thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

“Tough on threats. Easy on you.” That’s the strapline for AVG Antivirus and Security Software. Scary name for a company though, isn’t it? Sounds military, which may be why they add the “Easy on you” to the strapline as an afterthought.

I was a fool. I thought the “Easy on you” might mean that the software was easy to use. It seems I never learn. Let me explain. When I switched on my computer this morning a dialogue box kept warning me that I was “not protected” against “online threats”.

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I went to a workshop on web 2.0 the other day, at my local library. I thought it might help me manage my blog. And I may have picked up a few useful tips (possibly). Time will tell.

In some ways it was a belittling experience. Of course it was run by geeks – self-proclaimed geeks who were incredibly proud of how geeky they were. They talked about web 2.0 as if they had invented all of what they insisted on calling ‘tools’. They spoke through self-satisfied grins and talked about going on a “social media journey”.

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As I’ve been advised to ‘engage with the blogosphere’ I’m thinking of leaving a comment on this webpage. Trouble is it’s so hard to think of anything positive to say.

Digital-Marketing Series: 9 Ways to Reach Digital Natives (and the Rest of Us, Too)

Even if I did like extremely long headings (that one’s the length of a short sentence, for goodness sake) I definitely take exception to the cutesy tone of the first paragraph.

Obviously we all like to share our personal lives online. I know I have shared some of my bitterest and darkest thoughts on this blog, and may be it’s saved me. But really! If my 11-year-old progeny was attending the “Digital Marketing Mixer”, I think I’d keep it to myself.

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It turns out that I’m supposed to respond to the comments left on my blog. I wish I’d known about this when I started blogging. There was a time early on in the life of this blog that people did leave interesting comments about language and the way it is used. They don’t any more; probably because I didn’t respond. Now all I get is comments like this:

“Nice post you have here.”

I get really excited only to discover that it’s yet another one from “jndtoebgack” or I click the link and it takes me to a website in Cyrillic script.

I miss the comments that accused me of not knowing what a ‘grammatical imperative’ is. I never knew when I started this that there would be so much to learn about blogging.

So I turned to Wordpress, because if you don’t manage comments properly you can get into all sort of trouble: ‘Trojans’ on your pc for example.

Wordpress manage to give a clear explanation about comment spam, pingbacks and trackbacks in plain English. But I don’t understand it. For once, I do understand the words, but the ideas elude me.

The Wordpress site says that the originators of trackbacks, SixApart, have a good explanation of trackbacks and pingbacks. I decided to read it but it left me none the wiser.

“TrackBack uses a REST model, where requests are made through standard HTTP calls. To send a TrackBack ping, the client makes a standard HTTP request to the server, and receives a response in a simple XML format (see below for more details).”