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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Winter Morning

Though it seems to me that Victoria's winter has been wetter than usual this year it has been quite mild with the temperature hovering around freezing - sometimes above and sometimes just below. When I took this photo, however, we had just had a hard freeze.

8 comments:

Andy said...

Welcome to climate change.

Benjamin Madison said...

For those of you who wonder why sites bother with those irritating capchas when you want to make a comment, take a look at the two comments above. They are spam and were probably posted here by automated "bots" who look around for free advertising space. They also look to improve their Google ranking by pasting links to their sites anywhere possible. On the one hand they don't do any harm - aside from the fact that they contain no useful content. On the other hand they are parasitic, feeding off the popularity of other people's work. Normally I remove these as soon as I see them but I have decided to leave these two as examples.

JoJo said...

I've never received any comments like those above. I'm surprised your site gets them...most of my blogger friends never have trouble w/ spam. I was going to join a new website where you work at home; it was written up on some news websites as a real way to make money and people are making money, but reading between the lines, it looked like it was one where you have to spam people's blogs and Facebook with links and I didn't want to do that.

Still, I do appreciate the CAPTCHA being turned off because they are so hard to read and I always miss type it, then it makes me do it again till I get it right.

Benjamin Madison said...

@JoJo - The longer a blog has been around the more likely it is to attract spam. Victoria Daily Photo is about 5 years old which, for a blog, is relatively ancient. Secondly - popular blogs attract spam because links placed there are more valuable. This blog is not wildly popular but has about 800 followers/readers in addition to a few hundred visitors from search engines every day - more than the average blog. This blog also has plenty of backlinks (hundreds of other websites that link to this site). Again, this makes links on this site more valuable.

Stephanie said...

I moderate my blog without the code thingy, good way to keep spam out. Nice shot!

JoJo said...

What's a 'back link'? I opened my blog in 2006 but only recently hit 119 followers. I do post links from time to time in my posts. Is that a 'back link'?

Benjamin Madison said...

@JoJo - a backlink is when another site posts a link to your site on one of their pages. Roughly speaking the number of backlinks you have is an index of popularity and/or the quality of your site. Google and other search engines use the number of backlinks as one means of determining how to rate a site. Spammers try to game the system by putting links to their sites in comments on popular sites, thereby increasing their total number of backlinks.

William Kendall said...

The shot looks foreboding!

I opened up my blog to allow comments from anyone, as one of my followers wasn't on blogger. It opened the floodgates to spammers, though the filters usually catch them. They were infiltrating an older one somehow, until I put on a comment moderator approval on any blog over two months old.