Well, with the new look there are going to come some security enhancements to this blog. My general readership here is up to 18 UNIQUE visitors (yes Dad, you are still here the most) and I’ve added new back-end tracking that lets me see how people are getting to this web site. About 60% of you come here directly and either read through your RSS readers or directly on the site. 10% are referred here from www.leelanauphotography.com through the link on that page and the rest of you end up here due to a search you did on a search engine like Yahoo, MSN, or Google. Of those 18 unique visitors, an average of 2 – 5 minutes is spent reading my blog. Woo-Hoo!
Anyhow, I’ve also been getting a lot of spam registrations and comments left on my blog lately. This is not uncommon but it can be annoying for me because it can clutter up my comment section on the back end. I have filters that manage to catch most of the spam and get rid of it but some of it still gets through and I have to manually delete random text from time to time.
SO, in order to read this blog, you do not need to be a registered user but if you wish to leave a comment on one of my posts (and I encourage you to do so) you must register on my site. That means providing a valid email address. When you submit that, my site will automatically send you a password. When you come to my site and you want to leave a comment, you will be prompted then to enter your user name and password. This will help me control spam a little better and it will also allow me to moderate comments which can be useful in preventing spammers from filling up the comments sections with garbage.
There may also be a time in the future when I will password protect certain posts that I make. Registered and Logged-In users will be able to read them but people who are not registered or logged in will not be able to read them. This will be useful to me if I should need to make a rather direct comment about work or about specific people. I know how far I can go when I bitch about work but sometimes it’s nice to be able to say whatever I want without fear of repercussions from the general public. It’s also helpful if I just want to share something with family and not with the general public…since it’s mostly family that would have a reason to register in the first place.
With that said, take a minute to register as a new user on this blog. Click “REGISTER” over on the right side under my picture and you’ll be asked to provide an email address. When you hit submit, you’ll get an email from me containing your password. If anyone has any problems doing this let me know, I’m happy to walk you thorough it. Again, you DO NOT have to register if you just want to read the blog, only if you want to leave a comment or view any future password protected posts that I might put here.
