Today

Hey there, all you dudes and dudettes. Just a quick missive to let you know what's up, what's goin' down, what's coming your way, and how's yo mama?

If you have certain RSS readers or older browsers, you may be getting upset with me lately. I know that in some of them, when I edit older posts, those posts go to the top of readers as though they are new posts and they obviously are not. I am still steadily working on tags and making minor changes and that is not going to be done anytime soon. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I strongly suggest you upgrade your browser and/or find another reader; newer ones do not do this. Of course, having just come from a 98 machine for three months between the time my XP box went kaput and I got this one, I can appreciate that this is sometimes easier said than done, so I suggest Bloglines.

You may have noticed new posts now have a copyright notice at the bottom, linked to the site. It turns out The Rundown was being scraped - like a mofo! - and I had to include this to (hopefully) cut down on some of that. "Scraping" is when content-thieving shits use aggregate "mash-up" programs and plug-ins to scour the Web for others' content, then post it to their own "blogs." I had noticed it before, here and there, but there has apparently been something of an "outbreak" of this sort of behavior lately and, once informed, I went through and did some checking.

Sure enough, your fair Rundown showed up on almost as many blogs as damn Britney Spears!

So I included the copyright in hopes of slowing these little ass-biters down, or at least getting some links back to the site in case people liked what they read. You little asshats should know that this is just one, rather lazy, method of fighting-back and I will take whatever steps are necessary to impede you, so I would appreciate it if you took The Rundown out of your "pipes" and quit infringing on my copyrighted content.

I am going to be taking The OddBlog offline over the weekend long enough to try and repair the RSS feed, fix the wonky template, consolidate tags, and do some other technical work. It shouldn't be down more than an hour or two at best, but you know how these things go, so I'll make no promises.

I am also going to start working the press releases a little more because they show up as "duplicate content" and I have no idea how Google handles this. I will still release some of them in full, but I am going to work-out some kind of system where I basically run them down for you a few times a week - kind of take bits and pieces from the best ones and collect them like one of our regular Rundowns. I still haven't decided how I'm going to do this, so we'll see how things go.

I subscribed to Last.FM earlier. It's only $3.00/month and - MAN! - it is so worth it! This website alone is worth whatever you have to pay for high-speed access, I promise! It really is spooky; it's like they know exactly what I like and play it right when I want to hear it. And I have some pretty eclectic tastes. This is the first website I have recommended this fervently since Suck!

Other than all of that, it's just another cold - and I do mean cold! - day in the police state what is Decatur County, TN. Speaking of which, I got threatened by a rednecked cashier the other night and I'll bring you that story once I excise all the profanity and general hatred from the draft...

© C Harris Lynn, 2008