A Tough Month

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The faster you go, the bigger the messApologies to readers looking for new posts! Harried best describes my experience of life this month, as a huge, regular editing project has now been pushed from January into December—and I also lost a week to complete it. Couple that with a massive, new, musical Christmas production at my church (where I am the drummer), the annual Christmas season runaround, some annoying health issues, and trying to run a business while maintaining a household (did I mention the roof repair, vehicle maintenance, doctor’s appointments, and such?)—well, old Dan ain’t gettin’ younger. Cerulean Sanctum suffered as a result.

I believe normality will return in January—at least I hope it will! Look for new posts in the next week or so.

8 thoughts on “A Tough Month

  1. Mr. Poet

    I saw your comment at Forbes, Dan! Maybe you should take a page out of Costco’s new marketing strategy. You’re not writing less. No, your blog has gone artisanal!

    • Yeah, despite three spam-catcher plugins on this site, the sheer torrent of spam sometimes breaches those defenses. If you have 1,000+ spams hitting your site every day, SOMETHING is bound to get through. Heck, the moderation queue fills with 100-200 every couple days, so that’s the number actually making it through two of the three defenses, enough to be considered for moderation, and those defenses are the best auto-determiners available. I hate to have to go to manual moderation, but it’s a possibility should this torrent keep increasing.

      • Mr. Poet

        A countermeasure of last resort, moderation. The government has gotten clever about stopping spam. Remember the stories of how they found that 80%+ of spam came from one server in the U.S., so they cut that server from the backbone? When I read that article, it dawned on me (since I don’t filter my email) that spam had gone way, way down.

        • Poet,

          My Akismet spam blocked stats look like this:

          2007 – 266K
          2008 – 441K
          2009 – 250K
          2010 – 44K
          2011 – 78K
          2012 – 146K
          2013 – 80K (through 2.5 mos.)

          As you can see, 2008 was a mess, but stats plummeted from there. Sadly, 2012 almost doubled 2011, and 2013 is on pace to be 2008 all over again. So the onslaught is picking up.

          The majority of spam I get contains links for high-end consumer goods, mostly designer shoes, handbags, and watches, which I’m assuming are all counterfeits, but then again…

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