A Blogging Topic That Repels Spammers

In the eternal, unwanted, ebb and flow reality that is spamming-on-the-blog, I’ve noticed something intriguing.  Posts on my main topic of interest…Dying…repel spammers.  (These posts also, unfortunately, repel readers, but let us leave that topic for a brighter day.  Sigh.)

It is oh-so curious, no?

The pattern has just recently become clear to me.  Roughly eighty-five percent of my posts involve something I’ve learned from the dying and the longer I stay on topic, the likelier the flow of spam will trickle off and die. (No pun intended.)  But when I drift off-topic and broach subjects like Arab spring, or annoying Google advertising, or Stihl gas powered pole tree pruners, the velocity of spam immediately increases at a spanking pace.

Spanking, I tell you.

Then I return to my main focus and voila!  All I have to do is write three or more dying-related posts in a row and it crushes the burgeoning torrent of spam as efficiently as Raid on roaches.  Seriously.  It’s just that good.

Even I never dreamed the taboo on speaking about dying was this powerful; that spammers respond to it (in a second hand, traffic sniffing kind of way.)  Who would have thought anything was that strong?  A fascinating and, for once, entirely happy consequence of breaking said taboo.

(Image from Wikipedia)

copyright Dia Osborn 2011

How to live the best life? Look back from the future.

Linda, a (clearly) wise and percipient fellow blogger, had this to say in her comment about my last post on writing an obituary:

“…it dawned on me one day, that all the guidance I needed for making choices in life would be to live my life the way I’d like to see it written in an obit.”

Amen.

Now I guess I just need to write an obituary for myself to figure out what, exactly, I’d like it to say.

Thanks Linda!

My posting schedule:

Now that I’ve finally crawled out from under my log and let some of you know I have a blog, I realize I should also warn you up front not to expect a cornucopia of material.  I’m not prolific.  On the contrary,  I usually only post on Fridays because I’m slow and tortured and, in my world, no post is worth publishing unless every sentence has been worried and reworked for a minimum of an hour and a half, and every word has been tried, changed, rearranged and then put back to the original at least four times.

Predictably, this leads to a lot of garbled text.

I’m therefore forced to do a panic rewrite every Friday morning after which I finally hit the publish button in much the same spirit that I depress a toilet handle.  (I’m a little repulsed by the final product, but relieved that it’s done and blessed with a new burst of energy.)  I then redouble my efforts and spend the rest of the day re-re-editing and updating the published text.

Whenever I doubt my sanity I think of E.B. White who was also obsessive.  It was his habit, after finally working up the nerve to place a finished manuscript in the mailbox, to then panic, go to the postmaster, and beg him to fish it out and give it back.  (I understand it never worked.)  Remembering this always makes me grateful that I live in an age with the option of an update button.  Less humiliation.

Viva le blogging.

(UPDATE:  I know, I’m posting on a Tuesday to announce that I post on Fridays.  Life is full of little ironies.  This is just my contribution.)