again, I'm really, totally, stumped.

If there's anyone out there who uses MT version 4.12, or any version of MT at all,  and has the slightest clue why this has happened, please please please, post to the comments of this entry and tell me why it happened and how to prevent it, or email me at mysinglemomlife@gmail.com
Any help anyone can offer would be most appreciated.

Thank you!

EDIT**
Stupid fucking spammers.

I'm sure that you are all thinking that you have my site completely figured out and that is why you so boldly state things like  "I will at once grab your rss feed to stay informed of any updates."

But I got some news for you.
MT4 makes it ever so easy to dispose of your spam comments.
First, all comments are on moderation, this means that not a single comment gets posted unless I want it to post.
Second, when I get the email notification of a new comment, I am given 4 options to deal with the comment.

Approve comment.
View comment.
Edit comment.
Report comment as spam.

Each one of those is a link.
For your spam comments, I click on Report comment as spam, after my site then marks your comment as spam and reports it to the spam blacklist database, I get a link to go directly to the post you left your comment on.
Once at the post, I click to remove the check mark from the "allow comments" box, and then I click save which rebuilds the entry.
Once the entry is rebuilt, there is now no longer a way for you to leave a comment on that entry.
This whole process takes me less than 1 minute to accomplish.
I actually find myself enjoying the process because it saves me a lot of time having to go through and remove the commenting ability from every single one of my posts.
I only have a total of 425 posts on this blog, and because of you spammers and the super fast process of marking your comment as spam and removing the ability to comment on old posts, there are now only about 50 posts that need to have the commenting ability removed.
If you guys keep doing what you're doing, all of my old posts will have the comment ability completely removed in about 1 week.
So thanks spammers for helping me close off comments on old posts, it has saved me a ton of time!

Since yesterday morning when I started to feel a lot better, I have been going back and forth with this guy in email about doing some product and website reviews for him, mostly discussing the length of the posts, the pricing, and how long the posts would be on the blog.
I have been doing this kind of thing for a very long time, I know how this works, I do it day in and day out, and just when I finally thought we were at the closing, he freaked out about Google page rank.

To make a wicked long and irritating story short, the guy needs to take some
sales training classes in regards to online advertising in 2009.
It's not what it used to be, page rank is pointless these days and not only does every blogger know this, but so does almost every single advertiser out there.
It's a number made up by the Google gods, 100% pointless.
What is important is stats, the traffic details, hits, page views and search indexing, those are far more important than that silly number from 0-10.

The guy pretty much wasted hours and hours of my time over the course of  24 hours now,  that I could have spent doing all of the other stuff that I really needed to be doing, because he doesn't understand that page rank has become completely obsolete.

Sometimes I think I just need a really long vacation to somewhere secluded, to be all alone and not have to deal with anything or anyone.
I've even thought of being trapped on a cruise ship, locking myself in my room, only venturing out to eat, maybe taking walks on the decks late at night when other people are dancing away in the nightclubs or sleeping soundly.
I just want some major alone time, and I don't think I'm going to get any very soon.
Why?
I fade in and out of depression a lot, especially in these last few months.
I rarely sleep anymore, often lying awake all night long in my room just waiting for the alarm to go off, or laying on the couch watching mindless tv all night just to pass the time.
I need the surgery, I can't stay living like this, but I also don't want to go through another surgery again, I don't want to put my family through another one again.
It's hard, so so hard on all of us.
I don't have a date yet, but now that I know when Mark's graduation is, I want to wait until after that to have the next surgery, I don't want to miss it by being in the hospital, and I also don't want to miss it because I just got home from the hospital, and I also don't want to show up at his graduation in that terrible halo brace.
I think I'm going to call my surgeon on Monday morning and request that we do it in June.
That way I won't miss his graduation or have to go to it that brace, plus, both teens will be out of school for the year, they won't miss any school, they won't be in school worried about me either.
I think that's the best plan for all of us who have to deal with this.
But it also means another month or so like this, with my head stuck down, with not being able to eat unless other people are home because of the risks of choking, and being in so much pain.
But it really is the best plan I think, even if it means having to wait a bit longer.

I know not many people use MT much anymore, everybody loves WP, but I know there are others out there, somewhere, who use it.
I downloaded the plugin Blog Janitor which is supposed to close comments after so many days setting that you choose, but even though it's installed correctly, it is not closing comments on old entries.
Is there another plugin for MT4 that will actually close the comments?
I really don't want to do it by hand, but if I have to, at least I don't have many entries on this blog to do that to.