Being noteworthy, a mixed blessing. Not wanting to be churlish or anything...

Last week I got made a Blogger 'Blog of Note'.  Three and a half years ago, when I was just a little blogger (I am still a little blogger, but slightly sagging and a little overweight with age now), I secretly wanted this so much.  I used to look down at the Blogs of Note when I signed in, and wonder if I would ever be noticed like this.  In truth, I rarely visited them, though I do remember one rather good themed one about 19th Century Moustaches, but it still seemed like a good thing to be.

Of recent times however, I had pretty much forgotten about the existence of the thing, that I even could scroll down from my dashboard and find the list of recent Blogs of Note.  However, statistics being what they are, the time had to come when, simply by dint of having been around this long and still posting, and of Blogger needing to find a new one every day, my number was up.  Now I'm not saying the accolade is simply bestowed in some totally randomly, electronically generated way, I'm sure there are human beings involved, and that they have genuinely looked at Box Elder and decided that recognition is in order, but the longer I went on, the more likely it was to happen, and that, truthfully, it can't be much to do with quality and more about the need for quantity.

I always assumed one would be notified by the authorities in question, but the first I heard of it was from a hitherto unknown commenter congratulating me about it.  I received a handful of visits, comments that is, from people who haven't been here before, which was interesting and gratifying, and I have very much enjoyed visiting them back, they are proper, talented bloggers doing great things, so thanks to them for that.

My Followers have doubled in number.  Unfortunately, I don't and won't (at least for the foreseeable) subscribe to Followers myself, and unless you do, as I've said before, Blogger won't let you see who your followers are.  I daresay my stats have increased, at least temporarily, but as I don't and won't have any form registering or counting of stats on this blog, then I don't know about that either.  So the benefits there are equivocal. 

And then, there's the spam.  The spam creeps obviously pay more attention to Blogs of Note than I do.  Two of them were in non-Roman characters, I didn't bother to find out what language, and blitzed me heavily, so I had to go back and scrape them off a dozen or more posts, and one of them was Portuguese, urging me to 'make money on-line!'. He seemed to be a sort-of-real blog, with some profile information and posts about commercial webby matters, but I flagged him as spam anyway because I didn't like being harrassed by him, and he'd hidden the bar thingy with the 'report abuse' facility on it, so that indicated to me he had something to be ashamed of.  I copied and pasted his blog address into the relevant Blogger form anyway.  But it just kind of wasted my precious time.

Which brings me to the question of spamming on blogs.  What I've heard, from people who should know, is that once you follow a link in a spam comment or to a spam blog, you are risking being jumped by malware, viruses etc, even if you take no further action.  However, the other piece of advice, and one which I always tend to follow on principle, because it gives me some satisfaction to do so, is that spam blogs should be flagged and reported as abuse.  Now, how can you flag them if you don't follow the link?

Some of the spam is anonymous, I don't want to ban anonymous comments, for reasons I've given before, I've had some I wouldn't have missed for the world, and occasionally someone I know, without a Google account or just not logged-in, might use the facility.  So far, apart from the spam, I've not had unpleasantness from anonymous commenters, most of what I post here is fairly anodyne, I don't imagine many people would bother reading or looking here to take issue with anything.  Though now Blogger has brought me into the temporary and very dingy limelight, who knows...  This anonymous spam I delete straight away, but as the comments themselves are full of links, sometimes you can click on it inadvertently, in ignorance anyway.

Any information or advice here would be welcome. I really don't want to have to use moderation.  I know many of my best friends do, and it doesn't bother me to go along with it, but it would just seem to spoil something for me somehow, and ditching spam is still a chore, what ever stage you have to do it.

But, I must stop this graceless griping.  It was very nice to get noted, and welcome to any newcomers it has brought.  As you may have gathered, I am very comfortably ensconced in an evolutionary blind alley here; basic Blogger blogging without too many trimmings is really all I do; my life is free of stats, Followers, I've even ditched most of my feeds.  I don't have any truck with Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, or any of those things, because at heart I am a technophobe suffering from accidie (though at least I know how to spell it, which I probably still wouldn't were it not for blogging).  Even my Flickr account has fallen into desuetude, and my attempts to have a second string to my bow or possible bolthole with Wordpress also fell by the wayside on account of the accidie thing.  I only have Picasa web-albums because as an editing tool it's easier than Photoshop.

Now, enough blogging on about blogging.  I seem to have been doing rather a lot of that lately, and I think perhaps it's a bad sign.  A tendency to get self-referential is bad for any form of expression, I think.  (Or do I? You see I'm far too uncertain what I think about anything to get in any fights...)  So last night's 'The Virtual Revolution', and the question of whether we hedgehogs are an endangered species, about to be gobbled up by the youthful little foxes, will have to be shelved, or left to more trenchant minds than mine.

So now I'm off to whittle a stick-calendar, or perhaps finish illuminating a codex, if I've got the time.  Or else continue to shuffle and snuffle, hedgehog-like, through my blogroll.  But before that, a few abstracts of home, garden and compost heap, because I'm like that. ( In the one below, you can see my blue Nepali felt slippers, which I love with a passion, but which are already going into holes.)

Oh yes, and I meant to say, Crafty Green Poet got Blog-of-Noted too, and she does deserve it!