The Farmette Report

Too much fun to pass up

T-shirts with words on 'em don't usually float my boat, but this might be the happy exception! You're looking at the results of a SnapShirts rendering of The Farmette Report. Pretty cool, huh? (Even if it looks like MOLLY needs more air time!) Thanks to Michelle for sharing the link.

A deluge

Since this morning, more than 20 comments were left on the Farmette Report - each told me what a swell site this is, which is always nice to hear, but each comment also included odd random word combinations such as you sometime see in email spam - and, indeed, spam is what was hitting my site. Each comment included links to various other sites that didn't seem to have any direct relationship to the poster; these sites are generally game sites or other commercial ventures. I won't mention them by name because getting their name "out there" is part of their goal, not mine.

What is comment spam? I'll let TypePad describe it:

A spam comment is an unwanted message placed on your site as a comment or TrackBack on a post. ("Spam" is a common Internet term for junk messages, much like junk email is called spam mail.)

The comment that is posted can be an innocent message like "nice site!" or it can be an advertising message, and it usually includes a link to another site. The linked site could be a business site, an offensive or pornographic site, or it could also be a normal looking weblog.

Spammers post these messages to boost their rankings in search engines. By leaving the link on your site they have more incoming links to their site and this will make their site show higher in search results. To do this, they write scripts that submit comments to hundreds or even thousands of sites in an automated manner. This tactic works even if neither you nor your site's readers click on the links on the comments.

Right now, it's pretty easy to leave a comment on this site. I don't individually moderate comments, other than by checking the site or my email regularly, and I don't require registration or user authentication before someone can post a comment. But if this spam keeps up, I may have to make some changes, and a required TypeKey registration may be one of them. 

The good news is that we are experiencing another kind of deluge on the Ol' Farmette today - our first real, honest-to-god rainy day in over a month. Man, do we ever need this rain! We have been just loving it all day long and had the perfect rainy-Friday comfort-food lunch to go along with it: hot tomato soup and grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. Yum. Beats spam any day.

Not to worry

Greetings, all!

So much time has passed since I last updated the Farmette Report, that I fear some folks may worry that I fell off a kayak in Maine last month. No such luck! As it happens, work and other issues have kept me plenty busy - in fact, I am submitting this entry via my Blackberry while sitting in the lovely poolside garden of the Wardman Park Hotel at a conference in Washington, DC. The purpose of the conference is to match health professionals who will be finishing their residencies next year with community health centers and other clinical sites who provide care to the underserved. Although the community health center where I work is not eligible to recruit the category of physicians, dentists, and other health professionals present at this conference (we qualify for a different classification), meeting these individuals, as well as my counterparts at other health centers has been an amazing experience. Meeting with, and establishing connections with, those who manage th!
e federal program is also invaluable.

I'll be back home later today and hopefully back into the swing of things again very soon. Cheers!

Yep.

I seem to have me nose in a book these last few days. That is, when not watering the garden, praying for rain (it worked! twice! out of about 1,000 times!), petting the donkeys, brushing the cat, bemoaning the heat (or is it the humidity?), and plotting the hideous death of various over-sized rodents who have now established entire groundhog villas in my garden. Yes, I will post those pictures, I tell my self, before adding just after I finish this chapter.

TypePad maintenance

If the site is looking a little odd, it's because TypePad is doing some upgrade and maintenance work. Here's there latest update on how that's progressing. Looks like I'll have to tweak my templates.

MAINTENANCE UPDATE: Some published weblogs may currently be experiencing issues with layout and design. We know about the problem and are working hard to resolve it. Over the weekend we will be automatically republishing weblogs on TypePad in order to address this problem.

In the meantime, if you choose to rebuild your weblog manually through TypePad and experience issues with TypeList display in weblog sidebars, we recommend editing and saving any TypeLists that are displayed on the sidebar of your blog. Similarly, if you experience issues with photo album display in weblog sidebars, we recommend viewing and saving the configuration of any one of your photo albums, which will address the issue.

We appreciate your patience as we upgrade TypePad and republish weblogs across the service.

Google searches, blog results

I'm having some computer issues this week. It started with my needing to bring some work home last weekend to prepare for a big presentation this past Monday morning. My laptop died awhile ago, so I have been using the spouse's laptop. That was fine for blogging, editing photos, and various online activities, but he didn't have Office on the laptop, and I needed to write a memo and edit a complicated Excel file. Cue the desktop... ah, but it's a long story. I'll skip the details except to say that we switched computers and I haven't moved my files over when it was all I could do to crank out the project for Monday morning, considering what a completely glorious, sunny and warm, spring weekend we had. I did tons of gardening. There's still tons more left to do, but I still feel good about what managed to get done this weekend. The lawn tractor was broken, but Keith managed to fix it and do the first mowing of the season this week.

