Some Overdue Housekeeping

Inky stops to smell the sunflowers

Warning: long and boring post ahead!

I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while, so if that bores you, please feel free not to read on. In fact, that’s my philosophy in general for blogging and social media interactions: read what you like and disregard the rest. Sometimes that’s tough though. Example: someone on Reddit criticized me for the above image of Inky. They said they didn’t know if sunflowers were bad for cats, but they might be since some other flowers are, so I should be more careful. It turns out that (1) Inky only sniffed the flowers and sauntered off after I took the pic; (2) I then put the flowers outside because I was having an allergic reaction to all my birthday bouquets (there were a lot!); and (3) sunflowers are not toxic to cats ~ info found via a quick google, which that person could have easily done before criticizing me. I wanted to, but didn’t, say all that and cause a big to-do on the animal shelter’s post. Instead, I walked away, both from the post and the site. Highly recommend this behavior. 

Why did I decide to give up Reddit altogether? Because I was tired of seeing the same old political garbage stink up every topic, however unrelated. The photo was just the last straw. Same thing happened with BlueSky, but in their case it was specifically due to the raging antisemitism that no amount of filters could combat. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t returned to Facebook in 2020 ~ the politics are out of control there as well ~ but unfortunately so many of my peeps refuse to use any other platform to communicate. Example: all my FB friends (who are often in-person friends as well) know this blog exists. Do they ever visit and comment? Nope. 

EXCEPT YOU, KEERA! ❤️

Recently, I received an anonymous comment here that was crabby and critical. At first, I let it through because it wasn’t an ad, but then I had second thoughts after a bunch of other people commented. The anon comment could have been taken as criticism of them as well, and I don’t allow that here. Personal attacks are what destroyed my first blog during the Pit Bull War, and I vowed since then not to permit any nastiness on posts under my control. I don’t mind non-nasty anonymous comments if the commenter chooses a name to attach to their words consistently, but if they can’t be bothered with that, then no. I just created a comment policy for the comment form box thingy to remind my visitors, so there are no excuses.

It’s great to be able to review and/ or delete comments before they go live, and even afterwards if you change your mind. There aren’t as many bells and whistles here on Blogger as there were on WordPress, and in some ways that’s better because fewer things go wrong. I’ve never experienced glitches here that prevented me from posting for X number of hours or seeing other Blogger posts. I don’t think we’re periodically overrun with bot swarms either, which we were on WP from time to time, or at least I haven’t been. In general, I don’t see ads, except on a few blogs whose owners, I presume, deliberately have them in hopes of earning a few cents. WP blogs, on the other hand, are full of repulsive ads unless you pay to avoid them. You also have to pay for image storage over on WP, but my Blogger pics are folded into my Google account, and I pay Google a small fee each month for a giant glob of storage that should be enough until the end of time or until I die, whichever comes first. That said, I am still cautious about adding a new image for every post ~ I try to reuse ones already saved, as I did here.

That’s all for now…