Blog Offline

I had the weirdest experience the other day.  I got an email from Blogger saying that they had taken down a post because it violated their anti-spam policy.  I assumed this was some kind of phishing scam, but then I logged in and indeed my post was hidden from view.  I spent a little time trying to figure out what the problem was.  I think the most likely reason for being called a spam post is that I was encouraging people to go off and read my ancient term paper on Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, which I had uploaded to Dropbox.  However, a couple of years ago, I got so tired of running out of hard drive space that I killed my Dropbox account (and unplugged from utorrent as well...).  So the link is a broken one that I guess could look kind of spammy, though I assume this would have passed unnoticed until someone couldn't get the link to work and reported it.  (Though it would have been far more effective to leave a comment on the page, nudge, nudge, wink, wink...)

I removed the offending link and asked for the post to be reinstated, which it was after a day.  If interested, the review is here.  At one point, this was surprisingly my most viewed post, though it was easily surpassed by posts on Max Beckmann and Kafka.  I guess it was a bit of a nostalgia trip, and I spent a bit of time going through some old posts and fixing them up a bit.  I don't spend a lot of time going through the old posts, but when I become aware that a picture link has broken, I generally try to correct it.  Anyway, I added a postscript to the Headhunter review and cleaned up the cover images in my Lady Oracle review, but otherwise left them pretty much alone.  There's no point in endlessly working over my old material.

One thing I did do was try to find all the posts where I had linked to SFYS scripts (saved on Dropbox) and deleted those broken links, so that these posts aren't taken off-line at some random inconvenient time in the future.  On a side note, I've heard that the in-person return of SFYS was delayed yet again, but should be be happening this April, for realz this time, and I will look forward to that.  If you happen to see a broken link in some other old post, just leave a comment below, and I'll try to relink or just remove the link altogether.  Muchas gracias.