But I digress. What with gardening and work projects, I just didn't have time to check in on the blog, so imagine my surprise when I noticed a change in the traffic coming to this site. You see, one of my most fond things to do with TypePad is to see how many visitors come to The Farmette Report and how they managed to stumble onto the site. Sometimes the referring link is the result of a search engine query. I enjoy it when someone finds their way here as a result of search terms that are a good match for the site. Miniature donkeys, for instance. That's a good match. As much as I enjoy a good match, I often get a real kick out of the off-the-wall queries that somehow end up here, like with the person who was searching for "llama lasagne" for instance. Sorry! You'll find a reference to this place being a former llama farm. You'll find a couple of mentions of veggie lasagne (but no recipe, an oversight for which I hope you'll accept my apologies). But you won't find llama lasagne!

Last week, I posted two little 10-second videos of my miniature donkeys. Ever since then, the site has been busy with hits from search engines looking for videos. Are people looking for videos of donkeys? No. They are looking for videos of "asses" and of, uh... "love" - as in "me love you long time." No kidding, that was an actual search term that brought a visitor here. Not all the search terms were so quaint, but I'm trying to be careful how I phrase things because I want my young relatives to be able to visit this site. But, hey! Not all the searches were romantically inclined. Someone did a video search on "kicked in face." Yep, we only get the very best here on the Farmette!

Here are some of my favorite search terms that brought folks here to TFR:

1. "sister-in-law salad"
2. Squirrel eradicators
3. noel perrin mowed a field in vermont
4. llama+homemade+treats "
5. "seven deer" symbolism
6. martha stewart's brother's blueberry pie
7. grants +women +rural +farmette
8. donkey muzzles
9. how to keep cole slaw from getting soupy
10. poisoning in mystery novels

Unfortunately, with the exception of #8, this blog really didn't have much to offer these searchers.

Right on time

Local weather conditions were very Spring-like this past weekend, with a smattering of rain, some light hail, and plenty of warm sunshine.

There are tons of daffodils waiting to burst into blossom here on the ol' farmette, so when temperatures hit the low 60s on Sunday, we were watching like hawks for the first blooms to unfurl.

We didn't have to wait long or search hard. The first little cluster to burst forth was along the rocky foundation of the south-facing side of the house. The first daffodil blossoms were right on time for the first day of Spring!

The flowers may have been timely, but I have not been as on top of my game of late - not keeping up with The Farmette Report, not keeping up with lots else as much as I would like. We have been going through some Personal Life Stuff and, while I would like to be able to share some of this with you, it is too soon and too unsettled a time to do so. The one thing I will say, given that the last big news posted here was about my new twin nieces, is that they are doing great, no worries there. And no worries here, either, not really. I thank my regular visitors for their patience with the lack of posting here, and I want to let you know that I can't wait to catch up and come visiting your blogs again real soon.

Page design fun - or, honey, why does my blog look like this?

I've been messing around with the fonts, font sizes, typelists, etc. and so forth on the blog, and the results are... strange. In Internet Explorer, the sidebar text looks huge in comparison to the main body text. In Mozilla Firefox (my usual browser of late), the font changes seem to only apply to one side of the screen, and the post headings remain in Arial instead of Georgia no matter how many times I refresh the screen. One of my brothers-in-law has very low vision, and I am trying to make sure that he can see a few things here when he enlarges the text display on his computer. I don't have time to spend on figuring out and fixing the problem this morning, but will try to return to it this evening. If you notice anything odd looking in the page layout, or if you just have layout/style suggestions, please let me know. (And, yes, we know that llama is missing an 'l' in the banner and are working to get that corrected, lol.)

Edit - screen shots added so that y'all will know what I'm talking about.

New site design

Happy Day-After-Thanksgiving, everyone!

My brief hiatus from the blog gave me the chance to finish up a site redesign for The Farmette Report. Actually, it's not quite completely finished as there are some tweaks and links and whatnot that I'll be adding over the next week or so, but even so this is (in my opinion) a colorful improvement over the old look. I hope you agree, but in any case, let me know what you think.

My youngest sister, Jennifer, is a very talented graphic artist and she designed the top banner and helped with the color selection. (Thank you, Jennifer!)

A pleasant Thanksgiving with family and this new look for The Farmette Report has me re-energized for rolling again with more posts. Expect to see more this evening, including new photos, once the sun has set and my outdoor chores are done for the day.

Psssst

I wish there were a subtle, secret signal of some kind that I could post here just to reassure anyone who might be checking in on a semi-regular basis that, despite the silence of a few days, everything's fine and I'll be posting again here and elsewhere in no time - but right now I'm just trying to recover from a job where things heat up every so often, a job that - much as I normally love it - still kept me in the office more than 50 hours this week, which was a picnic compared to the 80 hours I put in last week, but - even so - once you tack on the 40 mile commute on either end of the day, makes for a long day and a brain that feels too used up for human interaction of most kinds. And I wish I could say it without sounding like a whiney-girl. Or writing in strange run-on sentences. Suggestions? Okay, then this would be my cue to get some rest and catch up with everyone later.

Happy start to the weekend, everyone. Get some rest!