Urban Yukon Blog Urban Yukon news and announcements

Thanks to Urban Yukon-er Amanda McDonald for organizing this year’s carnival, which features a goodly selection of UY member blogs:

• The Adventures of Matt, Kara, Hunter and Cavan in Faro Yukon
• ALLIE B BOOKS
• Amanda McDonald
• The Craft Project
• Jackie Irvine’s Landscape Art
• Keeper of Wild Places
• Nicole Bauberger
• Nicole Bauberger Paintings
• What He Said
• Writing Pie

There’s still time to join the carnival. Get blogging!

Yukon writer and prolific blogger, Amanda McDonald, is organizing a blog carnival in June. Sounds like the perfect excuse for some of us that are, ahem, a little behind in our blogging.

Why not join up: The First Yukon Blog Carnival.

You can read it here, and of course also in the print edition. The article is a follow-up to my previous piece about the Urban Yukon community.

On many blogs, when you respond to the author’s post, a little icon appears next to your comment. If you’ve never wondered about that icon, then it is probably a complicated geometric shape, with some sense of symmetry. For example:

Figure 1: an identicon. A representation of everything that makes you who you are, compressed into one square centimetre.

Your identicon is automatically generated from your computer’s Internet address. You don’t have much say over what it looks like.

However, if you sign up for a free Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar, you can choose any photograph, likeness, or sketch as your personal online representative.

Figure 2: Logos, photos, doodles, and smiling mugs of a few Urban Yukon members.

Gravatars are used in preference to geometric identicons, so as soon as you set one up, it’ll be active. Gravatars are also tied to your e-mail address rather than you computer’s address, so your gravatar will follow you to any computer you choose to use.

So What?

Still not persuaded to get a gravatar? Here’s another reason:

When you post a comment on someone else’s blog, if it has a gravatar icon next to it, that’s a good sign that you are a real person and not an automated blog spamming robot.

Spam messages almost always have the default identicons. I go through my WordPress spam folder every now and then to see if any legitimate comments were falsely picked as spam. There are a lot of spam messages though, so I just go by the little icon. If it’s an identicon, I ignore it, but if it’s a gravatar, then I look more closely. I’ve rescued a couple of bona-fide comments that way.

So do your fellow bloggers a favour and get a gravatar.

“Thanks very good for report, I follow your blog”

“Meyda Tiffany lamps are one of the greatest creations tiffany engagement rings under this label of luxurious lamps.”

“Hello,jumancuso.info – May i sex dating with you?”

Google’s Blogger (formerly Blogspot) has finally added a proper spam filter for comments. It’s about time. WordPress has long had the invaluable Akismet spam filter, and it pretty much guarantees that I won’t be bombarded with comments like the ones above.

If you’re a Blogger blogger, I recommend exploring the new spam filter. It’ll do wonders for your sanity.

The only downside is that you’ll receive far fewer sex dating invitations.

URLs can be quirky. Creating a link in a post is easy enough, but filling in the website field when leaving comments on other blogs can be confounding. For instance, I’m never sure if I need to enter the http:// part — the Web’s inventor has apologized for the excessive punctuation — but I do always include the final trailing slash after the domain name: http://urbanyukon.com/

And, to be polite to your link-clicking guests, you should type that final slash too. The reason is that the web server treats http://urbanyukon.com and http://urbanyukon.com/ differently. The slash-less form is actually incorrect, and so the web server is forced to respond with a message to the browser to re-request the same URL, but with the added slash at the end. That’s two extra messages flying to and fro just for the sake of one measly slash.

If the URL continues past the domain name (e.g., http://urbanyukon.com/blog/2009/12/13/blogging-etiquette-add-a-final-slash-to-your-urls/), then there may or may not be a slash at the very end — don’t add one in this case if you’re not sure.