Danger! Blogging can damage your health

I've heard of bloggers with writers block who have anxiety attacks over the pressure of feeling they HAVE to write a blog post. Still more suffer from stress, sleep deprivation, exhaustion and depression all related to their compulsion to blog.

Direct physical injuries are rare although RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) is a problem for quite a few. Alas, I fear I myself have become the latest casualty. I use a IBM Thinkpad T23 which is 8 years old. It has a red trackball mouse in the centre of the keyboard.

Photo: IBM Thinkpad Trackball Mouse Finger Injury

You use your index finger to move the mouse pointer around the screen. Recently, I noticed it seemed as if I needed to apply considerably more pressure to the trackball to move the mouse pointer. After a long 'hands online' session, I would have a Kirk Douglas-esque dimple on my index fingertip.

I started to notice a slight discomfort in the joints at the knuckles in my index finger about a month ago. That discomfort has grown to a pain requiring me to try and navigate using my other digits but with similar painful results and less coordination (you'd be surprised how tricky left handed trackballing is)

I did some googling and apparently this 'injury' is quite common so I think I'm going to have to either quit blogging or revert to a traditional mouse. The former seems a bit drastic and the latter so 'like totally' 1990's. What the hell am I gonna do?

Photo: Traditional Mouse

Tags: .Blogging can damage your health, RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), death by blogging, ..

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Blog Awards

I'm delighted to have received the above award from iWalk

Rather than follow the MeMe rules, I'm just going to say my blog roll (right margin) has been updated with the stuff I'm checking out lately. It's still  a work in progress and I probably shouldn't be tweaking code in the wee hours so if you're not there and want to be let me know.

Tags: blog awards

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Blogger Suicide

I almost committed blogger hari kari today. No I didn't try and 'top myself', but I completely screwed up my blog template so none of the posts were readable. The rest of this post will probably sound like gobbledygook gibberish unless you have a blog (and probably if you do too!) but here goes anyway.

What I wanted to do , should have been a fairly simple tweak to the blogger layout template and add a few new blogger widgets. I do make backups periodically but haven't done so in a while and I'm sort of a techie geek that should know better. *slaps himself on wrist*

There's a new blogger in-line comment feature which you can enable in draft blogger that finally puts a comment box below the post instead of having to click and launch a separate window or pop-up window.

I like it BUT......


a.) You have to do another code tweak to make it work if you previously tweaked the classic blogger template. This proved frustratingly difficult as the code refused to work "blogger incomprehendable error... blah blah blah!"

Twenty google searches later and tweak, tweak, tweak, like a budgie with bad pronunciation, it finally worked but not before a 30 minute slot where the only thing the hordes of people saw as they dropped by my blog was a small feedburner banner and no matter what they clicked on it just looped back to the same page. To those two unfortunate individuals, I offer my sincere apologies and please do come visit again!

b.) You can't sign up for follow-up comments on the new comment form which kind of sucks if you want to keep tabs on if/when your comment has been responded to (I love/hate this feature in all blog platforms.) I like being notified of a response to a comment I've made, but I hate being notified of 250 other responses i.e. 250 email messages, so I use that feature sparingly! Thankfully Gmail wraps the blog response emails in a cloak of the same conversation so its easier to manage. Hotmail has a lot to learn from the new kid on the block!

I found another hack that lets you add a link to the old comment form so your visitors can comment on either the 'new' or 'classic' version of the form. This worked fairly well except I kept messing up, since I had both the real blogger dashboard and the draft blogger dashboard open at the same time as I modified stuff and one would overwrite the others changes - argh!.

Finally it's working - well sort of - I still have some alignment issues!
... but you can now comment the old way with email follow up (if you have a gmail id) or use the box below the post. Now I understand why people move to Wordpress , MoveType etc!

OK almost the end of techie gibberish post. I've also tweaked the comments for I DO FOLLOW (remove 'No Follow') so you get a little link love from your comments when the Google Spiders come crawling here!



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PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... C: wait... SD: wait...

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I Follow Your Comment Links - You Gain Page Rank

I Follow your links - NOW YOU CAN DO THE SAME!

Almost all blog platforms by default are set up so that a “dead end” piece of code is inserted wherever there is a link in a comment, so that search engines will not “count” the link as they are crawling the internet. This was originally designed to help stop comment spam, but it doesn’t work. What it does is remove some of the incentive for your readers contribute to your site by commenting on your posts.

What can you do about it? Turn off “nofollow”. Show your commenters that you appreciate them. Spread the link love.

How?

Click the appropriate links below:

Depending on the blog platform you’re on, you can install a plugin (like this one for WordPress), or disable it (see this post if you’re a Moveable Type user), or modify your template (check this site for Blogger tips).

Courtesy http://randaclay.com/blog/i-follow/

Commentluv plugin
Dofollow plugin
Top Commentor
Keyword Love
Lucia Linky Love

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