Geeky Abstinence

I am on an insta break right now …and biting the sour apple…

I clumsily dropped my phone and the front glass shattered. It’s being repaired, but in the meantime I am having a bad case of iphone abstinence. As with everything this proves what I already knew: it’s not until you loose something that you notice how much you love it (or need it, depend upon it or use it).

I am not obsessed with my phone, but now that I don’t have it I understand how often I use it to distract my thoughts, to waste time or to check for messages! I especially miss taking phone photos and sharing my favorite ones straight away on instagram. But also taking a walk and having the endless possibility of podcast and radio shows via internet in my ears! But in a week or two I will get my phone back and everything will be back to normal. Except maybe, I’ll try not to waste as much time on it when I shouldn’t…

This week I kind of lost interest in blogging for a few days too, since I turned off comments for a while… I so love the comments I get, they’re like food to me… Maybe it shouldn’t be like that, but loosing the ability to get comments here felt horrible…

I got a warning from my web hotel that my blog was being under spam bot attack! A spam bot is a program that automatically fills in all the required fields as a blog comment, but super fast and without much meaning. The constant attacks were slowing down and disturbing traffic for the other sites hosted on the same server. Surftown (the company that host my blog), as always lovingly caring about me as a customer, threatened to just shut my site down if I didn’t take care of it!

So I turned of comments totally for 24 hours while trying to figure it out. All spam comments, from real people and bots, were directed into the spam folder (thank you Akismet!), so for me personally this wasn’t actually a problem. But there were a lot of spam comments coming in, about 2-3 per second for a while! In the end I caved in an installed a plugin that stops bots from making any comments at all, and so far it’s working. Yay!

The plugin is called Sweet Captcha, and looks like this:

The only problem is that it also slows you down, my dear reader, who sometimes and so kindly, wants to comment on a post here… But then, all you do is drag the correct image to the right, and then you can post your comment as usual. Feel free to give it a try. It’s quite funny that this happened right now, because I have always hated CAPTCHA codes or having to log into an account just to leave a comment… but this week I’ve been raving about how they’re the barbwire of blogging, to my twitter followers.

Ooh, the irony of telling others to remove their captcha barbwire (tweeting out links to articles explaining “How To Make Your Blog More Comment Friendly“) – and then needing it for my self. Though at least I hope the one I picked is isn’t a difficult, unreadable code to figure out?

When I couldn’t get any comments I got abstinence for those too.

I want to make it as easy as possible to leave comments and feedback here, because I love that you guys write me comments! So hopefully I can remove the picture question captcha some day, but for now it’s staying. Rather have that thing here than my whole blog disappearing, right?

Have you ever lost something you didn’t know you were dependent upon? Or even addicted to perhaps? Maybe a short break is a good thing, a wake up call, a note from the geek god that you should be grateful for what you have got – while you got it…