Friday, December 10, 2010

Friday Miscellaneous

It's Friday, and it's been a long week. I'm ready to go home, put my feet up, and have big glass of red wine. But first a few items:

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1. Go to Lulu and enter “lloyd phillip campbell” in the search box. Look at what pops up (in addition the the Ethereal Gazette’s Issue 12). LOL! Go, Lloyd!

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2. I've been hanging out over at Writerface the last couple of days. You guys all remember that place, right? The site where Nicky first made his appearance on the Ning network? So yesterday and today, spammers and scammers have been hitting the site pretty hard.


Yesterday, it was "Johhny Myers" and his Elvesonshelves.com, a web site designed to separate self-published authors from their money. He spammed five or six groups, and after I posted a (grantedly rather snarky) response, he deleted those posts...and my response along with them. Except for the one he forgot. I also e-mailed Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware because I think Elvesonshelves is a bad deal (although not necessarily a scam) and wanted them to have a heads up. I received a nice e-mail back.


Today it was "Ann Alloria"/"Annie Alloria"/Ari Hinnant/Cheryl Hinnant/??? who left an identical comment on a zillion different user profiles, hawking a web site she claims isn't hers. She also made several forum posts with the same information. I Googled her and found claims that "Ann Alloria" was an alias for the others I listed above. There's more to the sordid story than can be summarized here, and I've made a blog post over at Writerface. After I let "Ann" know that I Googled her, she changed her user name slightly and edited her profile settings so that I couldn't see her recent activity.


Why is it that the Nitwits seem to com out in force in December?

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3. I've been playing around with Wordpress recently. The problem is that I still haven't found a Wordpress theme I'm completely happy with. Blogger themes were more customizable, but the rest of the interface is not at as nice as Wordpress. Hm, maybe I'll have to cave and learn CSS, and then purchase the Custom CSS upgrade so that I can tailor themes to my liking. Any CSS wizards out there who would be willing to help me learn?


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